Livestock production not huge climate change factor says UC scientist

Oct. 16, 2009 - - For three years, anti-meat advocates, certain climate-change activists, and some small-farm organizations have used a United Nations report to accuse mainstream meat production of being a significant source of greenhouse gases, contributing to global warming. But research by an air-quality specialist and associate professor at the University of California-Davis, Frank Mitloehner, finally puts the U.N. data into context. The result? It turns out that livestock production is not nearly the climate problem that some activists claim.
The report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, issued in 2006 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, claims that livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas production—more, Mitloehner told trade publication Meat & Poultry, “than all transportation, including planes, trains, cars, trucks, and ships, combined.”
He and his team checked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s data, as well as data from the California Energy Commission. Both agencies report that all of agriculture, not just livestock production, contributes about six percent of greenhouse gases, with about half that total coming from livestock. “Where do the discrepancies come from? The U.N. report is global and is an average,” the professor said. “You come to the conclusion that Third World countries have a very different carbon portfolio than developed countries do. For example, in Ethiopia they have many more livestock animals than they have cars, so livestock production contributes a much greater percentage of greenhouse gases there than cars do.”
In his study of the U.N. data, titled Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change, co-authored with Maurice Pitesky and Kimberly Stackhouse, both also on the UC-Davis faculty, Mitloehner writes that the U.N. report “has been most instrumental in pointing the public attention to the kinds of environmental consequences in which livestock production can potentially result, with special emphasis on climate change. Unfortunately, some of the report’s key conclusions (i.e., livestock produces more GHG [anthropogenic greenhouse gases] than transportation) have been applied regionally and out of their intended context, leading to significant consequences on major public policy affairs.”