Human Starvation, Climate Change, and Pollution

Ga-Maleven

In this journal I will be discussing how animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, pollution, climate change, human starvation, and species extinction. I won’t be discussing how human s are herbivorous and simply don’t need animal products.

While human overpopulation is a major factor of pollution, deforestation, and climate change, its effects are still less than that of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is the use of producing billions of animals for food, clothing, etc. on a mass scale. This includes raising animals for their flesh (meat), mammary secretions (milk), menstrual cycles (eggs), and even clothing (leather, fur, wool, etc.). But why is it so bad?

The primary reason animal agriculture is devastating the planet is due to the astronomical amount of resources it requires to raise livestock. On average a single cow consumes about 20 pounds of grain a day and drinks up to 30 gallons a day. Cows are kept alive 3-5 years on average (despite living to be 20). In 4 years time one cow will have consumed about 21,900 pounds of grain and drunk about 43,400 gallons of water. This will only produce about 490 pounds of meat. There are 98.4 million bovines raised for dairy/meat in the USA alone.

On top of that, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals raised for their flesh also consume/drink thousands of pounds/gallons yearly only top produce even less “food” for consumption. Of the 760 million tons of grain ground yearly to feed livestock, if that were to instead be given to humans it would end world hunger 14 times over.

The land used to grow the crops for these animals is taken from the wildlife. Millions of acres are cleared for animal agriculture each year (1-2 every second). Forests are destroyed and cattle are grazed in grasslands expediting desertification. 45% of the Earth’s total landmass is now used for livestock. 91% of the Amazon’s destruction is due to animal agriculture. Taking this land away from wildlife and destroying the forests is the leading cause of species extinction. Wildlife is having to seek new land to live on, but they are running out of space, being forced to interact with humans and domesticated animals more. While hunting is causing extinctions, its impact is still less than that of the destruction caused by animal agriculture.

Most of the grain grown for these animals come from developing countries. While the grain is shipped off to fatten livestock for rich countries to get sick off of, the poor people end up starving. This has led to being the primary cause of human starvation. Raising animals for food in these poor countries also harms the people for they have to give their food to the animal until the animal can be killed, which yields less food in the end. This is why gifting animals to poor countries does more harm than good.

Number of people worldwide who will die of starvation this year: 60 million

Number of people who could be adequately fed with the grain saved if Americans reduced their intake of meat by 10%: 60 million

Human beings in America: 243 million

How frequently a child starves to death: every two seconds

Number of people who could be fed with grain and soybeans now eaten by U.S. livestock: 1.3 billion

Percentage of corn grown in the U. S. eaten by people: 20

Percentage of corn grown in the U. S. eaten by livestock: 80

Pounds of grain and soybeans needed to produce a pound of beef: 16
Fatalities per 100,000 in livestock occupations: 28

People employed in slaughterhouse operations: Over one half million

Fossil fuels needed to produce a meat-centered diet vs. a meat-free diet: 50 times more

Number of acres of U.S. forest cleared for cropland to produce meat-centered diet: 260 million

Area of tropical rain forest consumed in every quarter-pound hamburger: 55 sq. ft.

Current rate of species extinction due to destruction of tropical rain forests for meat grazing and other uses: 1,000 per year

Use of more than half of all water used for all purposes in the U.S.: Livestock production

Gallons of water to produce a pound of meat: 2,500
Worldwide, about one billion people suffer from hunger and about 8.8 million people die of hunger every year
More than 70% of all grains reaped by humanity on the planet are feed to animals that we exploit in agriculture
To produce 1 kg of meat, you need 16 kg of grains + 15.000 liters of water
On the surface, which is needed to harvest 1 kg of meat, could generate, in the same period 200 kg of tomatoes or 160 kg of potatoes
50% of water pollution in Europe are caused by factory farms
The contribution of livestock to the greenhouse effect is more important as that of the entire global auto, air and waterway together

“The rearing of livestock, especially that of bovines, has become an increasingly detrimental risk to all of humanity. Cows produce a vast amount of methane emissions and in terms of greenhouse gases, one cow produces the same amount in one day as an SUV driving over 30 miles (roughly 48.2 kilometers). The total number of cows on this planet is close to one third of the estimated human population. The methane expelled into our atmosphere from the back end, as well as from the mouths of cows, partnered with the decomposing refuse produced by the whole of the farming industry, makes for a lethal dose of over 100 million tons of further greenhouse emissions.

Greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have already pushed our global average temperature up by nearly an entire degree since the 1980′s. This may not sound like a dramatic increase to you, however, considering that this slight rise in temperature has caused extensive glacial melting and the exposure of permafrost in arctic climates, we may see the beginning of global heating sooner then we predicted.

Permafrost itself, is simply ground that is frozen solid for over 10,000 years and it is rich with ancient vegetation. When the permafrost thaws, which it now is, this vegetation becomes exposed from its icy shell to the elements, including bacteria. Bacteria begins to eat away at the vegetation, expelling massive amounts of methane in its waste product. This is already beginning to happen around the world as evidence can be seen in many arctic regions.

