nitrogen_and_nox
The end of coal will haunt the Navajo.
The fossil fuel has been an environmental threat and economic necessity for Native American tribes in Arizona. What happens when it's gone?
Percy Deal, 67, lives in the same small, three-bedroom stone house he grew up in, situated in the remote Navajo village of Cactus Valley, Ariz. Like many homes in this part of the country, Deal’s lacks running water, so once a month, he drives his pickup truck 17 miles to a public pump, where he fills three 55-gallon drums to bring back home. On the living room wall, his father’s ceremonial feathers and sweat-stained cowboy hat hang over the couch next to a framed poem his father wrote, titled Endless. The second stanza reads: “Your heart and your roots tell a perpetual story of the love and harmony you and Mother Earth share.” His family has been on this land for 500 years.
Sixty miles north of Cactus Valley lies the Kayenta Mine, a 44,000-acre open pit whose sole customer is the Navajo Generating Station, 100 miles northwest in the town called Page. NGS is the country’s eighth-largest climate polluter, pumping out 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and hundreds of pounds of mercury and arsenic into the atmosphere each year. It’s also one of the area’s largest employers: Together with the mine, it’s responsible for 3,000 jobs, more than a third of them full-time.
In February, NGS’s controlling shareholder, a public utility called Salt River Project, announced that it would shut down the power plant beginning at the end of this year, another casualty of the surge in cheap natural gas. Without the power plant to buy its coal, the mine will be forced to shut down, as well. Navajo leaders railed and called on the Trump administration for help; Percy Deal and environmentalists celebrated. “Our leaders are not talking about the impact on the health of these people, respiratory diseases as a result of the industry,” Deal says.
In 2014, the independent Clean Air Task Force estimated that emissions from NGS contribute to 16 premature deaths, 25 heart attacks, 300 asthma attacks, and 15 asthma emergency room visits each year, and that shutting down the plant would save $127 million in annual health-care costs, according to the task force’s assessment. That same year, the Environmental Protection Agency reached an agreement with NGS to cut its emissions of nitrogen oxide—the main pollutant linked to lung ailments, not to mention thick haze in 11 nearby national parks, including the Grand Canyon—by 80 percent over the next 16 years before shutting down permanently in 2044. “Back then, the economics projected that it would still be viable,” SRP media relations manager Scott Harelson demurs. “The analysis of utilities and the price of natural gas moving forward show that the price will continue to remain low, and that’s what ultimately caused SRP to make their decision.”
For years, every economic indicator has pointed to the eventual death of coal as a power source—but with no public announcement before this year that SRP would consider shutting down the plant before its 2044 deadline, the tribe had little reason to think they needed contingency plans. “They dropped the whole thing on top of us,” says Navajo Nation chairman Russell Begaye. Each salary derived from NGS probably supports 20 to 30 people, he says—and at $141,500, on average, it is seven times greater than the median salary on the reservation. Already the poverty rate among the Navajo is three and a half times the national mean. “If we knew five years ago that they were going to be shutting down, we would have been ready.”
It’s unquestionable that closing NGS is the best possible outcome for the land the Navajo and their neighbors, the Hopi, have called home for more than 800 years. It’s also unquestionable that closing NGS presents an existential threat to both tribes. Once the work of winding down operations is said and done, “some will say, ‘I have no choice but to make a life off the reservation,’” says Hopi Chairman Herman Honanie. “That is very likely, and something that we, as parents and tribal leaders, especially for younger people, may have to really encourage.” After centuries of fighting against both men and laws, it’s market forces that have brought them to this breaking point. “I think we need to reach deep down inside ourselves and ask how we want to survive as a people,” he says.
“You don’t see a direct effect from pollution. And I live here,” says Marie Justice, a truck driver at the Kayenta mine and local union president, who lives down the street from Navajo Generating Station. “I’ve lived here a long time. My parents lived here their entire lives. They didn’t have any lung issues that you think would be from pollution. I just don’t think you can prove it.”
