Here are some links and notes relevant to the issue of livestock's contribution to climate change.

1. Meat should be rationed to four portions a week to beat climate change, says Government-funded report (1/10/08)

See also Guardian coverage

2. What is your dinner doing to the climate?, New Scientist. (10/9/08)

Now open access, key excerpts:

"One recent study suggested that the average US household's annual carbon food-print is 8.1 tonnes of "equivalent CO2 emissions" or CO2eq (a measure that incorporates any other greenhouse gases produced alongside the CO2). That's almost twice the 4.4 tonnes of CO2eq emitted by driving a 25-mile-per-US gallon (9 litres per 100 kilometres) vehicle 19,000 km - a typical year's mileage in the US."
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"Methane remains in the atmosphere for 9 to 15 years and traps heat 21 times as effectively as CO2. Fertilisers and manure release nitrous oxide, which is 296 times as good as CO2 at trapping heat and remains in the atmosphere for 114 years on average. A food's emissions total also depends heavily on where it grew and how it was transformed from raw ingredients into your dinner. This includes gases generated by tilling the land, sowing the crops, making fertilisers and pesticides, harvesting the food and shipping it to processing plants, as well as electricity for cleaning, processing and packing your food, and then transporting it to your store. Finally, the loss of carbon sinks when forests are cleared for grazing or crops has to be accounted for."
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"333 grams of CO2eq is emitted to make one hard-boiled egg. Compare that with a bowl of cereal with milk: 1224 grams of CO2eq - equivalent to driving a typical SUV 6 km.

"The main culprit in the bowl isn't the cereal, it's the milk. That's because the most emissions-intensive foods are red meat and dairy products. In general, red meat emits 2.5 times as much greenhouse gas as chicken or fish, since rearing cows and other livestock requires a lot of energy. It takes 2.3 kilograms of grain to make every kilo of chicken meat, 5.9 kg of grain for a kilo of pork, and 13 kg of grain plus 30 kg of forage for a kilo of beef. Worse still, they produce methane and their manure releases nitrous oxide."
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"Can the animals' diet make a difference? Grass-fed beef is frequently marketed as the cleaner, greener alternative to grain-fed cattle because the cows don't consume energy-intensive crops. However, this is misleading according to Ermias Kebreab at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

"Kebreab and his colleagues developed a computer model of the cow's digestive system and simulated whether grain or grass produced the most methane. Then he tested his predictions by placing a cow in a room, feeding it either corn or hay, and measuring the rising levels of CO2 and methane every minute for 24 hours. He found that grass-fed cows actually produce more methane than the grain fed ones.

""Cows evolved to eat grass, but these grass-fed cows produce less milk and meat than their grain-fed counterparts," says Kebreab, so you need to rear more to produce the same amount of food. Higher-quality feed like corn builds a more productive cow that yields more meat and milk and produces less methane.

"It matters because meat and dairy products make up a third of humanity's protein intake, and demand is growing fast. In 2000, global meat consumption was 230 million tonnes per year; by 2050 it is expected to reach 465 million tonnes."

One solution being considered is in vitro meat grown from stem cells, which would produce far less ghg and need far less land.

3. IPCC Chairman Dr R Pachauri's lecture to CIWF on the climate change and animal welfare, including highlights and Pachauri's slide presentation (8/9/08)

Also full audio recording of the lecture: on "The 300-350 Show" now online at www.climateradio.co.uk

Dr Pachauri stressed it was his personal recommendation that people eat less meat, not of the UN or IPCC, and that his "Latin American colleagues" on the IPCC had not liked such suggestions. He gave a slideshow pointing out that the CO2 impacts of meat were greater than the 18% of suggested by FAO as one should add in refrigerated transport, packaging, cooking etc. which also totalled more than the equivalent veg.

Dr Pachauri ended by showing a short film of another project he is involved in promoting rechargeable portable electric lamps for villagers, recharged by local solar power, as an alternative to oil lamps.

Questions from the audience including Mayer Hillman arguing that regulation i.e. carbon rationing which applies to the carbon content of all goods including food in the supermarket, as education alone would not change behaviour in time. Dr Pachauri disagreed with regulation, arguing "if we teach kids properly in schools they will educate their parents".

After an initial round of questions the panel was widened to include

Dr Henning Steinfeld of FAO, who argued that since poultry has one of the best nutritional conversion factors (1:2), FAO wanted to promote intensive poultry production since that also meant less land. He said that the US had withheld funding from FAO because the US farm lobby didn't like the Livestock's Long Shadow report;
Joyce D'Silva of CIWF, who disagreed with the intensive bit;
Robert Watson, who disagreed with regulation in respect of dietary consumption though he favoured regulation of countries' overall emissions. He slipped in that we had got biofuels "completely wrong";
Dr John Powles of Cambridge University, who presented a few slides on the Lancet paper he co-authored which called for "Contraction and Convergence" of animal product consumption in the world to ensure there was enough land to go round as population rose and affluence spread.

I asked Watson afterwards if he thought biofuel expansion would adversely impact on animal welfare and the idea hadn't occurred to him.

4. Observer letters (14/9/08) on the Pachauri story

5. FAO Report Livestock's Long Shadow (2007)

6. The Times report Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’ (4/8/07) - to save someone else posting it but I recommend the above sources more.

7. Increasing terrestrial livestock for food means more deforestation and consequential emissions as more land is needed, although the some livestock are proportionately less land-efficient than others - see Dr Pachauri's lecture above.

8. Eating less meat could cut climate costs http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16573-eating-less-meat-could-cut-c... (10/2/09)