Why does eating meat contribute to global warming?

Question

Why does eating meat contribute to global warming?

Answer 1

It doesn't.  

Every political activist on the planet is researching some way to tie their pet cause to the global warming bandwagon.  Animals we find useful cause global warming, but the rest of the animal kingdom does not.  Smoking cigarettes causes global warming, but many claiming this would cry foul if you made the same claim about weed.  Being overweight causes global warming, but those hyper outdoorsy-types who wolf down 5-6,000 calories a day are perfectly fine.  

See what I'm saying?  

My lightbulbs are evil, but a room full of candles is fine....on and on and on.

Answer 2

Meat, especially red meat has a carbon "footprint" 10-100 times the equivalent nutrition in vegetable form.  If a person eats meat daily this can be 18-20% of their total.  The large amounts of fossil fuel used to produce fertilizer, grain feed, market preparation, etc all make meat an energy intensive meal.  Meat eaters of days gone by who hunted wild game left no such "footprint".   The water "footprint" is proportionately large as well.

Answer 3

The number one emitter of greenhouse gasses is .....

Livestock, more than cars etc.,

However, eating meat does not contribute much to global warming unless someone wants to kill the animals.  The only cost is the gas ect, used in the process, however there is the same gas etc used to make beans.  I would say none.

Answer 4

Lol, I guess all that methane gas?

Answer 5

For one thing, ruminant livestock (like cows) emit methane when they burp and in their dung.  The larger contribution to global warming, however, is through land use change.  In order to provide livestock with pastureland, the land has to be converted from another use, like forest land.  A lot of the Amazon rainforest has been cut down and is now used for pastureland.

Further details in the links below.

Answer 6

IT DOES'NT.

Answer 7

It doesn't.  Humans have been eating meat for tens of thousands of years and the climate has varied from relatively warm to extremely cold.  We wouldn't have survived as a species without food from animal sources as there are many parts of the world where the only food available was fish and mammals.

Answer 8

Feeding  animals,  causes emission of methane and CO2. However, we can ignore the CO2 simply because the plants consumed absorbed that CO2 being released during digestion.

Growing the food to feed animals of course also causes lots of Greenhouse emissions, even though the crops themselves absorb lots of CO2.

Eating the animals or not eating them does not change anything. It is all about feeding them.

From this we can see that exterminating all animals may be needed to stop global warming to protect earth as a viable home for animals.

Desertification, converting farm land to desert, obviously removes large scale animal feeding and should be expected to help slow down global warming, were it not for the loss of plants that absorb CO2.

If we insist that the objective is to increase human population until we starve, then changing to  eat only plant matter will allow us to go on increasing human population without as much land, water.

But humans too will contribute to global warming. Feeding people will cause GW just the same as feeding other animals does.

Answer 9

Well, first off, the environmental damage caused by meat consumption goes far beyond just green house gas emissions. Unfortunately, the environmental movement has been over simplified by the media into only caring about "carbon foot prints" and global warming.

Secondly, "eating meat" in and of itself does not contribute to global warming or any other environmental degradation.

It is a result of these two facts that you have gotten so many negatively skewed and irrationally negative answers.

The truth is, that although humans have been consuming meat for thousands of years, the WAY in which we currently raise animals for food is incredibly harmful, and is fairly recent. The entire move to an industrial model of agriculture, for both plants and animals has occurred within the last 100 years, and mostly in the last 50.

By producing meat (corn fed, factory farmed, and shot up with hormones and antibiotics) the way we do, we are causing immense damage to the natural environment, as well as human culture and health.

So to answer your question, eating meat does not contribute to global warming if it is meat that has been raised or hunted in a sustainable fashion.

However, if the meat you are eating has been raised on a factory farm, where it was fed a diet of genetically modified corn (that was raised on a massive corporate farm that was fertilized with a petroleum based fertilizer and sprayed with petroleum based pesticides and then harvested with huge machinery and trucked across the country) , and where it's waste was pumped into a huge lagoon of animal excrement that routinely leaches into freshwater reserves, and where the animal is kept in such close confinement that in order for it not to die of the rampant diseases it has to be injected with constant antibiotic shots, and then when it is eventually killed and processed (In huge corporate packing houses staffed usually with non-unionized and often exploited immigrant labor) has to be then shipped again in refrigerated trucks all around the country to huge superstores, before being bought by you and driven home to be thrown on a grill, then, yes, it will contribute to global warming as well as a slew of other equally terrifying environmental problems.

Answer 10

Don't worry about it and eat your meat so you can grow up strong like me.

Answer 11

im  pretty sure i doesn't