Copenhagen is a cornucopia of causes pitching how they can cut pollution and save the world. Companies of all stripes hawk “greenish” technologies like fuel cells that use little or no carbon-spewing gasoline. Thomas Lux urges another remedy: quit eating meat.
“If the world sharply reduced its meat consumption, we would significantly reduce the amount of methane,” said Mr. Lux outside the main conference hall here on a snowy morning.
Reducing meat demand would shrink the cattle-raising industry and, therefore, the amount of bovine emissions, a methane goldmine, he says.
Methane, which cows emit in hefty quantities, is one of a handful of major greenhouse gases that many scientists say are threatening to increase the earth’s temperature by incremental but environmentally significant amounts. Carbon dioxide, which gets much of the public attention because of its association with fossil fuels like coal and industrial smokestacks, is the greenhouse gas that U.N. organizers are most focused on reducing.
But Mr. Lux says that’s too narrow an approach. Mr. Lux and an army of about 100 people have been regulars at the U.N.’s two-week climate change conference, passing out vegetarian sandwiches to delegates daily and carrying placards calling livestock farms “an environmental hazard” and to “Go Veg”. (Other high-profile proponents of curbing meet consumption to curb emissions: Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Beatle Paul McCartney.)
Reduced meat consumption, if done on a big scale, could even prompt landowners in Brazil, the world’s biggest soya producer, to stop clearing rain forest to grow soya bean, which cattle-owners often feed their livestock to beef them up, Mr. Lux says. Rainforests act effectively as carbon-sponges because they suck up carbon from the atmosphere and eventually convert it back into oxygen.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the world’s 1.2 billion ruminant animals, which include cattle and sheep, account for about 28% of global methane emissions.
The big meat industries in the U.S. and Argentina have said the stink over methane is overblown and that cattle are just a fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions globally and that vegetarians are pushing an ideological agenda.