Et les transports, c'est un peu beaucoup une fausse piste : mieux vaut des gesticulations sur les bagnoles électriques qui vont nous sauver plutôt que s'attaquer au vrai problème, n'est-ce pas :
Dans la dernière newsletter du Guardian, Damian Carrington a écrit :
Cutting meat from our diet could be twice as good for the climate as we thought
A few years ago I switched to a plant-based diet. After reporting study after study spelling out the dire environmental impact of the overconsumption of meat in rich nations, it felt like the right thing to do and I have no regrets. It’s unlikely we’ll end the climate crisis without tackling the vast environmental hoofprint of livestock. And, according to new research, the climate benefit of cutting meat consumption could be double what we thought.
We already knew that cattle and other livestock use 83% of the world’s farmland for pasture and fodder, while producing just 18% of protein. In rich countries, 70% of food-related emissions come from livestock. What the new study shows is that if people in developed nations adopted a healthy, low-meat diet, a huge amount of carbon dioxide could be sucked out of the air by letting farmland revert back to natural forests and grasslands.
In fact, the carbon-reduction impact of the growing trees and plants roughly doubles the climate impact of just cutting meat-eating alone, which itself reduces agricultural emissions by more than 60%. That’s because we are talking about a lot of land being freed up: almost 350m hectares of pastureland and 80m more of cropland – about half the area of the US. The total savings would be about 100bn tonnes over time, equivalent to about 10 times China’s annual emissions today.
“It’s a remarkable opportunity for climate mitigation,” says Paul Behrens from Leiden University in the Netherlands who led the study. “But it would also have massive benefits for water quality, biodiversity, air pollution, and access to nature, to name just a few.”
I can hear your questions already, so let’s address a couple. First, the study did not assume everyone in the 54 nations analysed all went vegan, Instead, they used the "planetary health diet", which allows a beef burger and two servings of fish a week, plus some dairy products every day.
Second, what about farmers? Behrens says: “It will be vital that we redirect agricultural subsidies to farmers for biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration. We must look after farming communities to enable a just food transition.” It is an extraordinary fact that almost 90% of the $540bn in global subsidies given to farmers every year lead to “harmful” outcomes, according to the UN.
The new research landed in Veganuary, which challenges people to go vegan for the first month of the year, and has seen record sign-ups this year. However, while replacements for meat and dairy products are handy for many plant-based eaters, they are sometimes criticised as being junk food.
Prof Guy Poppy, at the University of Southampton, UK, said last week: “In the rush to develop marketable, attractive alternatives, please don’t get into the rush of creating plant-based junk food [that are] ultra processed and high-fat, high-sugar.”
Obviously, in an ideal world we would all eat meals freshly prepared from raw ingredients. But we don’t live in that world and I worry that this criticism of meat alternatives risks making health perfection the enemy of the environmental good.
Despite the urgency of the climate emergency, the world is not going to go vegan overnight. People will continue to eat burgers and sausages, which are unlikely ever to be health foods however they are made. But I think plant-based alternatives could get a lot of people a lot of the way towards potentially huge environmental benefits. Let me know what you think by replying to this email or emailing downtoearth@theguardian.com.