Justice grew up in nearby LeChee, a sparse village of 1,400, where her family raised sheep. They lived in a hogan, a traditional Navajo mud-and-wood structure, before building a single-story cinder-block ranch in the early 1960s. The home didn’t have running water and was first wired with electricity—through a program sponsored by NGS—in 2015. Thirty members of her extended family have been employed at either NGS or Kayenta, she says. She met her husband, Bill, a retired supervisor, at the mine, and her son now works at the power plant.
Talk with nearly anyone around the plant or the mine, and you’ll hear stories of families depending on them for far more than just their jobs. Kayenta operates the water pump Deal goes to for water, and in the winter, the mine also provides free coal at a public load-out station to all native residents. “It burns long and hot—much better than wood,” says Dwayne Blackrock, who lives on the reservation and whose father worked at the mine for 21 years. “Everyone out here relies on the mine. When they are gone, I am not sure what some people are going to do.” This dependence is due in no small part to actions taken by the federal government.
The Navajo and the Hopi may be allies in the fight to keep NGS operational, but they have a fraught history of land disputes dating back to the 19th century. In 1966, as a means of forcing the tribes to negotiate, the federal government enacted the Bennett Freeze, which prohibited development on 1.5 million acres of contested land. For the 35 years the Bennett Freeze was in effect, the tribes were prohibited from undertaking infrastructure improvements such as laying gas or water lines and paving roads—worse, residents were unable to perform necessary maintenance such as re-roofing a house. By 2001, when the freeze was finally lifted, more than 75 percent of homes in the disputed territory had become uninhabitable. Today an estimated 60 percent of homes in the area still don’t have electricity or phones, and one in three has incomplete indoor plumbing.
The federal government has been more than willing to step in and legislate in the past, but in this case, it has been unwilling to assist the tribes. In May, the Hopi and Navajo sent a joint letter to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke asking the department to intervene on their behalf—a reasonable expectation, they thought, given the administration’s bellicose pro-coal rhetoric. “We have not received any commitment from them,” says Begaye, the Navajo chairman. “The government is not living up to its promises when it comes to supporting coal.” The Department of the Interior did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On Oct. 9, however, EPA chief Scott Pruitt announced the Trump administration’s intention to roll back the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which curbs emissions from coal power plants such as NGS. “The war on coal is over,” Pruitt said. But it may be too little too late for the Navajo’s economic breadwinner.
While Salt River Project owns the largest share of NGS, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a division of the Department of Interior, also has a stake that entitles it to extract power for the Central Arizona Project, which pumps water from the Colorado River to parts of central and southern Arizona. (Others, including Arizona Public Service Company, NV Energy, and Tucson Electric Power, are also minority shareholders.)
David Palumbo, deputy commissioner of operations at the Bureau of Reclamation, told Bloomberg News it can’t just take over. “We don’t believe we have the current congressional authority to assume complete ownership of the plant,” he says. “Our authority lies in bringing power to CAP.” Helping SRP subsidize the price of coal to rates competitive with natural gas—a cost of $100 million per year—is also not an option. “We do not currently have that as part of our budget,” says Palumbo. “The authority to subsidize does not exist.” The federal government’s Indian trust responsibility, which obliges the U.S. to assist Native American tribes with economic development, doesn’t apply to jobs lost at NGS and the mine, Palumbo says, although he adds that the department will be accelerating efforts related to infrastructure development, including bringing broadband, electricity, and water to rural communities, after the closures.
This is Percy Deal’s main priority. “There is only one thing more powerful than money. That’s water,” he says. “The mine closing down is going to be a blessing to us. It’s going to be the beginning of a new era for us towards recovery, simply because we are going to get access to the water. Water is life. Without water, everything is at a standstill out here.” The plant uses more than 30,000 acre-feet per year for its cooling system, while the mine draws an additional 1,200 acre-feet per year, mainly for dust control. There’s no evidence to suggest that either has prevented water from reaching Deal’s hom. However, the water level of the Little Colorado River Plateau, which provides water to the northern region of the Navajo reservation, has dropped by 11.2 feet in the past 20 years.
SRP plans to pay the Navajo Nation $110 million over a period of 35 years to monitor the plant’s long-term environmental impact—less than 3 percent of what it would have paid the tribe for use of the land if the plant had remained operational. The tribe will also retain ownership of water pumps in Lake Powell, the direct water source for the plant’s cooling systems, as well as the railroad used to ship coal from the mine to the plant. To take those items off SRP’s hands, it will pay the Navajo an additional $18 million.
