GLOBAL WARMING: COWS OR CARS? - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 189

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G LOBAL W ARMING : C OWS OR C ARS ?
W hen I began this topic, the global warming impact of livestock, mostly related to
methane from cows, was considered a side issue. Since 2007, it has become the main argu-
ment against carnivory, and is now deployed as such by people who have long been advan-
cing other reasons for not eating meat. 1 If you are a climate sceptic, then the global warming
argument is irrelevant, and you can safely skip the next two chapters, unless you are inter-
ested in how the discourse has been altered by the rise of climate politics. I am not a cli-
mate sceptic, but that is not to say that I am convinced that 90 per cent of scientists must
be right (any more than I believe that we live in an expanding universe born out of a big
bang just because 90 per cent of physicists think so). I accept the global warming discourse,
because of Pascal's Wager, otherwise known as the precautionary principle; and because I
believe it is an appropriate ideology (or religion if you prefer) for humanity at a time when
we are clearly placing too much pressure on the environment through excessive population
and consumption. 2 In this chapter and the next I therefore take the climate change scenario,
as modelled by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as a premise.
If you surfed around the Internet investigating meat and global warming in 2006, you
were certain to alight upon this:
Cut global warming by being vegetarian. Global warming could be controlled if
we all became vegetarians and stopped eating meat. That's the view of British physi-
cist Alan Calverd, who thinks that giving up pork chops, lamb cutlets and chicken bur-
gers would do more for the environment than burning less oil and gas. Writing in this
month's Physics World , Calvert [ sic ] calculates that the animals we eat emit 21 per cent
of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity. We could therefore
slash man-made emissions of carbon dioxide simply by abolishing all livestock.
This press release was posted on the website of Physics World , a magazine which pub-
lished Calverd's article on 7 July 2005. Unfortunately, to read the whole article, you have
to subscribe to the magazine which costs £240, or £599 if you want access to its archive
of back issues. I tried e-mailing Physics World , but the e-mail bounced back. So I keyed in
'Alan Calverd global warming' in the hope of locating a pirated copy. I had no luck, but in-