Professor Mitloehner on “unringing the bell” on cows
31/10/2018
In the essay, Professor Mitloehner’s main message is one he has delivered consistently throughout this decade: claims that, globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector are “demonstrably wrong”. A large proportion of what he calls “meat’s bad rap” stems from this claim, the essay says.
Even today, studies, campaigns and even product promotions frequently quote ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, a famously inaccurate report published by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2006. In 2010, a team led by Professor Mitloehner from the University of California, Davis, reacted to ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ and showed that the figures in the report were flawed. Not only did the FAO accept that its report was inaccurate, in 2012 it asked Professor Mitloehner to become the chair of a committee to assess the environmental impact of the livestock industry.
He explained in the essay in The Conversation that the problem with ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ was that FAO analysts used a comprehensive lifecycle assessment to study the climate impact of livestock, but a different method when they analysed transportation.
“For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat,” he said. “This included emissions from fertiliser production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.”
However, when the 2006 FAO report looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, the authors ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. “Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes,” the professor wrote. “As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted.”
Direct emissions of greenhouse gas from transportation is 14% of the global total, he explained, while the figure for livestock is 5%. He also explained that, according to the FAO’s statistical database, total direct greenhouse gas emissions from livestock in the US have declined by 11.3% since 1961, while production of meat from livestock has more than doubled over the same span of time.
In the essay, he gave credit to the FAO for acknowledging its error as soon as he and his team presented their alternative research. “Unfortunately, the agency’s initial claim that livestock was responsible for the lion’s share of world greenhouse gas emissions had already received wide coverage. To this day, we struggle to “unring” the bell,” he said.
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