The Navajo Nation recently allocated $21 million to serve water to 180 new homes, including Deal’s. But Begaye admits that reclaiming water rights won’t be easy. What the plant uses is owned by the state of Arizona—part of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided water rights among seven states, not including any Native territories. “We still have to get permission from the state of Arizona to get us that water, which we know is something we will not get,” Begaye says. “We will negotiate as hard as we can with the state to bring that water back to our people.”
On the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, the Absaloka coal mine accounts for 50 percent of the tribe’s nonfederal income. The mine opened in 1974 and employs 170 people, but revenue from the operation has dwindled in recent years because of coal’s decline, causing the tribal government to lay off 1,000 of its 1,300 employees. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it—ever,” Crow Chief Executive Officer Paul Little Light told the New York Times in April, referring to poverty on the reservation.
“Many tribal economies are insufficiently diversified,” says Joe Kalt, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development at Harvard University. “With coal-reliant tribes like the Crow or the Navajo, you are obviously seeing consequences of not being diversified more directly. Part of the problem at NGS, too, is just the problem of coal in general. But this being part of the first generation of economic development, back in the ’60s, they put a lot of eggs in that single basket.”
SRP signed a 50-year lease with the Navajo in 1969; Peabody Energy Corp. signed agreements with both the Navajo and the Hopi in 1966 (the same year the Bennett Freeze was enacted). Together, the two companies pay the Navajo $35 million per year, which amounts to 30 percent of the tribe’s income. Peabody pays the Hopi $13 million annually—a full 85 percent of the tribe's yearly revenue. “The plant and mine hold up the economy of an entire region,” Begaye says, adding that he’s considering reducing hours and cutting retirement packages for Navajo government employees. “We are facing a crisis here.”
Begaye says the Navajo Nation will continue to operate the water station, and no-cost coal will still be available for heating, but residents will have to venture out to find it themselves. SRP offered to find jobs for NGS employees at its other facilities in Arizona, which include a coal power plant 260 miles from NGS and several gas plants and corporate buildings in the Phoenix metropolitan area, four hours away by car. Peabody, too, will offer priority consideration to Kayenta employees for jobs at other sites in the U.S. “Peabody believes NGS is an important engine for Arizona’s economy and growth and should continue operating well into the future,” the company told Bloomberg News. Peabody has exclusive rights to the 21 billion tons of coal in the area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, worth upward of $100 billion. If NGS shuts down, that revenue remains in the ground.
SRP’s position is that the factors contributing to NGS’s closure were hardly unique or secret. “We have regular communications with the Navajo Nation. The subject of costs of other resources are part of those conversations,” says Harelson. “Natural gas prices dropping was not a mystery to anyone, including the Navajo Nation. But when was the tipping point for us? It’s difficult to say.”
The plant’s 50-year lease ends in 2019; the original agreement included an option to extend until 2044, which SRP chose not to exercise. A necessary two-year wind-down period explains its haste to close. In July, the Navajo and the Hopi successfully negotiated a two-year lease extension with SRP, which would allow the plant—and, by extension, the Kayenta mine—to remain operational through 2019. But because the federal government is technically a trustee of the land, it has to certify the agreement before the deal can go through. It has until Dec. 1 to do so. In the unlikely event it rejects the lease extension, the plant and mine will begin shutting down soon after Christmas. On Oct. 2, however, Peabody announced that potential investors have expressed interest in pursuing ownership of NGS, which may extend the life of the facilities.
Every morning for the past 40 years, Gerald Clitso, 59, has made the same drive from his home in the town of Kayenta to the mine, where he’s a machine operator. He has two grown children, both of whom he was able to put through college off the reservation. “I decided to work in the mine because of my family—to support them and give them a good life,” he says. “But now that opportunity is being taken away from others. There’s nothing else up here for jobs—nothing.”
