Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
stead got well over 100 citations to the article, including coverage in the
Financial Times
,
the
Daily Mail, The Sun
and the
Sydney Morning Herald
. I opened up about 50 of these
and on only one did I find any evidence that anyone had actually read the article: a contrib-
utor to the Oregon Public Network site quoted a sentence from the article which could not
than repeat the press release word for word.
I also found out that Alan Calverd was an expert in 'photon beam therapy level graphic
calorimetry', and discovered an e-mail address for him, but my message to that address
bounced back as well. I ordered his article through the interlibrary loans service, but the
response came back that it could not be located. Since this hardly ever happens, I was be-
ginning to wonder whether the magazine, the article, and Mr Calverd weren't just a figment
of some ingenious blogger's imagination.
They weren't, and eventually I located the article through contacts in the US academic
library service, and even they had some difficulty. Instead of being, as I had anticipated,
a lengthy scientific paper, it was a one page opinion piece, adorned with a photo of the
author, a genial soul, blowing on a euphonium, who has 'a passion for good food, radic-
al thinking and playing instruments in the bass clef'. Calverd's argument was simple: all
animals generate carbon dioxide by breathing, and therefore we could make sizable reduc-
tions in our CO
2
emissions - around 21 per cent in his view - 'by abolishing all livestock
and eating plants instead'.
4
Of course it is not as though nobody has ever thought of this before. The same idea is
expressed in facile bumper stickers on the lines of 'if you think CO
2
is a problem, hold
your breath'. But most people discard the thought almost immediately because any carbon
released into the atmosphere by a living animal is carbon that has previously and helpfully
been withdrawn from the atmosphere by what is known as the short term carbon cycle. The
carbon dioxide which any animal breathes out has to come from somewhere, and unless it
has been fed fossil fuels, it comes from the vegetable matter it eats (or if it is a predator,
from the vegetable matter consumed by the prey). Vegetable matter obtains its CO
2
from
the atmosphere through photosynthesis, so when animals breathe out, they are merely re-
turning to the atmosphere carbon dioxide that their food has previously withdrawn from
it. The sum total of animals in existence at any one time in fact serves as a carbon sink,
and if we got rid of them all, in which case carbon would return to the atmosphere through
burning or through methane caused by rotting vegetation, there would arguably be slightly
more carbon in the atmosphere. Calverd is no doubt fully aware of this; and any joker who
makes headlines in the national press, and convinces virtually the entire vegan web-com-
munity to reprint a load of codswallop, is quite entitled to go 'oompah!'
Eighteen Per Cent
