The Last Frost

Here's part II of my previous article on why vegetarianism can help save the world. I ended the last article just as I was about to explain what the power of 10 rule has to do with global warming. So here it is:

Large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by our food industry. I've heard estimates that up to 17% of our fossil fuel use goes towards food production in the US. Vegetable production is no exception, you need all sorts of mostly gas powered vehicles to plow, sow, harvest, and distribute much of the plants we eat.

CO2 is released during the production of crops, although some if not all of it is offset by the plants themselves which remove CO2 from the atmosphere during their growth. Though we still need to transport the fresh plant matter to processing plants or distribution facilities which then create greenhouse gas emissions themselves. Then we can either transport the plants to supermarkets, or we can feed the stuff to animals which will go on to produce our meat in addition to Methane gas among other things which contribute to global warming. Then the animals need to be processed and the food transported yet again to our supermarkets, which we probably drove to in a gas guzzling car. Finally we need to cook the meat which will take even more energy and most likely result in even more greenhouse gas emissions. 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 2:13 am and is filed under Activism, Agriculture, Climate Change, Conservation, Energy, Health, How-Tos, Pollution, Rants, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.