Unlike some of his co-workers, Clitso doesn’t deny the environmental impact of the mine. “It’s a choice we’ve had to make,” Clitso says. “What am I supposed to do? Keep living in poverty and raise my kids in poverty? There will never be a day that I regret to say that I worked at the mine.”
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Trump’s pro-coal agenda is a blow for clean air efforts at Texas' Big Bend park.
For decades Big Bend's stunning vistas have been compromised by poor air quality that Texas, working with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is supposed to address.
Big Bend national park is Texas at its most cinematic, with soaring, jagged forest peaks looming over vast desert lowlands, at once haughty and humble, prickly and pretty. It is also among the most remote places in the state.
Even from Alpine, the town of 6,000 that is the main gateway to the park, it is more than an hour’s drive to one of the entrances.
So far from anywhere, it might seem an unlikely location to be scarred by air pollution. Yet for decades its stunning vistas have been compromised by poor air quality that Texas, working with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is supposed to address.
But environmental advocates fear that the Trump administration’s pro-coal agenda will derail the prospects of improvement, at least in the short term. Tuesday’s announcement that the EPA plans to abandon the 2015 Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions came less than two weeks after the agency revealed a revised plan to combat regional haze in Texas and Oklahoma that critics say will do little to cut pollution.
Chrissy Mann, Austin-based senior campaign representative with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, said: “Taken in combination with the Clean Power Plan, what we’re seeing is an attempt from this administration and this EPA to dig in their pockets and find whatever kind of tricks they think are going to stick to provide a lifeline to the coal industry across the country and here in Texas. It’s disappointing.”
Texas is part of a multi-state coalition that sued to stop the Clean Power Plan, which was placed on hold by the US supreme court last year.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement: “It’s gratifying that our lawsuit against Obama-era federal overreach was a catalyst for repeal of the plan. We look forward to working with the administration to craft a new strategy that will protect the environment without hurting jobs and the economy.”
A back-and-forth between the EPA and Texas over regional haze has been in motion since 1999, when the agency launched a concerted effort to deal with the problem, bidding to improve the air quality in Big Bend national park, Guadalupe Mountains national park and in Oklahoma, the home state of the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt.
In 2009, the state enforcer, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, issued a plan that would restore “natural visibility” to Big Bend by the year 2155. That was rejected as inadequate by the EPA in 2014.
The EPA wanted Texas to cut 230,000 tons of sulphur dioxide emissions per year to improve visibility and reduce the risk of worsening respiratory diseases and heart disease and damaging soil, water, fish and wildlife.
Two years later, finding “Texas relied on an analysis that obscured the benefits of potentially cost-effective controls”, the EPA replaced parts of Texas’s emissions plan, calling for plant upgrades and a target of “natural visibility” by 2064.
Texas sued the agency and won a stay of implementation in a federal appeals court. The state argued that it is making reasonable progress and, along with industry representatives, claimed that enacting the structural improvements – notably fitting some electricity plants with sulphur dioxide scrubbers – would cost $2bn and be a backdoor way of forcing the closure of coal-fired power plants. That, it said, might put the state at risk of power shortages and increased prices for consumers.
Last December, in the sunset days of the Obama administration, the EPA proposed another scheme that would also have required older plants to upgrade their technology.
But in August this year, Pruitt’s EPA asked a federal court for more time – until the end of 2018 – to come up with a way forward. When the judge refused, on 29 September the EPA unveiled a path that is much more palatable for Texas and the power companies: one that wouldn’t require retrofitting, instead claiming to achieve comparable results with an intrastate cap-and-trade programme. That would give polluters allowances within an overall emissions budget that can be used or traded in a marketplace.
Such programmes can be effective, but Mann, of the Sierra Club, contends that the cap is too high so will not provide any incentive for meaningful reductions. “It’s not very aggressive. In other words, the amount of pollution that coal plants in Texas are allowed to produce is actually higher than our emissions from last year from the same coal plants, taken all together,” Mann said.
The National Park Service and EPA carried out a study in 1999 to understand what causes haze in Big Bend, which is worse in the warmer months. It found that sulphate particles formed from sulphur dioxide sources such as coal power plants and refineries were a key cause.
