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Is giving up meat one day a week the way to save the world?

Meet a serious threat to the worlds climate: your Sunday roast. Meat production, says the
UNs Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is responsible for 14.5 per cent of the
worlds greenhouse gas emissions more than transport. Yesterday David Camerons climate
adviser joined with Sir Paul McCartney and environmental groups to try to create a mass
movement to reduce it.
Greg Barker, until recently the Governments climate minister, has thrown his weight behind
Meat Free Mondays the McCartneys long-standing campaign to persuade people to do
without meat for one day a week, after getting to know the former Beatle at the gates of a
school attended by their children. Yesterday he and two of Sir Pauls daughters designer
Stella and photographer Mary launched an online bid to get people to sign a Meat Free
Monday Climate Pledge, and plan to publicise the results at a climate summit at the UN in
New York in two weeks time.
Giving up meat for one day a week is equivalent to taking your car off the road for a month
each year, says Mr Barker. And if enough of us do it, we will send a very powerful and
loud message to world leaders. Sir Paul calls it a simple way to contribute to a more
sustainable future.
And its not just the climate that would benefit, since meat production which last year rose
to 308.5 million tons, a twenty-five fold increase over the last two centuries takes an
increasing toll on the environment and world hunger. Over 40 per cent of the wheat, rye, oats
and corn grown each year goes to feed cows, as do 250 million tons of soya beans and other
oil seeds effectively creating competition for the nutrients between cattle and people.
Over 70 per cent of the worlds agricultural land is used as pasture, while another ten per cent
goes to grow all those grains and oil seeds. Nearly a quarter of its available freshwater,
calculates Washingtons Worldwatch Institute, also goes to produce animal feed. And
ranching is one of the main causes of deforestation worldwide, while overgrazing is turning a
fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert.
Besides doing so much to drive global warming, an FAO report concluded, livestock
production also produces more than a hundred other polluting gases, including over two
thirds of the worlds emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain. Wastes from
feedlots over nourish rivers, lakes and streams, choking of them of life and wash down to the
seas creating vast dead zones.

And, if all that were not enough, heavy doses of antibiotics four times as much are used on
livestock than on humans in the US are making a huge contribution to the terrifying growth
of growth of resistance to the drugs. This already kills 5,000 Britons a year and, in Mr
Camerons words, threatens to take the world back to the dark ages of medicine before the
discovery of penicillin, where a childs grazed knee could kill.
That joint on the dinner table may never look the same again.

Reference
Lean, G. (2014, September 9). Is giving up meat one day a week the way to save the world?
Telegraph Blogs. Retrieved October 15, 2014, from
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geoffreylean/100285688/is-giving-up-meat-one-day-aweek-the-way-to-save-the-world/

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