Meat, Not So Environmentally Problematic! By James Reed
I have been covering, as has Mrs Vera West, the attack upon meat by the fanatical climate change lobby. The idea is that the carbon footprint of cows, from farting methane, is so high that people would be better off eating bugs, or just dying, to make room quicker for the Great Replacement. However, there is some contrary evidence to the bad-meat ideology.
“A new paper by New Zealand and English scientists concludes that going meatless will only have a small impact on a person’s overall lifetime carbon footprint.
The paper, published in the Swiss-based Sustainability Journal, was written by researchers at Auckland, Massey, Victoria and Oxford universities, the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).
It found that giving up meat would only reduce the average person’s lifetime contribution to global warming by 2 per cent to 4 per cent.
That was because long-term, the benefits in not eating meat were largely offset by the carbon dioxide created to produce alternative foods and the relatively short life of methane, farming’s key greenhouse gas.
MPI funded the report, but a ministry spokeswoman said the study was not necessarily reflective of the Government's position on climate change, which is to get farmers to calculate and ultimately reduce their emissions.
“However, like many research papers this should not be considered reflective of the position of the Ministry for Primary Industries. Nor does the ministry hold any particular viewpoint on it.”
Stuff has approached Primary Industries Minister Damien O'Connor for comment.
Meat industry group Beef + Lamb welcomed the paper, but one academic argued it relied greatly on the choice of metric used.
One of the report’s authors, Dave Frame, a director of Victoria University's school of geography, environment and earth sciences, said fighting climate change was becoming a more nuanced debate.
“As people get serious about mitigating climate change, a lot of the issues that haven’t mattered when you have weak price signals start to matter a lot when you start to talk about what we actually have to do to stop warming.
“I think in the future what you’re going to need to do is, to think about ... the temporary environmental impacts of products and the permanent impact of products.”
Long live meat, hot off the bone!
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