Researchers discovered that substantial amounts of sulphate particulates came not only from Texas and Mexico, but the distant eastern US. When air flows from the east, production in America’s coal heartlands has an effect on Big Bend’s scenery.
Even if Trump’s efforts to boost coal collide with economic reality and market forces spur more growth in renewable energy, any delays in transitioning to cleaner energy and reduced emissions prolong the haze problem.
Air quality has not improved and ozone has seen a slight deterioration over the past decade, according to Jeffery Bennett, physical sciences program coordinator at the park. “Nitrogen deposition has not changed and remains a significant concern. Desert landscapes are especially sensitive to nitrogen,” he wrote in an email in July.
“Mercury is an emerging concern,” he added, based on levels found in fish; it is unclear whether this is because of atmospheric deposition or the legacy of nearby abandoned mercury mines.
The park faces Mexico and since Donald Trump entered the White House it has attracted attention as a particularly unsuitable place to build a wall.
Still, in a few years, tourists might find that while Trump might have failed to wall off the Big Bend from Mexico, the view is blocked all the same. “If you’re standing here in Panther Junction and not able to see the Sierra del Carmen that’s 20 miles away, because of the sulphates and other pollutions that blew in, you’re missing a big part of why this became a park,” Jennette Jurado, the park’s public information officer, said earlier this year at the main visitor centre.
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Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction.
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off.
Following the family tradition, Chris Darwin is leading the fight to protect animals from extinction
Great, great grandson of Charles Darwin says we must change our diet to prevent more wildlife dying off
Jane Dalton @IndyVoices Sunday 8 October 2017 00:00 BST
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The Independent Online
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“Chip is much more popular than me everywhere we go,” Chris Darwin says, jovially co-operating by posing for photos with the toy bald eagle he carries on his shoulder. “I nicked him from my children’s bedroom and he gets lots of attention.”
To meet Mr Darwin, laidback, cheerful and ultra-friendly, you would never guess he tried to commit suicide 26 years ago. He’s perfectly open about it, as much as he is passionate about his new work that sprang from the famous surname.
Mr Darwin’s great, great grandfather, Charles, may have developed the theory of the origin of species but today his descendant has picked up the evolutionary science baton to defend mass extinctions of species.
“We all have crucibles,” he says of the dark period when, aged 30, he tried to end his life by cycling over a cliff (he was saved by a random tree branch). “Critical moments when something normally bad happens that changes the rest of your life, and mine was this suicide event. Slowly I came to the concept that I needed purpose in life.”
Darwin the younger looked at all the world’s big problems – starvation, polluted water, disease – and settled on the crisis of mass extinctions as one he felt he wanted to help tackle. “So in 1991 I set off down that road.”
Bird man: Chris Darwin is making it his mission to halt wildlife decline (Jane Dalton)
When asked to what extent he was influenced by his legendary ancestor’s work in identifying the origins of man, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was entirely independent,” he insists in a voice heavy with irony.
Chris Darwin, 56, had come to London from his home in Australia for a groundbreaking conference attempting to tackle the growing crisis of the world’s rapidly diminishing wildlife, and one of the key causes of that loss – worldwide demand for meat.
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More than 50 of the best minds in the fields of ecology, agriculture, public health, biology, oceanography, eco-investment and food retailing joined forces over two days to brainstorm ideas on how to stem the rapid shrinkage of the natural world caused by damaging agricultural practices.
The Extinction and Livestock Conference, with at least 500 delegates, was the world’s first ever conference examining how modern meat production affects life on Earth, and, put simply, it was designed to find ways to revolutionise the world’s food and farming systems to prevent mass species extinctions.
“We have to stop this,” says Mr Darwin, and he recalls how his great, great grandfather regretted on his death not having done more for other animals – a sentiment that shaped his decision to turn around his “self-indulgent, selfish” life, which involved working in advertising, and do something for the planet.
Wildlife under attack
The fact that the food on our plates is a major cause of shocking declines in wildlife – ranging from elephants and jaguar to barn owls, water vole and bumble bees – may come as a surprise to many. But for the experts gathered for the conference the link was clear. What was less easy to see was how to force practical global change.
Nobody can be in any doubt about the alarming rate at which animals, reptiles and birds are becoming extinct. The journal Science says we are wiping out species at 1,000 times their natural rate.
