Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
IPCC itself, which claims that the whole of agriculture only contributes 10-12 per cent of
global GHG emissions. 7 The World Resources Institute's global warming flow chart, which
is based on 1996 IPCC statistics, allocates just 5.1 per cent of global greenhouse gases to
'livestock and manure'. 8
This discrepancy does not necessarily mean that one figure is wrong and the other right.
It is mainly a matter of which sector various kinds of emissions are allocated to. For in-
stance, the widely quoted figure of around 14 per cent of global emissions attributed to
transport, only includes direct fossil fuel consumption; emissions caused by vehicle manu-
facture, road building, airports, oil extraction, the electricity to power trains and a host of
other costs are slotted under 'industry' or 'iron and steel' or 'cement' or 'commercial build-
ings'. If you include all these emissions in the transport sector then the figure would rise
considerably; I have been unable to find a convincing assessment, but it is easy to compute
from existing figures that the oil extraction and refining alone would add 1.5 per cent to the
global transport figure. A Canadian study estimated that whereas fuel burnt in vehicles rep-
resents 31 per cent of all Canadian GHG emissions, once oil refining, vehicle manufacture
and road building are included, the figure rises to 52 per cent. 9
'There are many assumptions that one needs to make when quantifying emissions,' states
Gidon Eshel, a US professor of environmental studies, who has estimated that global live-
stock emissions account for about 10 or 11 per cent of US emissions. 'It's not that any one
assumption is correct. Almost all of them are defensible.' 10 The assumptions that different
analysts make will (whether they mean to or not) refiect their ideological position. Statist-
ics are never black and white, they always come in a certain colour.
Amidst the publicity about Livestock's Long Shadow , few people bothered to read the
400 page report to examine what assumptions the main author, Henning Steinfeld, and his
team had made to arrive at their figure of 18 per cent. It doesn't take a very long perusal
of these figures to see that the FAO find fossil fuel use associated with livestock to be of
negligible importance, whereas the main 'organic' sources account for 97 per cent of all
livestock emissions. Less than three per cent of livestock emissions are caused by burning
fossil fuels for nitrogen fertilizer, farm machinery and processing. Three gases are respons-
ible in roughly equal degrees for all the rest: a third of the total consists of carbon dioxide
from deforestation, another third methane produced by animals' guts, and the remainder
nitrous oxide from manure and fertilizer.
Moreover Steinfeld and his colleagues make another distinction. In sub-sidiary columns
in their main table they show that 70 per cent of these emissions are attributable to extens-
ive livestock (ie grazing) and only 30 per cent are attributable to intensive livestock (indus-
trial farming).
Perhaps, given what has already been revealed about Livestock's Long Shadow in
Chapter Six, you can detect an agenda emerging here. The conclusion the FAO economists
 
 
 
 
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