I had better start this by being clear about my stance on carbon
and climate change – it is real, the climate is affected by increasing levels
of C02 and other greenhouse gases. Humankind has been responsible for emitting
sufficient quantities of those over the couple of hundred years since the start
of the industrial revolution to alter the levels in the atmosphere, and so
bring about the changes in climate that are underway.
Not everyone agrees with that, but the weight of scientific
evidence is strongly against those who doubt it. Once again, we find those with
an ideology are the hardest to convince, and maybe some of you will find that
what I am about to say also contains elements of an ideology.
We don’t really have to look very hard to see where
greenhouse gas emissions are coming from, as fossil energy use is ubiquitous –
it powers so much of our lives from the electric light, heating and cooling,
the manufacture of the consumer goods we so willingly buy, production of agricultural
fertilisers and on to the transport of goods, our food and of course ourselves.
Depending on where you are reading this, there will be varying degrees of
renewable energy generation, but overall, we are all hooked to fossil energy.
The more we consume, the more we are involved.
There are other factors that have contributed to the build
up of GHGs, and I won’t even pretend to be exhaustive in this; conversion of
forests, savannahs and rangelands have played their part, and so have
extractive industries of every sort. Disturbing the environment releases
carbon, so clearly much of what we as a species do contributes to emissions.
A whole industry exists to calculate the precise amounts of
GHGs emitted in the life cycles of any product or service you care to think of,
and a whole counter industry is evolving to pass the buck on to others, to deny
any responsibility, or to claim that there is nothing that can be done about
it.
Those of us with any familiarity with the beef industry have
of course been told that beef, as a product, has a very high carbon footprint;
just as we have been told that it has a high water footprint as I discussed in
my last blog post. What is actually meant by this? The figures, as most often
quoted include an element of emissions for land conversion (deforestation,
conversion to arable land etc), the fossil energy used in the whole value chain
– from ploughing to grow feed, to production of chemical fertilisers, to
transport etc.
They also include, probably most famously to the general
public, the enteric methane emissions from rumen fermentation. People get hot
under the collar about this one because the warming potential of methane is 64
times higher than that of C02. So apart from land conversion and
enteric emissions which I will come to, basically all of the other emissions of
beef boil down to our fossil energy use – which as I noted earlier is
ubiquitous.
Land conversion is always an emotive issue – especially for those
who started to develop later than western industrialised countries. The industrialised
countries do not pay to maintain the tropical forests of South America, Africa
and South East Asia, and yet they expend a lot of hot air telling the countries
of those regions that the forests must be preserved; i.e. those countries
should forgo development, at their own cost, for the public good not only of
their own people, but for the whole world. In the case of Brazil, this is taken
a step further, as individual and commercial private landowners are expected to
preserve forest at their own cost for the good of mankind. Don’t misunderstand
me, I find the preservation of those forests to be very important, but the
absurd inequality of the means by which we expect it to happen should be patent
to everyone. Needless to say, land conversion that took place historically in
now industrialised countries does not figure in product footprints today – even
though the benefits of removed forest are lost every year, not just in the year
they are removed.
The next question around land conversion is what drives it,
and how should it be apportioned? The fashionable view up until a few years ago
was that Amazon deforestation was driven by the beef industry, and undoubtedly
the beef industry played a significant role, with institutions such as the IFC
(the World Bank’s lending arm) investing heavily in slaughter plants in the
region. More recently it has been shown that cattle are simply the default
option on land cleared for speculative purposes, as extensive ranching requires
less investment than other options. So are the emissions from this clearing
only attributable to beef, or should a share go to the financial system that
encourages land speculation? Of course, when serious money is available, there
are other options with a much higher return – such as soy, sugar cane or palm
oil. A fair proportion of the land originally cleared and used for cattle in
the amazon is now used to grow one of those crops – should the attribution to
beef now be transferred from the beef industry to the crop? None of this is to
suggest that beef has not been involved – there are after all around 50 million
head of cattle in the legal amazon after all, but it does raise questions about
how boundaries are established. And on deforestation, there has been a very
encouraging trend in Brazil over the past 8-10 years, the rate of deforestation
has decreased significantly, while the production of both beef and soy has
continued to increase. In other words intensification (through better pastures,
improved management, genetic improvements etc) has led to higher production per
ha, and a lower pressure on remaining forest. This has not been picked up in mainstream media, even though a
slight increase in deforestation rate in 2013 compared to 2012 was widely trumpeted; and despite the fact that 2013 was still one
of the lowest of recent decades, and that Brazil has kept 3.2 billion tonnes of
CO2 out of the atmosphere since 2005 (Nepstad et al).
