more incovenient truth

from the BBC's newsnight blog,information, amazingly and perfectly seriously, that gases from livestock do as much damage to the atmosphere as long haul flights do :

At a conference last week the environment secretary David Milliband pointed out that "the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than transport". Agriculture is reckoned to account for 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as aviation.

And methane isn’t the only issue. It is claimed that one acre of arable crops can produce enough food for up to 20 people. Turn that field over to beef production and it will feed just one person.

Not only that, raising animals is a lot more carbon intensive than growing vegetables. David Pimentel, an ecologist from Cornell University, has calculated that animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than plant protein yet yields proteins only 1.4 times as nutritious for humans.

That’s the average. When you look at individual sectors the figures are even more startling. Take beef, for example. Using US Department of Agriculture figures he found that beef production requires an energy input to protein output of 54:1 (as well as 100,000 litres of water per kilogram of meat).

Vegetarians shouldn’t feel too smug, though. Milk protein has a ratio of 17:1.

a unusual and persuasive ecological argument for veganism.

meantime, as the H5N1 strain of bird flu is discovered in suffolk, the guardian reports:

The UN senior coordinator for avian flu and human influenza, David Nabarro, said in Indonesia that he expected an increase in bird flu around the world: "At the moment there are rather a lot of [cases] ... that is why everybody needs to be a little anxious about what is happening."

In a letter to the Guardian, Nobel prizewinners and campaigners, including Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein called for the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming which they argue is "accelerating the development of new pandemic diseases".

and talking about the living conditions of the turkeys on on radio 4: 'each bird has an area about the size of an A4 sheet of paper; these are not small birds.'

you might want to know what lisa simpson thinks about this.

Tags: chomsky, factoryfarming, fwbo, globalwarming, vegatarian