How eating meat will save the climate

(Warning: sensitive climate activists might take offense by reading this article)

It has been a sizzling summer in the red-hot political year of 2024. Thank God we could relax in front of the grill and lose ourselves in the aromas and sounds of meat roasting.

Actually, the grill-skills of middle-aged guys (the main keepers of the keys to the barbie) hold one of the greatest promises for saving the planet and – NO! – it is not about putting veggies on the flames instead of chunks of meat. You and your families can happily continue to delight in those seared, umami-packed cuts. And let me prove this by using science.

Let’s start by going to climate gas school:

The term GWP?stands for?Global Warming Potential. It is a metric used to compare the relative impact of different greenhouse gases on global warming over a specific time period, typically 20, 100, or 500 years. The GWP of a gas is expressed relative to carbon dioxide (CO?), which has a GWP of 1. This means that a gas with a GWP of 30, for example, would trap 30 times more heat in the atmosphere than the same amount of CO? over the chosen time period. Most often we use the 100 year period during which the three greenhouse gases that count (CO?, methane and nitrous oxide), have GWPs of 1, 30 and 300, respectively. According to this measurement CO? is the clear dominant that we need to get rid of.

BUT, these greenhouse gases have different lifespans. CO? stays in the air for hundreds to thousands of years. Nitrous oxide lives to a 114 years. Methane, however, dies young, around 10-12 years.

The long lifespan of CO? is why we focus on that gas so adamantly. Since it stays with both us and future generations we need to absolutely NOT release any more into the atmosphere.

But what if we saw climate from the barbecue-perspective? Meat does not emit so much CO?, but vast amounts of methane. And methane lives for around a decade. What do greenhouse gas emissions look like if we use a less-used measurement called GWP-10 and that focuses on the 10-year perspective?

HOLY COW! If we take that perspective methane becomes the dominant greenhouse gas,? representing roughly half of all emissions! It seems like we could make an absolutely meaningful dent in the short-term warming of the planet by slashing methane emissions. I mean, summers should be hot, but not THIS hot.

Wait a minute, from where do we get methane? We might as well call it meathane (pun absolutely intended) because meat is a key contributor. Now we need to go to meat school:

Not all meats are created equal from a climate perspective. Livestock, the animals we raise for food, can basically be divided up into ruminants and non-ruminants. Ruminants (cattle, sheep and goats) have over millennia proven extremely beneficial to domesticate since they have a digestive system that allows them to graze; they can feed themselves! But when the microbes in the different stomachs of a ruminant break down what they munch on, methane is a direct side-effect. The incessant burping of ruminants releases vast amounts of methane.

But that is not all, we also need to take into consideration manure management, feed production, land-use change, and energy use to correctly calculate their methane emissions*.

If we would rank the emissions from meat under the GWP-10 scenario in such a more holistic way it looks like this (calculated in the so-called CO2e – CO2 equivalents):

Beef: 140-220 CO2e/kg

Lamb: 100-150 CO2e/kg

Goat: 70-110 CO2e/kg

Pork: 20-60 CO2e/kg

Poultry: 10-30 CO2e/kg

But do we not have new innovations that inhibit methane production and that is give as feed supplement? Absolutely, a lucky few cows get that, but, sorry to say, it is not a silver bullet. There are many, many, many ruminants in the world. And, as we said, their emissions do not only come from their stomachs, but also from change in land-use, feed etc.

The share of greenhouse gases coming from ruminants according to GWP-10? Roughly 25%. Not from agriculture. Not from meat. From ruminants. In the short perspective, that also will be the long perspective unless we change our habits, shifting choice of meat is key to keeping temperatures at bay.?Here come the good news. We eat relatively little ruminant meat. Of all the meat we consume they only represent about 15%. If we would shift our consumption of ruminant meat to a basket of the other meats we eat we could save approximately 10 billion tons of CO2e annually, which is about what the global transport sector emits.

Yes, one could argue that going vegan is the only correct way, but that would require policy-measures and since meat has become the number one culture war item no politician with re-election ambitions will touch the subject. It is up to us as individuals to move the dial in this case.

But how do we then replace ruminant meat? Ask the middle-aged guys by the grill. They know how to make all sorts of meat tasty and they will delight in making you happy by cooking up your favorite cut with all their knowledge and creativity (and a good portion of trade secrets, magic rubs and home-made marinades). They might burn your impossible burger or zucchini slices out of sheer obstructiveness, but they would never treat chicken or pork meat with contempt. The next time dad says it is time to fire up the grill you know what is at stake – all meats are ok, but not ruminant steak. Hey, he might even become a part of the movement as soon as he realizes we do not want to take his meat away!

Johan Jorgensen

*I asked AI for help on the calculations, so the usual caveats apply, but the reasoning and calculations seemed absolutely plausible, so I do not think it was hallucinating this time around.

Image by BuBBy Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.