In the past 40 years alone half the world’s wildlife species have been lost, with conservation giant the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) predicting Earth is on course to lose two-thirds of its species within the next three years.
Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, could not have put it more starkly: “Lose biodiversity, and the natural world – including the life-support systems as we know them – will collapse.”
Changing our spots: if we don't change our diets then animals, such as jaguar, face extinction (AFP/Getty)
The depth of the crisis was underlined earlier this year when scientists announced we were already living through an era of the world’s sixth mass extinction – caused by human activity. What was happening was so urgent, they warned, it should be termed not “mass extinction” but “biological annihilation”.
The researchers revealed, in the journal Nature, their findings that tens of thousands of species – including a quarter of all mammals and 13 per cent of birds – are now threatened with extinction. The researchers, who studied 27,600 species, said: “Dwindling population sizes and range-shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilisation.”
And it’s not just land mammals that are disappearing. Last year a study in the journal Science suggested sharks, whales and sea turtles were dying in disproportionately greater numbers than smaller animals – the reverse of earlier extinctions.
The link with food
Climate change and hunting are usually blamed for declines in the natural world but at Extinction Conference 17, WWF revealed fresh research showing 60 per cent of global biodiversity loss is down to meat-based diets.
Its report, Appetite for Destruction, laid bare how the vast scale of cereals and soya grown specifically to feed animals farmed for meat is soaking up great tracts of land, taking huge quantities of fresh water and eliminating wild species.
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What’s more, the study says, the world is consuming more animal protein than it needs: the average UK consumption of protein is between 64g and 88g, compared with guidelines of 45g-55g. Poultry such as chicken and duck are the biggest users of crop feed worldwide, with pigs second.
One study found that 60 per cent of EU cereal production (and 67 per cent in the US) is used as animal feed – yet for every 100 calories fed to animals as crops, we receive on average just 17-30 calories in the form of meat and milk.
It's a jungle out there: deforestation for food production is a massive problem (AFP/Getty)
According to the charity Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), the destructive practices were set in train after the Second World War, when intensive farming techniques spread from the US to Europe. Vast landscapes were replaced by “monoculture” – a single crop – in fields liberally treated with pesticides and fertilisers. They killed the insects, bees and butterflies at the bottom of the food chain and wiped away bird habitats, while active deforestation for food production is leaving ever smaller landscapes for mammals, from jaguar and elephants to polar bears and rhinos.
It’s happening in exotic locations – such as Indonesia, where the palm oil industry wrecks habitats and leads to elephants, porcupine and wild pigs being poisoned – and closer to home, where decades of use of nitrogen and other chemicals on farms has led to dire warnings about Britain’s soil having fewer than 100 harvests left.
But worldwide, the overwhelming problem, experts say, is the highly inefficient use of land to grow soya and cereals that are then fed to chickens, pigs and cattle slaughtered for meat.
According to The Economist, although livestock provides just 17 per cent of global calories consumed, it requires twice that proportion of the Earth’s fresh water, feed and farmland because of the crops required. And this makes it the greatest user of land in the world.
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Philip Lymbery, chief executive of CiWF, which organised the conference, set out the causal links between modern intensive farming practices and the destruction of the natural world in his book Dead Zone, which explains how intensive rearing of animals in Britain and abroad to produce meat cheaply involves destroying forests half the size of the UK for farmland each year.
In South America, rainforests have been replaced by swathes of soya crops to feed cattle, pigs and chickens. Some 13 million hectares there – about the size of Greece – are used for soya imported by the EU, nearly all for industrial feed, according to WWF.
The system is so inefficient, says Lymbery, that “worldwide, if grain-fed animals were restored to pasture and the cereals and soya went to people instead, there would be enough for an extra four billion people”. Feeding animals on crops that are fit for humans is “the biggest single area of food waste on the planet”.
Sting in the tail: use of pesticides in fields is one of the factors leading to a decline in bees (CiWF)
“Many people claim factory farming is the answer to feeding a burgeoning population but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.