We must also consider what will happen once vast sheets of ice no longer cover the Earth’s surface during summer months. Obviously, ice is bright white and reflects much of the Sun’s warming rays. Where there is no ice, dark waters absorb the Sun’s rays, which will increasingly raise the temperature of the Earth’s oceans. Anyone who understands in the slightest, how fragile and perfectly balanced all life in the sea is, realizes what will come from this. The Northwest Passage has already become navigable during the summer. Until 2009, the Arctic pack ice prevented regular marine shipping throughout most of the year, but global warming has changed that. Humanity itself, has altered the face of the planet on an unprecedented scale, over the last century.

All of this says very little in regard to the amount of fertile lands about the globe that are stripped barren, deforested for the sake of rearing cattle for their flesh. These lands, once grazed over by herds of cattle, become lifeless and unable to regrow vegetation at all again. The Amazon itself, is being raped and pillaged as you read this. Currently, because of human interference, less than 6% of the Earth’s surface is covered by the rain forests that supply much of our oxygen. Clearing tropical forests for agriculture is slated to produce another 17% of the entire world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which is more greenhouse gases than the entire global transport system.”

“A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: “Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.”

The recommendation follows advice last year that a vegetarian diet was better for the planet from Lord Nicholas Stern, former adviser to the Labour government on the economics of climate change. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has also urged people to observe one meat-free day a week to curb carbon emissions.

The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.

Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: “Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products – livestock now consumes much of the world’s crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilizers and pesticides.”

Both energy and agriculture need to be “decoupled” from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.

Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: “Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation.”

The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilizers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, says the report, which has been launched to coincide with UN World Environment day on Saturday.

Last year the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said that food production would have to increase globally by 70% by 2050 to feed the world’s surging population. The panel says that efficiency gains in agriculture will be overwhelmed by the expected population growth.

Prof Hertwich, who is also the director of the industrial ecology programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that developing countries – where much of this population growth will take place – must not follow the western world’s pattern of increasing consumption: “Developing countries should not follow our model. But it’s up to us to develop the technologies in, say, renewable energy or irrigation methods.”

“If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

● 70 million gallons of gas–enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

My favorite statistic is this:

According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads. See how easy it is to make an impact?

Other points:

Globally, we feed 756 million tons of grain to farmed animals. As Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer notes in his new book, if we fed that grain to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided more than half a ton of grain, or about 3 pounds of grain/day–that’s twice the grain they would need to survive. And that doesn’t even include the 225 million tons of soy that are produced every year, almost all of which is fed to farmed animals. He writes, “The world is not running out of food. The problem is that we–the relatively affluent–have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible, if we were to eat the crops we grow directly.”

A recent United Nations report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow concluded that the meat industry causes almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s transportation systems–that’s all the cars, trucks, SUVs, planes and ships in the world combined. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every level–local and global.

Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.

In its report, the U.N. found that the meat industry causes local and global environmental problems even beyond global warming. It said that the meat industry should be a main focus in every discussion of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortages and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

Unattributed statistics were calculated from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.”

“There is more than enough food in the world to feed the entire human population. So why are more than 852 million people still going hungry?

The truth: the more meat we eat, the fewer people we can feed. If everyone on Earth received 25 percent of his or her calories from animal products, only 3.2 billion people would have food to eat. Dropping that figure to 15 percent would mean that 4.2 billion people could be fed. If the whole world became vegan, there would be plenty food to feed all of us more than 6.3 billion people. The World Watch Institute sums this up rightly, saying, “Meat consumption is an inefficient use of grain” – the grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans.

Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor.

It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of edible animal flesh. According to the USDA and the United Nations, using an acre of land to raise cattle for slaughter yields 20 pounds of usable protein. That same acre would yield 356 pounds of protein if soybeans were grown instead more than 17 times as much!

Producing the grain that is used to feed farmed animals requires vast amounts of water. It takes about 300 gallons of water per day to produce food for a vegan, and more than 4,000 gallons of water per day to produce food for a meat-eater. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

It should be no surprise, then, that food for a vegan can be produced on only 1/6 of an acre of land, while it takes 3 1/4 acres of land to produce food for a meat-eater. If we added up all the arable land on the planet and divided it equally, every human would get 2/3 of an acre more than enough to sustain a vegetarian diet, but not nearly enough to sustain a meat-eater.

On top of this the industrial world is exporting grain to developing countries and importing the meat that is produced with it, and thus farmers who are trying to feed themselves are being driven off their land. Their efficient, plant-based agricultural model is being replaced with intensive livestock rearing, which also pollutes the air and water and renders the once-fertile land dead and barren.

If this trend continues, the developing world will never be able to produce enough food to feed itself, and global hunger will continue to plague hundreds of millions of people around the globe. There is only one solution to world hunger – A vegan diet is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue.

