Popular media reports, based on what appear to be numerous scientific investigations, tend to urge the modern consumer to much reduce their animal protein consumption. This, most reports claim, is necessary to protect the climate as agriculture represents around a quarter of the total man-made Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Of this quarter, around 60% is said to be due to animal products, with red meats and certain cattle products, taking the lion’s share. Besides climate, there would also be other environmental concerns such as water and soil degradation, deforestation, and more. It would also be healthier as red meats in particular, but also animal proteins in general, are considered to cause cancer and cardiovascular disease. Furthermore, it would be morally problematic to kill sentient animals, or to keep them under industrialized conditions. The only responsible and reasonable thing to do would therefore be to adopt a vegan lifestyle, or at least flexitarian habits with reduced intakes of animal proteins.
The authors of such publications work across the entire quality spectrum of science and media, including researchers from some of the world’s most renowned universities such as Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, journalists at the New York Times and the BBC, and policy advisors at esteemed organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
This report reviews several of the most high profile and most often cited scientific investigations on which these claims of climate and health damage are made. The report finds that each of these scientific investigations suffer from crucial methodological flaws, are careless and shoddy with referencing critical data, systematically ignore findings that do not fit the ‘meat is irresponsible’ narrative, and are not as numerous as they are claimed to be. Each of these criticisms can be easily retraced and verified by the reader of this report, since all materials to which it refers are readily downloadable from the internet and are marked by page.
In particular this report highlights the following shortcomings:
Conclusion: As at 2010 the total annual man-made GHG emissions were estimated to be 49 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent. If a quarter of this is due to agriculture, then this would be around 12 Gt. Half of this amount is supposedly caused by land use changes, primarily deforestation, which is falsely attributed to food production. The real cause for deforestation is poverty, weak institutions, crime and corruption, and not the need to grow more food. Of the remaining 6 Gt, enteric fermentation fermentation is estimated to account for between 1.6 and 2 Gt. However, if compensating methanotrophic activity should be estimated with the currently available (meagre) knowledge, then we would need to conclude that all or almost all of this is compensated by bacteria. This compensation calculation includes also the roughly 1 Gt of manure related GHG emissions. The remaining agricultural emissions would be related to rice cultivation, organic soil cultivation and crop residue decay. In other words, while animal protein production might be largely climate-neutral, rice and organic produce cultivation are the remaining problem crops for the climate. Under these circumstances, switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet would increase the GHG emissions of agriculture, not decrease them.
The oft-repeated narrative that animal protein production is harmful to the climate and to the consumer has begun to enter received common wisdom. For instance, the singer artist Beyoncé raffles off a 30-year valid free ticket to all her concert tours to all participants promising to reduce their animal protein intake. She is clearly convinced that this is the right thing to do. This report does not speculate on who promotes this factually-wrong narrative and for what reason. Clearly there are scientists who are willing to bend, bias and selectively report the existing state of knowledge to support and confirm this narrative. The author of this report puzzles why earnest scientists are willing to do so. Science should investigate rigorously and create unbiased knowledge. It is an important debate: nothing less than the health of the global population, the environmental sustainability and survivability of our lifestyles, and the fortunes of the single largest industry of the world, the animal protein production industry, are at stake.