Last week, I blogged about a new WorldWatch article that suggested that as much as 51 percent of earth’s greenhouse gas impact may be caused by animal agriculture. That’s much higher than the seminal 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow [PDF link], that pegged the number at 18 percent.
Now, my friend David Steele at the University of British Columbia has been kind enough to analyze WorldWatch’s numbers, and contribute a write-up of his findings to Vegan.com. Steele found that the WorldWatch authors identified several important contributors to global warming that weren’t previously considered, but that some of the resultant analysis put the greenhouse gas figures too high. He’s re-crunched the numbers and has concluded:
Based on my adjustments of the numbers Goodland and Anhang have provided, my conservative reanalysis of their claims indicates that animal agriculture contributes a minimum of 30.4% of worldwide greenhouse gases in CO2 equivalents.
Fingering animal agriculture for at least 30 percent of global warming is a big deal, and these look to be the most reliable figures yet published. Link.