Intensively grazed landscapes, with fertilisers and pesticides and the demise of stubble, have led to steep declines in barn owls and other farmland birds and small mammals, while chemical run-off from fields is seen as a key cause of bee decline.
CiWF is not the only voice linking extinctions with our diets. The UN has stated that “intensive livestock production is probably the largest sector-specific source of water pollution”. The Soil Association says the UK’s food system accounts for 30 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions, largely because of industrialised processes.
And WWF has warned: “We could witness a two-thirds decline in the half-century from 1970 to 2020, unless we act now to reform our food and energy systems and meet global commitments on addressing climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting sustainable development.”
Solutions
Seven years ago, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity drew up a strategic plan, signed by 196 countries, of detailed targets for 2020 to slow wildlife decline. Since then scientists have repeatedly warned not just that the targets would be missed but also that biodiversity loss was worsening. The lack of action was one factor behind the Extinction Conference.
Lymbery said it should be the start of a “global conversation” on transforming food and farming worldwide, and called for a fresh UN convention. “To safeguard the future, we need some kind of global agreement to replace factory farming with a regenerative food system. But that’s not all. We all have the power, three times a day, to save wildlife and end an awful lot of farm animal cruelty.”
Mucking in: We have it in our power to prevent factory farming – by changing our behaviour (AFP/Getty)
Duncan Williamson, of WWF, proposed feeding farm animals on specially cultivated insects and algae, to dramatically reduce deforestation and water use needed as animal feed.
Food producers, meanwhile, showcased a new vegan burger that “sizzles and bleeds like meat”, endorsed by Joanna Lumley, the star of Absolutely Fabulous.
Less meat
Time and again, the solutions by conference experts led to a need to end industrial animal farming – which meant animal campaigners were suddenly no longer the only ones urging people to scale back drastically the amount of chicken, pork, beef, salmon, dairy and eggs consumed.
Chris Darwin, who spent six weeks on a container ship travelling to Britain to avoid flying, said: “Verifiable evidence indicates meat consumption globally will double in the next 35 years, and if that occurs so much forest will have to be cut down around the world that we’re going to cause a mass extinction of species within the next hundred years. And we cannot let that happen.”
He explained passionately how a typical diet uses “two-and-a-half planets” in terms of resources but cutting out wasteful animal produce uses “a quarter of the planet”.
Cut it out: Rainforests are being chopped down and replaced by soya crops (AFP/Getty Images)
He is using modern technology that would have astounded his great, great grandfather to fight back against the seemingly relentless decline of the natural world – in the form of an iPhone app helping people to switch to a more plant-based diet.
By tapping in what they eat, people can receive feedback over time on how many animals, carbon emissions and how much land and water they have saved, as well as days of lifespan added, and their placing on a leaderboard.
“What is the single silver bullet to solve this problem?” he says. “We need behavioural change to solve this problem – and that is to eat less meat.”
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Chesapeake acidification could compound issues already facing the bay, researchers find.
As oceans around the world absorb carbon dioxide and acidify, the changes are likely to come faster to the nation’s largest estuary.
For ten days across recent summers, researchers aboard the University of Delaware research vessel Hugh R. Sharp collected water samples from the mouth of the Susquehanna River to Solomons Island in a first-of-its-kind investigation. They wanted to know when and where the waters of the Chesapeake Bay were turning most acidic.
One finding: As oceans around the world absorb carbon dioxide and acidify, the changes are likely to come faster to the nation’s largest estuary.
Scientists have long studied the slow and steady acidification of the open oceans — and its negative effects. Acidifying waters can kill coral, disrupt oyster reproduction, dissolve snail shells like nails in a can of bubbly Coke.
But researchers are just beginning to investigate the consequences for the Chesapeake. And they’re finding that acidification could compound the ecological challenges already wracking the bay.
Not all effects are immediately negative on all species. Experiments are showing that blue crabs, marsh grasses and algae could theoretically thrive in the conditions expected to develop over the next century. But the acidification is a threat to other keystone bay species, such as oysters — a key source of food for crabs. Scientists say acidification could dramatically and unpredictably alter the delicate balances that stabilize the bay ecosystem.
With so many variables expected to affect bay creatures — including rising acidity, warming waters and continued nutrient pollution — research is complex.
