Bummer: Agriculture Produces About A Third Of Greenhouse Gases

The obvious solution here is that Mankind needs to drastically reduce the amount of food we produce, which means we need to kill off a goodly chunk of the world’s population, and, either figure out a way to recycle the people without producing GHGs, or launch them into the Sun

Food production generates more than 1/3 of manmade greenhouse gas emissions – a new framework tells us how much comes from crops, countries and regions

Producing enough food for a growing world population is an urgent global challenge. And it’s complicated by the fact that climate change is warming the Earth and making farming harder in many places.

Food production is a big contributor to climate change, so it’s critically important to be able to measure greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector accurately. In a new study, we show that the food system generates about 35% of total global man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Breaking down this share, production of animal-based foods – meat, poultry and dairy products, including growing crops to feed livestock and pastures for grazing – contributes 57% of emissions linked to the food system. Raising plant-based foods for human consumption contributes 29%. The other 14% of agricultural emissions come from products not used as food or feed, such as cotton and rubber.

This is nothing new. Way back in the day the UN IPCC’s first report said that the majority of GHGs from Mankind came from agriculture and landfills. And it was more about methane than CO2. We’ve done a good job with landfills, better recycling, better management, reduce the GHGs produced. Agriculture? What do they want us to do? But, the study itself?

To fill those gaps, we have developed a comprehensive framework that combines modeling and various databases. It enables us to estimate average yearly global emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide from the production and consumption of plant- and animal-based human food. Currently, our study covers the years 2007-2013. Here are some of the insights it offers, using data that represents an average of those years.

So, mostly a computer model, and it is more about methane and nitrous oxide. And it only covers 6 years. So, a rather weak study. Though probably correct. Even though there are a lot of estimates, rather than hard figures. And Blamestorms a lot of areas like SE Asia, India, and China.

Based on these results, governments, researchers and individuals can take actions to reduce emissions from high-emitting food commodities in different places. As U.N. leaders have stated, making food production more climate-friendly is essential to reduce hunger in a warming world.

And there we go, a study meant to give government some data so that government can look to take more control of the agriculture sector. Surprise?

Climate alarmism is the real threat to public health

So climate change is now a ‘health emergency’ is it?

That was certainly the message from US president Joe Biden last week, after he launched the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity. It will reportedly explore how a warming, changing climate poses an immediate, existential threat to people’s health. As Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate-change adviser, put it: ‘Climate change is fundamentally a health threat.’ (snip)

It’s scary, portentous stuff. But this rather desperate presentation of climate change as a public-health emergency is hardly a surprise. Policies and measures to tackle everything from knife crime to racism are now often framed in terms of public health. It has become the catch-all justification for policymakers – a source of authority and legitimacy for technocrats. And this tendency to justify just about anything in terms of protecting citizens’ health has been supercharged by the response to the pandemic, where all sorts of measures, from school closures to bans on protests, have been imposed in the name of health and safety.

I’ve been sitting on that one in the GetPocket account, worth a full read.