Ban the Beef?

Nov 21, 2018 Bjørn Lomborg

For many environmental campaigners, eating meat is fast becoming as repellant as smoking – behavior to be discouraged or even banned. But is your hamburger really to blame for climate change, and would going vegetarian really help?

COPENHAGEN – Christiana Figueres, the former United Nations official responsible for the 2015 Paris climate agreement, has a startling vision for restaurants of the future: anyone who wants a steak should be banished. “How about restaurants in 10-15 years start treating carnivores the same way that smokers are treated?” Figueres suggested during a recent conference. “If they want to eat meat, they can do it outside the restaurant.”

In case you have missed this development: eating meat is fast becoming as repellant as smoking to many green campaigners. It is behavior to be discouraged or even banned.

That’s because your hamburger is being blamed for climate change. Meat production – especially raising cattle – emits methane and requires carbon-dioxide-intensive inputs. In the breathless language of recent reporting, a “huge reduction in meat-eating is essential” to avoid “climate breakdown.”

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Bjørn Lomborg

Writing for PS since 2005
181 Commentaries

Bjørn Lomborg, a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School, is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. His books include The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World, and, most recently, Prioritizing Development. In 2004, he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people for his research on the smartest ways to help the world.

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alex Dec 20, 2018

David Griso and others here have already pointed out the lack of life cycle accounting. Perhaps adding as well on this direction, one must also account for what should be the effect of such large scale vegan behaviour and attribute these effects to that choice. The most evident is the loss of soil health. Firstly, from the loss of livestock services to regenerate land, ecosystem services, biodiversity. When projected in time and spatial scale, comparing to a carbon horizon of a fully functioning photosynthetic capability in each bioregion (the 5-10 years projected state with applied regenerative grazing), the deficit in carbon stock's long term and in active use (soil biology, foliage and animal weight - all kinds) compared to not doing it, would fairly be allocated to a sole vegetable production system.

Secondly, Such strategies has been calculated would result in a higher land use under intensive methods (in many regions unviable) with the consequent further degrading of soil relative to any starting benchmark.
Considering these, the vegan equation is highly against climate change
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bill Dec 19, 2018

So, in effect, reducing (let's be specific - confined animal) meat consumption will do very little to reduce individual CO2 contributions directly, but doing so will also free up cash for people to spend on other things that will add to CO2 concentrations?

Well then, I have to point out that eating beef from producers using regenerative planned grazing techniques will not only reduce one's climate impact (due to sequestration, something artificial meat will never be able to do btw), it will also benefit the climate overall by taking a little extra change out of one's pocket and instead, putting it into the hands of the farmers. A win/win.

Seems to me then, that if we are ever going to see any climate benefits from agriculture — from producer to consumer — we'll have to start pushing for more small stakeholder production using monitored regenerative, carbon sequestering practices. That is, by getting people back out onto the land to beneficially produce food for the city dwellers causing global warming in the first place. One would think.

That would result in agriculture going from a net positive contributing factor to a net negative in many cases and places. That would leave activists fighting climate change to check off ag and free to focus on the other two major factors: fossil fuel use and green-energy implementation. In a perfect or near-perfect world anyway. Something to think about.
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david.griso Dec 13, 2018

Bjorn, not only are these emissions overstated, they should not even be considered "anthropogenic emissions". The whole approach is absurd from head to tail. In terms of CO2 emissions, considering a grazing system we have obvious negative CO2 emissions (there is sequestration of CO2 in the grass, carbon stocks in pasture land are higher than in agriculture land, and have yearly continuous sequestration, and then there is a significant sequestration in undecomposed manure, and of course the cow itself). Life cycle analysis of the entire system show that for grazing systems actually there is a sequestration of up to 6kg per kg of beef for natural grazing systems).

Now some would argue: the problem is the GWP of methane and nitrous oxide! Really? I think the problem is the IPCC GHG protocol methodology. Why doesn't it take into account sequestration balance? Why only enteric fermentation and emissions from manure? One is tempted to think that it is because the balance would be unimportant, but it actually is not at all, to the point that when you consider the whole system you get systems where sequestration is up to over 6kg of CO2 equivalent per kg of beef meat! Check this article as an example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X17310338

Why does LCA or IPCC protocol also FAIL miserably to identify, when it comes to emissions, which emissions come from fossil fuel sources and which ones from natural sources? CO2 from natural sources at some point in the short past was in the atmosphere so one way or the other will come back to it (even methane, afer 10 years converted into CO2)... so why muddle the whole debate with CO2 that comes from natural sources such as grass and leaves? Shouldn't we focus our energy on tackling fossil fuels only, which will take hundreds or thousands of years to reduce?

Not to talk about a well known fact: methane emissions from wild animals prior to the human led mega extinction in the neolithic were higher than current total emissions from livestock and wild animals... so we are just going back to the pre-human normal!

In my humble opinion, the whole issue has been muddled by the vegan movement, and its interest in demonizing "industrial" livestock production. Time to stop this nonsense at once.
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🙏 🙏 Dec 11, 2018

The arguments in this article are flawed. In addition to what had been already highlighted by other comments, as well as several others, there is the argument that the so-called "rebound effect" cuts the positive effect of not eating meat in half. The provided link to literature is a single study that DOES NOT support the author's argument. In order for the effect to be cut in half, the person would have to save money, and then use that money (as oppose to save or invest it), and consume something with the emission footprint of (meat minus the eaten vegetables). Which is highly unlikely, as they had already eaten. Even if they did significantly increase their food intake, it would be hard to find the food sources that match the needed profile. It seems far more likely that the extra money is used for quality and not quantity (which completely avoids the so-called rebound effect).
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nayan savla Dec 8, 2018

