Welcome to Top Excellors!

Homework Help

Homework Help. El Centro College English Composition Final Essay

This is the final essay. This essay will require you to summarize, analyze, and synthesize This scholarly article.


Livestock Contributes to Global Warming

Article Commentary

Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” World Watch, November/December 2009, pp. 11-16. Copyright © 2009 World Watch Institute. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

Robert Goodland is retired from his twenty-three-year position as lead environmental adviser at the World Bank Group. Jeff Anhang is aresearch officer and environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation.

Whenever the causes of climate change are discussed, fossil fuels top the list. Oil, natural gas, and especially coal are indeed major sources ofhuman-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). But we believe that the life cycle and supply chain ofdomesticated animals raised for food have been vastly underestimated as a source of GHGs, and in fact account for at least half of all human-caused GHGs. If this argument is right, it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives would be the best strategy for reversingclimate change. In fact, this approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrationsandthus on the rate the climate is warmingthan actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Livestock are already well-known to contribute to GHG emissions. Livestock’s Long Shadow, the widely-cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), estimates that 7,516 million metric tons per year of CO2 equivalents (CO2e), or 18 percent of annualworldwide GHG emissions, are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. That amount would easily qualifylivestock for a hard look indeed in the search for ways to address climate change. But our analysis shows that livestock and their byproductsactually account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.

This is a strong claim that requires strong evidence, so we will thoroughly review the direct and indirect sources of GHG emissions fromlivestock. Some of these are obvious but underestimated, some are simply overlooked, and some are emissions sources that are alreadycounted but have been assigned to the wrong sectors. Data on livestock vary from place to place and are affected by unavoidableimprecision; where it was impossible to avoid imprecision in estimating any sum of GHGs, we strove to minimize the sum so our overall estimate could be understood as conservative.

Livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

The Big Picture

[According to the FAO] 7,516 million tons of CO2e per year [is] attributable to livestock, an amount established by adding up GHG emissionsinvolved in clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed, keeping livestock alive, and processing and transporting the end products. We showthat 25,048 million tons of CO2e attributable to livestock have been undercounted or overlooked; of that subtotal, 3,000 million tons are misallocated and 22,048 million tons are entirely uncounted. When uncounted tons are added to the global inventory of atmospheric GHGs, thatinventory rises from 41,755 million tons to 63,803 million tons. FAO’s 7,516 million tons of CO2e attributable to livestock then decline from 18percent of worldwide GHGs to 11.8 percent. Let’s look at each category of uncounted or misallocated GHGs:

Breathing

The FAO excludes livestock respiration from its estimate, per the following argument:

Respiration by livestock is not a net source of CO2Emissions from livestock respiration are part of a rapidly cycling

biological system, where the plant matter consumed was itself created through the conversion of atmospheric CO2 into organiccompounds. Since the emitted and absorbed quantities are considered to be equivalent, livestock respiration is not considered tobe a net source under the Kyoto Protocol. Indeed, since part of the carbon consumed is stored in the live tissue of the growing animal, a growing global herd could even be considered a carbon sink. The standing stock livestock biomass increasedsignificantly over the last decades…. This continuing growthcould be considered as a

carbon sequestration process (roughly estimated at 1 or 2 million tons carbon per year).

But this is a flawed way to look at the matter. Examining the sequestration claim first: Sequestration properly refers to extraction of CO2 from theatmosphere and its burial in a vault or a stable compound from which it cannot escape over a long period of time. Even if one considers thestanding mass of livestock as a carbon sink, by the FAO’s own estimate the amount of carbon stored in livestock is trivial compared to theamount stored in forest cleared to create space for growing feed and grazing livestock.

More to the point, livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe. Moreover, while over time an equilibrium of CO2 may exist between theamount respired by animals and the amount photosynthesized by plants, that equilibrium has never been static. Today, tens of billions morelivestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere byabsorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared. (Meanwhile, of course, we add more carbon to the air by burningfossil fuels, further overwhelming the carbon-absorption system.)

Carbon dioxide from livestock respiration accounts for 21 percent of anthropogenic GHGs worldwide.

The FAO asserts that livestock respiration is not listed as a recognized source of GHGs under the Kyoto Protocol, although in fact the Protocol does list CO2 with no exception, and “other” is included as a catchall category. For clarity, it should be listed separately in whatever protocol replaces Kyoto.

It is tempting to exclude one or another anthropogenic [human-made] source of emissions from carbon accountingaccording to one’sown interestson the grounds that it is offset by photosynthesis. But if it is legitimate to count as GHG sources fossil-fuel- drivenautomobiles, which hundreds of millions of people do not drive, then it is equally legitimate to count livestock respiration. Little or no livestock product is consumed by hundreds of millions of humans, and no livestock respiration (unlike human respiration) is needed for human survival.By keeping GHGs attributable to livestock respiration off GHG balance sheets, it is predictable that they will not be managed and their amountwill increaseas in fact is happening.

Carbon dioxide from livestock respiration accounts for 21 percent of anthropogenic GHGs worldwide, according to a 2005 estimate by British physicist Alan Calverd. He did not provide the weight of this CO2, but it works out to about 8,769 million tons. Calverd’s estimate is the only original estimate of its type, but because it involves only one variable (the total mass of all livestock, as all but cold-blooded farmed fish exhale roughly the same amount of CO2 per kilogram), all calculations of CO2 from the respiration of a given weight of livestock would be about thesame.

Calverd’s estimate did not account for the fact that CO2 from livestock respiration is excluded from global GHG inventories. It also did not accountfor the GHGs newly attributed to livestock in our analysis. After adding all relevant GHGs to global GHG inventories, the percentage of GHGsattributable to livestock respiration drops from 21 percent to 13.7 percent.

Land

As there is now a global shortage of grassland, practically the only way more livestock and feed can be produced is by destroying naturalforest. Growth in markets for livestock products is greatest in developing countries, where rainforest normally stores at least 200 tons of carbon per hectare. Where forest is replaced by moderately degraded grassland, the tonnage of carbon stored per hectare is reduced to 8.

On average, each hectare of grazing land supports no more than one head of cattle, whose carbon content is a fraction of<

Homework Help

Solution:

15% off for this assignment.

Our Prices Start at $11.99. As Our First Client, Use Coupon Code GET15 to claim 15% Discount This Month!!

Why US?

100% Confidentiality

Information about customers is confidential and never disclosed to third parties.

Timely Delivery

No missed deadlines – 97% of assignments are completed in time.

Original Writing

We complete all papers from scratch. You can get a plagiarism report.

Money Back

If you are convinced that our writer has not followed your requirements, feel free to ask for a refund.