The
current problems of global warming and the reduction of Earth’s
natural resources such as fossil fuels, fresh water and topsoil are
the most difficult challenges humankind has ever faced. Scientists
have concluded that reducing the release of carbon dioxide (CO2)
will lessen global warming; so in 1997 181 governments signed the
Kyoto Protocol to reduce their emissions of the chemical along with
five other “greenhouse gases.” Although this measure is
a positive step, in the July 2005 issue of the scientific journal
Physics World, British physicist Alan Calverd proposes
a simpler way to eliminate global warming—stop eating meat.
His article “A Radical Approach to Kyoto” has spread rapidly
across the Internet and is being heatedly discussed by scientists.
Although Calverd is not a vegetarian he recognized the great waste of
natural resources and energy caused by the raising of animals for food. So
he calculated the various forms of CO2-producing power use, such as the
burning of fossil fuels and human and livestock metabolism, and found that
21% of such power consumption involves keeping farm animals alive. Similar
to automobile fuel exhaust, the livestock’s breathing generates an enormous
amount of CO2, and remarkably, this agent of global warming is not included
under the category of manmade emissions by climate scientists and
politicians because they consider it a non-human phenomenon that can not be
altered.
Further, Calverd’s figure of 21% does not include indirect sources of
carbon dioxide emissions, such as feed production, mechanized slaughtering,
evisceration, packaging, transport and refrigeration.
A more complete calculation of the energy cost of meat production has
been done by Cornell University’s Dr. David Pimentel, an agricultural
scientist, who is not involved with the vegetarian movement, but has been
tracking the energy cost of ‘growing’ meat for decades and written 560
scientific papers and 23 books on the subject. Dr. Pimentel has also held
numerous governmental posts overseeing the meat industry and repeatedly
tells his fellow meat scientists, “I’m not making any moral judgments. I’m
just giving you data.”
In his 2004 paper “Livestock Production and Energy Use,” Pimentel
estimated that in the US the amount of gasoline required to sustain the
average meat-based diet is an astonishing 401 gallons per year, versus 219
gallons for a vegetarian diet. These numbers increase dramatically the more
meat one eats. Pimentel also calculated that if the entire world ate the way
people in the US do, Earth’s petroleum reserves would be exhausted in just
thirteen years. Most remarkable is the following observation:
Even driving many gas-guzzling luxury cars can conserve energy over
walking; that is, when the calories you burn walking come from the standard
American diet! This is because the energy needed to produce the food you
would burn in walking a given distance is greater than the energy needed to
fuel your car to travel the same distance, assuming that the car gets 24
miles per gallon or better.
In addition, a similar calculation on bicycle riding from the website
http://www.bicycleuniverse.info/ reveals that cycling on a
meat diet requires as much fossil-fuel consumption as driving a car.Another
meat related emission that is often forgotten is methane, a product of
anaerobic digestion generated when a cow exhales. A National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) study published in the February 2005 issue of
the journal
Geophysical Research Letters
reveals that due to its effects on atmospheric ozone
methane causes twice the amount of global warming previously estimated
(10%), and meat-eating is responsible for a full third of all biological
methane emissions.
Another surprising statistic is that the nine billion head of livestock
kept in the US consume seven times the grain eaten by the country’s human
population, and the percentage of grain fed to livestock is also
skyrocketing in developing countries such as China, Egypt and Mexico.
Furthermore, according to the Worldwatch Institute, each pound of grain-fed
steak results in 35 pounds of eroded topsoil, and sustaining a meat-eater’s
diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water daily versus 300 for
vegetarians.
According to the renowned ecologist Mathis Wackernagel, our animal-based
diet is a major reason that humans are consuming the planet’s long term
bio-capacity at an unsustainable rate. Thus, many scientists such as
Wackernagel and Calverd have scientifically verified that meat consumption
is draining Earth’s resources, but there are other unquantifiable but
significant issues that need to be considered as well, such as animal
welfare and the moral impact of mass animal slaughter on human
consciousness.
As Quan Yin practitioners know, meat-eating is one of the greatest obstacles
to spiritual growth and enlightenment. Killing animals for sensory
pleasure or paying others to do so for us hardens our hearts and leads
to wars and other forms of human misery. Now that scientists are uncovering
large amounts of empirical data showing that meat-eating also destroys
the very basis of our planetary existence, humanity has more reason
than ever to abandon the meat-based diet in the new Golden Age.
♥
Vegetarian Heroes of
the Silver Screen
♥
Film Star Linda Blair on Vegetarianism
and Compassion
♥
A Key to Reducing Global Warming
and Resource Depletion
♥
Vegetarian Fish and Chips
Arrive in London
♥
Eminent Scientists and Inventors
on Vegetarianism
♥
Vegetarian Awakening in the
Himalayas