And I wonder, if the sole emphasis on emissions is not appropriate as well? Should not we also take global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use into account?
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lalit rane Dec 3, 2018

The article misses two critical outcomes of high meat consumption. First, water consumption associated with raising cattle or pig. 85 percent of the soy is converted into vegetable oil and oil meal. Almost all of the soy meal goes as animal feed. There is huge difference (at least a hundred times) between water required to product same amount of proteins in pulses vs meat, especially cattle. Second is water pollution and nitrogen cascade. Sewage coming out of industrial scale cattle, pig production together with heavy use of fertilizers for animal feed production is playing havoc with lakes, rivers and oceans. This is resulting in not just water pollution but also oxygen depletion, toxic algal blooms in water bodies and directly affecting sea food based supply chains.
- Stefhan Gordon Dec 19, 2018
  
  You clearly don't understand how water footprints work. With water footprints for beef cattle, most of the water (around 98%) is the water required to grow the feed or forage that a head of cattle eats over its lifetime. Depending on the way that head of cattle is raised and "finished", 92 to 98% of that water for feed or forage is "green" water. What's green water? Rain that falls regardless of how the land is used. So for grass finished cattle in places like the Western US, around 97% of the water is RAIN.... that falls on land that isn't suitable for crops. The only way you grow crops on such land given its flat enough is with massive amounts of "blue" water. Blue water is ground or diverted river water for irrigation. BLUE water is what's critical NOT green water.
  - lalit rane Feb 19, 2019
    
    Your basic lack of understanding of how industrial scale meat production works is hindering your intelligence to accept the fact that industrial scale meat (cattle and pig) production cause huge stress on land use, water use and causing nitrogen leaching and algal blooms. That kind of Donald Trump intelligence is nothing new. Even Western US is now grappling with drought and alarming levels of depleting ground water resources.
    
    Even cattle fed on pastures are known for burping methane that is 40 times deadlier than carbon in it's global warming potential.
    
    You conveniently ignored everything about nitrogen cascade and total amount of water required to raise crops such as soymeal as cattle feed and industrial scale meat production.
    
    Instead of taking your intelligence from Donald Trump's hateful speeches, search on internet site called as "GOOGLE". If it is too hard to do that, ask a 5 year old kid, he/she will teach you how to search for terms like "nitrogen cascade", "industrial scale meat production", "water and land use for protein", "algal blooms in USA", "ground water depletion in western US", "obesity in USA", "meat consumption and cardiovascular diseases".
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Nikola Radunović Dec 2, 2018

What is it about people these days trying to force their lifestyle on other people? The fact that you actually seriously considering it is deeply insulting to any person who values personal freedoms and individuality. What happened with liberal values and freedom to live as we choose? What kind of sick dystopia you are proposing? The one where people will have to adopt the prescribed lifestyle, or put in prison if they refuse? How come you don't see me writing articles about banning the vegans and vegetarians because I dislike them immensely (and I do)? What's wrong with you Bjorn?

I was always center left. You and your fellow activists made me switch sides. I guess we should've stopped all this nonsense at smoking, maybe even at car seat belt.
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Henrik Henrik Nov 23, 2018

Bjørn, Du er da 30% dummere end bølgepap, det er da ikke køerne, der er problemet, det er overbefolkning af kloden som skaber problemet, hvad ville i skide Københavnere gøre, hvis jeres forsyningslinjer brød sammen, leve af græsset i parkerne..
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bori. bori. Nov 23, 2018

Great article Bjorn,
I am however, wondering about details of your approach. Do you account only for direct emissions by cows and their feed? or do you also take into account deforestation and use of clean water for meat production?

Cheers,
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Roland Kupers Nov 23, 2018

Lomborg makes an interesting contribution as always. But he overlooks one critical element. Assuming that the choice of vegetarianism (or veganism) is an independent choice, he concludes the climate contribution is minor (laudably considering the rebound effect).

But what he doesn't consider is that climate friendly behaviours are not independent variables. Someone who chooses to reduce meat consumption, will likely also reduce energy waste, make more climate friendly travel choices etc.. People's behaviours have a degree of coherence, and this will serve to amplify the carbon reduction.

2% is in any case considerable, but it may multiply several times as other behaviour changes kick in.
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P. Kamath Nov 22, 2018

Some of these Vegans can be as fanatics as most athiests are in their beliefs!
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Quentin Vole Nov 22, 2018

I understand that farm animals produce a lot of methane (which will fairly swiftly oxidise to carbon dioxide and water vapour). But almost all of the carbon they emit comes from eating plants, which in turn have captured it from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. So shouldn't the first order effect be a net zero (rather like powering your car with biofuel)? (I expect I must be missing something)
- david.griso Dec 13, 2018
  
  Hi Quentin... no you are not missing anything. Like the child of 'The emperor's new clothes' you see it quite clearly. CO2 emissions are not just neutral, they are negative because CO2 is sequestered in the undecomposed manure, carbon sequestered in the soil, and of course, those 600kg of cow. Now anti-cow hysterics will say 'it's not about the CO2. it is about the methane and nitrous oxide, which have massive GWP'. Even with that, GWP emissions are not outweighed by sequestration. Why the IPCC accounting ONLY accounts for enteric fermentation, and methane emissions from manure and nitrous oxide from manure and doesn't consider the sequestration? And why doesn't any LCA or IPCC differentiate from emissions from cyclical systems vs emissions from fossil fuels? The methodology is so bad that it reaches the following conclusions: industrial livestock feedlot systems where cattle are fed grains are better for the environment in terms of emissions than extensive grazing!!!
  
  The sad thing is FAO started all this mess, and the directors of the 2007 study that took all this nonsense mainstream have published meek apologies 'taking it back' yet everywhere you ask you see this 'less meat= less heat' nonsense!
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