Corey Pierce

Remember 2006? It was a big year for global warming awareness — Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth radically altered the way we viewed our world’s relationship with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Also released that year, to decidedly less fanfare and fewer awards, was a pivotal report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (UNFAO) detailing the global livestock industry’s annual GHG contributions. By looking at factors such as deforestation (to plant feed crops and increase grazing space), animal digestion byproducts (like methane and nitrogen dioxide) and the fuel to get meat to market, they showed responsibility for 7.5 billion tons of Carbon Dioxide Equivalents (CO2e). That’s a disturbing 18 per cent of human-caused climate-changing emissions, dwarfing the 14 per cent that comes from fossil-fuelling our transport machines throughout the land, air and sea.

In case that old New Year’s Resolutions: 2007 list haunts you with an unfulfilled “Save Planet — Eat Less Meat!” pledge, researchers with U.S.-based World Watch Institute published a report last week that took a close look at the UNFAO research and determined that the numbers were a touch on the conservative side. By updating the stats and factoring in a few not previously included, like the CO2 emitted from livestock respiration (like us, they breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2) and from the fish farm industry, they found that raising animals, usually for meat production, actually contributes a whopping 32.5 billion tons of CO2e — 51 per cent of the GHGs we force our planet to deal with. And that figure doesn’t even take into account the other major drawbacks of our carnivorous habits, like water pollution, land degradation or outbreaks of deadly listeria and E.coli poisonings. (For an in-depth look at North America’s meat industry, Food,Inc. is a must-see film).

At first reading, the report’s conclusions are pretty overwhelming, but the upside is that we, as consumers, have real agency in the matter. By reducing our collective consumption of meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish, our dietary decisions would have a significant impact on GHG emissions. In fact, researchers with the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency recently concluded that if everyone on Earth were to limit their weekly meat intake to 70 grams of beef and 375 grams of chicken or eggs, the change would be drastic. For starters, GHG emissions would drop by 10 per cent while 15 million square kilometres would be freed up for growing crops, biofuels or reforesting devastated landscapes — and that means plenty of job creation. In the process, the world would save about $20 trillion that would have been spent on lowering GHGs to a level that may avert ecological disaster.

Wondering how we could possibly spend that much fighting climate change? Here’s a good example: Consider the $745 million the Alberta Government recently pledged to Shell and the $436 million they’re giving TransAlta for building experimental Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS) facilities, basically to test a theory about being able to bury huge amounts of CO2 deep in the earth. The federal government is similarly excited about CCS — it’s spending $479 million between the two projects — and tarsands companies are confident that CCS is the answer to their emissions woes, too. Unfortunately, according to researchers from the World Wildlife Foundation, even the rosiest scenarios presented by tarsands experts (for example, 30 per cent reductions by 2030; 50 per cent by 2050) are still too high to be competitive with conventional crude extraction, and fall far short of lowering Canada’s emissions to target levels that world leaders will be discussing at December’s Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Instead of watching our governments gambling taxpayer money and the fate of Rocky Mountain glaciers on technology that guarantees nothing beyond being costly, we, as consumers, can make a real, tangible difference as soon as today by choosing a low-meat diet. Rather than eating breakfast, lunch and dinner from the factory farm, why not celebrate our continued survival with a 2.5 oz Alberta beef steak on Sundays (bump it up to three ounces if you befriend a few vegetarians). A mid-week morale boost is important, so a locally raised chicken dinner will keep us smiling through the rest of the week, and a medium organic egg (50 grams) or two should satisfy cravings in the meantime. Thankfully, Friday dinners need not be compromised — there are still plenty of wild fish in the sea whose stocks aren’t in danger of collapse (a good list can be found at oceansalive.org). You could even switch to soy, rice, almond or hemp milk and forgo buying carbon offsets for future air travel.

It may seem like a ridiculous proposition in a province where every second vehicle is branded with an “I ♥ Alberta Beef” sticker, but the level of suffering with these dietary changes will be minimal — we may have evolved as omnivores, but only a few generations ago almost everyone ate low-meat diets. Chances are that food poisoning and obesity rates will decrease, saving money on health care in the process.

There are plenty of online nutritional resources for an idea of how much protein we need (it’s lower than you think!) and which delicious foods can supply it. There are restaurants, cookbooks and supermarket aisles providing the infrastructure and the know-how, which means that unlike trapping vast amounts of carbon underground, the switch to a low-meat diet is already a proven concept without need of a multibillion-dollar pilot project.

The fork, on this one, is in our hands.