Other forms of land conversion should not be
forgotten, and maybe one of the worst is simple degradation; we have around 4.5
billion ha of rangeland, prairie, savannah etc in the world, and over a quarter
of this is degraded to some extent. That basically means that it has been
mismanaged for whatever reason, has become less productive, and has lost soil
carbon to the environment; not just on ranching land, but on poorly managed
common lands, in national parks etc as well. This has contributed a significant
part of the emissions attributable to livestock systems. The only positive is
that it can be reversed, using livestock, and the carbon can be sequestered in
the process of restoring the land, with all of the concomitant benefits.
Now onto the enteric emissions; what are they? As the rumen
flora ferments grass to break it down, one of the by-products is methane, which
cattle burp back into the atmosphere. The exact amount produced depends upon a
number of factors including the quality and digestibility of the feed, the
rumen flora and other environmental factors. Cattle browsing thorny scrub in an
arid environment will burp out a lot of methane but gain very little weight,
and so the emissions per kilo of final product are high, whereas cattle grazing
and browsing in a silvo pastoral system with high legume content will gain
weight fast on protein rich digestible forage and therefore emissions will be
much lower per kilo of weight gain. There are a myriad of other scenarios, and
there is a lot of variation between them. Cattle fed on a formulated ration can
produce even less direct methane emissions, though the embodied carbon in that
ration also needs to be taken into account. There are also feed additives and
rumen inoculations (i.e. different strains of bacteria) that can reduce methane
production in any given scenario.
That is what enteric emissions are; but just as with the
water footprint issue, I want to question why this has been made to seem such a
big issue. The number of cattle on the planet at this moment is likely to be
higher than ever, but we have to remember that the human race has at the same
time been responsible for the mass removal of many wild species; think of the
bison (buffalo) in North America, massive wildlife migrations in Africa that no
longer exist, and the saiga antelope in Asia – and these are just the
relatively recent declines of large species – we humans have been doing this on a grand scale
for millennia. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that wildlife removal has been
a positive thing, but it does mean that a significant background level of
enteric emissions from ruminants has always been present, and that with well-managed
grazing systems we can sequester significant amounts of carbon and keep
livestock systems well balanced.
Finally I think we should also question the ethical basis of
comparing emissions from producing food on land incapable of growing crops to
that of our fossil energy consumption to which we already know there are
alternatives. The preposterousness of this comparison was brought into stark
relief earlier this year when Richard Branson, multi billionaire owner of some
of the most fossil fuel intensive and unnecessary businesses in the world
announced that he would stop eating beef to save the planet. At the time, this
seemed to be nothing more than absurd. However, in the light of his
dissimulation around promised $3 billion investments in moving his businesses
to a lower carbon future, and his full awareness of the potential of grazing
systems to sequester more carbon than any other option currently being proposed
to mitigate climate change, it is clear that it is a conscious ploy to transfer
the focus from the real problem, fossil fuels, to the livestock industry that
so many fashionable metropolitans love to hate.
Whatever the background to that fashion, what it boils down
to once again is a quick fix ideology that tells people that they can keep
living life at full tilt, buy and dispose of all the consumer goods they like,
travel the world in Branson’s planes to their hearts content, as long as they
don’t eat beef. It seems to be seductive to many, whose direct experience with
animals is restricted to pets and to zoos. Once again, a simplistic message
appeals more than the fascinating complexity of real life.
