New report says roughly HALF of human-made greenhouse gas emissions are from our food system

[bananas]

Just checked Frances Moore Lappe's twitter feed and saw this:

http://twitter.com/#!/fmlappe/status/121615763198050305

New report says roughly HALF of human-made greenhouse gas emissions are from our destructive food system: http://ow.ly/6MfA6

That link goes to here:

http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4357-food-and-climate-change-the-forgotten-link

Food and climate change: The forgotten link
GRAIN | 28 September 2011 | Against the grain

Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around half of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Chemical fertilizers, heavy machinery and other petroleum-dependant farm technologies contribute significantly. The impact of the food industry as a whole is even greater: destroying forests and savannahs to produce animal feed and generating climate-damaging waste through excess packaging, processing, refrigeration and the transport of food over long distances, despite leaving millions of people hungry.

<snip>

Add the above figures together, factor up the evidence, and there is a compelling case that the current global food system, propelled by an increasingly powerful transnational food industry, is responsible for around half of all human produced greenhouse gas emissions: anywhere between a low of 44% to a high of 57%. The graph below illustrates the conclusion:



<snip>

[Amonester]

1. But... but... but.... we Have To Have Unlimited Growth (TM)!

Without Unlimited Growth (TM), We, The Rich Will Suffer (although we don't know of what yet)...

[JDPriestly]

2. Why would we buy rice, beans, vegetables, breakfast cereal packaged in

paper or plastic? We can't eat the paper or the plastic, and fresh vegetables, beans, rice, breakfast cereal do not spoil outside the paper or plastic.

I try not to take the plastic bags for my salads and other vegetables and fruits in my local green grocer's market. Who needs them?

I take these things home and put them in recyclable containers that keep them fresh.

Also, I save old tee shirts, old towels, etc. and use them as rags so that I do not have to use so many paper towels.

Obviously, we should all carry recyclable bags to the grocery store.

We don't need a lot of the packaging that we get at the stores.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[truedelphi]

4. How much is mountain top removal responsible for, in terms of

Greenhouse gases?

Last week, when people were testifying about the Tar Sands project, the percentage figures of what the continued Tar Sands oil project would be using up were rather scarey, but I didn't record them.

What would the total of all the mountain top removal for coal, and all the XL Pipleine activities use up in terms of harmful units each year?

I realize that the main message is to us, the little people, that we are very very bad for eating. But really and truly, why don't we hear about how much the war-mongering activities, the chemtrails and the damn "old concept" fuel sources cost the planet?

[stuntcat]

5. lots of the food is grown for, moved to, then pooped out by animals for us to eat.

Humanity FAIL

[txlibdem]

13. The looming shortage of fresh water should be all the impetus we need to change

Take hamburger and steak for example:

How Much Water to Make One Pound of Beef?

March 1, 2001 -- To date, probably the most reliable and widely-accepted water estimate to produce a pound of beef is the figure of 2,500 gallons/pound. Newsweek once put it another way: "the water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer."

Not surprisingly, the beef industry promotes a study that determined, using highly suspect calculations, that only 441 gallons of water are required to produce a pound of beef.

(The cattlemen's study applied liberal deductions from water actually used, reasoning that water was evaporated at points during the process, or was "returned" to the water table after being used to grow plant feed, or was returned to the water table via urea and excrement from cows. Thus, study authors reasoned these waters were not "lost" but "recycled" and therefore could be subtracted from gross amount of water actually used in beef production. Of course, evaporation and cow dung don't go very far in replenishing water pumped from acquifers which took thousands of years to fill. It's interesting to consider that if the same fuzzy math were applied to calculating how much water it takes to grow vegetables, potatoes would probably only require about 2 gallons of water per pound.)

http://www.vegsource.com/articles/pimentel_water.htm

For comparison, the article lists the amount of water it takes to grow some typical vegetables:
Potatoes, 60 gallons
Wheat, 108 gallons
Corn, 168 gallons
Rice, 229 gallons
Soybeans, 240 gallons of water

And if you count only the edible cuts of meat (hamburgers, steak) it takes 12,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of burgers or steak.

[Codeine]

6. If people would stop ramming meat down their swollen gullets

with both butter-slick hands then the problem would get much smaller, as would their repulsively bloated bodies.

[Gregorian]

7. Why focus on the food when the problem is population.

We should be able to eat what we want. Now no matter what we do it's going to be damaging to the planet. But I hear the same old reply that we CAN support this monstrous number of people on the planet. Even though our fish are depleted, the forests are now stumps, oil is gone, etc...

It's population. Stupid.

[GliderGuider]

8. They're the same thing. Food=People, People=Food

If we each need 2500 calories a day to live, then every new mouth adds a constant burden to the planet's food supply, and all the ecological devastation that goes with it - greenhouse gases and nitrogen runoff and deforestation and habitat loss and falling water tables and pesticide pollution and the release of GMOs into the biosphere.

Forcing everybody to become vegetarian (really???) would allow us to feed 9.5 billion people instead of today's 7 billion, but with no reduction in agricultural devastation. The UN figures we're going to have that many people by 2050. Unfortunately, they're all supposed to be getting richer at the same time. And what do rich people eat more of? Right.

So yes, it comes down to this: how many human beings is enough?

IMO, we probably need there to be fewer than a billion of us if we want to achieve any kind of sustainability - even the fake UN-calculated kind. "True" sustainability probably requires that there be fewer than 250 million of us.

It's a nasty little conundrum, isn't it?

[Gregorian]

9. It is a strange situation

I mean that from this standpoint:

Dentistry. Look at that, alone. You can imagine what life was like. I just had massive dental work. I would have just died from infection. And the advances we've made in other areas required vacuum tubes to get to diodes, to get to integrated circuits, to get to mass communication so that the planet could effectively function as one big brain.

It's a dilemma. Suffer and live in equilibrium, or grow.

I don't see it as much as a dilemma/conundrum as maybe it really is. I keep saying the human (not unlike all animals in the breeding sense) doesn't know when to stop. Even Google was better two years ago than it is now. A bunch of people all having to work every day. Thy aren't going to leave and go home because Google is working. No, it's their job. But we could have survived on the life we had in 1890. Phone, electricity. Some dental and medical quality.

And then there is the negative effect of the modern lifestyle that just feeds back into the system in a negative way. Driving instead of using the body. Now we have obese and sick people.

[sam11111]

10. orbital sunshades etc can cool us despite CO2 for a good while

IMHO

[GliderGuider]

11. And how are they against ocean acidification?

Which may actually be a bigger problem than climate change, especially over the longer term.

[TheWraith]

12. Cool. Give me a call when we can actually launch one. nt

[Nihil]

14. That username will have burnt out by then ...

... and probably have been through several other reincarnations
(like those leading to the current one - same shit, different name).