So the less meat you eat – the more people we can feed!”

Chatham House warns that in spite of a compelling case for addressing meat consumption and shifting diets, a lack of public awareness is being sustained through government inaction. If this continues, “even with ambitious mitigation in other sectors, the chances of avoiding dangerous climate change are slim.”

Their findings align with the growing body of scientific evidence confirming that funneling plants through animals rather than eating plants directly is wreaking havoc on our environment. Now more than ever, whether or not you care about the trillion+ animals slaughtered globally/annually at human hands (and you probably do), you cannot in good conscience continue to willfully ignore this evidence if you care at all about the planet we all share. Please open your heart and your mind to the truth.

A small fraction of this growing body of evidence includes the following examples:

UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet: “Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change.”

Climatic Change, The importance of reduced meat and dairy consumption for meeting stringent climate change targets: Targeting the fossil fuel industry alone is insufficient because “the agricultural emissions … may be too high. Thus we have to take action in both sectors.”

Oxford University study: People who eat meat are responsible for almost twice as many dietary greenhouse-gas emissions per day as vegetarians and about two-and-a-half times as many emissions as vegans.

Ilmi Granoff of the Overseas Development Institute in the United Kingdom: “The fastest way to address climate change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of meat people eat.”

Lead scientist Dr Fredrik Hedenus of a study done by Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden: “We have shown that reducing meat and dairy consumption is key to bringing agricultural climate pollution down to safe levels.”

The UK Department for Energy and Climate Change: Developed a Global Calculator showing the current Western diet is incompatible with climate action goals.

Shrink That Footprint “compares the carbon footprints of five different American diets and finds that when it comes to foodprints, vegans lead the way.”

Science Illustrated: “A vegetarian diet could be the best solution to the increasing water scarcity problem the world is facing. It would mean that the crops grown would be used to feed people instead of feeding livestock.”

National Geographic: “On average, a vegan, a person who doesn’t eat meat or dairy, indirectly consumes nearly 600 gallons of water per day less than a person who eats the average American diet.” :bulletorange:On top of this there is also the matter of waste. A farm with 2,500 “dairy cows” produces the same amount of waste of a city with 411,000 humans. 7 million pounds of excrement are produced every minute in the US alone from “Farm” animals. That’s 130 times more waste from farm animals than humans. And much of this waste from feces, urine, and blood from slaughterhouses seeps into the ground, gathers in lakes/rivers/streams, and ends up polluting and poisoning surrounding communities. It even leaks into the oceans and makes the sea life sick.

Palm oil is another cause of deforestation. The plant is easy to grow and used in many foods throughout the globe. Forests are demolished in order to grow this plant and sell its oil to many companies. About 26 million acres of rainforests have been cleared for the production of this oil. The plant is grown in warm, humid climates, primarily in Indonesia, Borneo, Malaysia, Thailand, and Colombia. The lust for palm oil and its profit is now the leading cause of the eradication of orangutans. With their home being bulldozed away, the apes are often killed from falling off trees, set on fire, sold as pets, and in some cases used for animal prostitution.

While the need to remove animal agriculture to save the planet will be the greatest benefit in fighting off climate change, deforestation, and pollution, we must also look into clean, renewable fuels to power our machines. Coal, oil, and fossils fuels are limited and cause immense pollution to collect and process. It is also very dangerous to collect, with hundreds dying in coal mines, and many dying from large machinery malfunctions or accidents in collecting oil. And if there is an oil spill in the ocean, rivers, or land, it causes the deaths of hundreds to thousands of animals who suffocate on it, become poisoned, or unable to escape as they become encased in it.

A better solution to these sources is solar power. While wind power, water power, and other renewable sources are giving us the energy we need, sometimes they too have some issues. Dams cause fish population who migrate to be unable to do so, often dying out. In China, the baiji dolphin is extinct (although there have been some reports of sightings of recent) due to the construction of a dam on the Yangtze river. Dams also have caused destruction by flooding towns, destroying land, and in one case creating a lake that engulfed an ancient city in China, the Lion City.

Solar power is safer, cleaner, and easier to use. Roadways and rooftops that bake in the sunlight for hours everyday can easily be replaced with solar panels. There are several cities already powered by 100% renewable energy, and this number continues to grow.

Plastic is another issue that must be addressed to save the planet. Millions of tons of plastic is littered all over the planet, from the top of Everest to even the deepest parts of the ocean. Plastic is killing wildlife by strangulating animals, accidentally being consumed and filling their stomach, to even small particles collecting inside of them and killing them from the toxic chemicals used. While some toxins in plastics have been banned, those plastics still exist out in the oceans and on land, making those who accidentally ingest them very ill and sometimes die from it.

“Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret” and “Before the Flood” are two great documentaries to watch on this topic. Cowspiracy is available on Netflix and is sometimes uploaded to Youtube.