“When you have three things changing at once, that’s where our challenges really increase,” said Jeff Cornwell, a research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge. “All these things are intertwined.”
Water, as they teach in middle school chemistry, has a neutral pH of 7. But over the past 300 million years or so, ocean water has registered as basic, with an average pH of 8.2.
As carbon dioxide has multiplied in the atmosphere over the past century, it has also dissolved into the oceans, producing carbonic acid. That has dropped ocean pH to 8.1. The shift might seem slight, but it actually represents a 30 percent increase in acidity, because the pH scale is logarithmic.
The consequences, coupled with the impacts of rising ocean temperatures, could eventually be severe. Research suggests that the acidity that could develop by 2100 could make it harder for oysters, clams, sea urchins and corals to build their protective shells, and could even dissolve the shell of the pea-sized creature at the base of the food web known as a sea butterfly.
But that’s just in the open ocean. Most research focuses on that massive habitat, because its chemistry is largely consistent from one spot to another. In environments close to land, where ecology is more complex and active, biological processes like photosynthesis and respiration drive more volatile swings in acidity and other chemistry.
Whitman Miller is a research scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater.
If an acidifying ocean is like a bottle of carbonated seltzer water, he said, estuaries like the Chesapeake are similar to a beer.
“Because it’s so uniform, in some ways, we know much more about the open ocean at the global scale than we do these local scales we’re tangling with in estuaries,” he said.
Researchers around Maryland and across the country are working to bridge that knowledge gap.
Research published last month in the journal Nature Communications showed that acidification is already apparent in the bay. The team that measured acidity across the bay, led by the University of Delaware marine science professor Wei-Jun Cai, found a zone of increasing acidity at depths of about 30 to 50 feet across the Chesapeake. While surface waters hover around the pH norm of 8.2, the deeper waters registered almost one point lower — nearly ten times more acidic.
The researchers, who included Cornwell and colleagues from UMCES, believe it’s not only the global effects of carbon dioxide emissions, but also the dead zones of low or no oxygen that have plagued the bay for decades. The zones are created when nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms, lawns and sewage fertilize large algae blooms. Microbes strip oxygen from the water to decompose the blooms when they die, and release more carbon dioxide in the process.
The problem is worsened when organic matter is decomposed in water that is already stripped of oxygen — the bacteria use up other compounds in the water that produce an acidic chemical, hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is what makes the muck around the bay smell like rotten eggs.
Cai said the processes suggest that the bay, and other waterways struggling to reduce nutrient loads, are especially vulnerable as the pH of waters around the globe decline.
“You have something we call a synergistic effect, where one plus one gives you something more than two,” he said. “There’s a very strong acidification effect.”
Miller and colleagues at the Smithsonian are exploring the consequences in a meadow of marsh in that looks like so many others around the Chesapeake — except this one is dotted with metal heat lamps and plexiglass chambers that are helping to simulate the environment of the future. They call it the Global Change Research Wetland.
Scientists are conducting experiments to study the effects of increasing carbon dioxide, nutrients and temperature on the growth of sedge grasses and invasive plants, and the ability of the Rhode River marsh to grow upward to match sea level rise.
One study has been running for 30 years. Pat Megonigal, a biogeochemist and lead investigator of the research wetland, says it should be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest-running climate change experiment.
Along the creek that flows into the marsh, researchers from the Smithsonian Institute have built a gateway through which they are measuring the carbon content of water as it flows in and out twice a day with the tides. Some of it is carbon dioxide, but a portion is the compounds carbonate and bicarbonate — elements that may actually help counteract acidification in the estuary.
They hope the data will help explain not only what changes acidification could bring, but also what role natural ecological processes could play in limiting them.
“It tells us something about the influence of the marsh on the chemistry of the water,” Megonigal said. “We think the net effect of water leaving the marsh is to buffer the acidity of the estuary.”
Other researchers are eagerly testing what those changes could mean for the bay’s crabs and oysters.
For her recently completed dissertation, UMCES doctoral candidate Hillary Glandon exposed blue crabs to both warmer and more acidic waters and watched their response. She found that acidification alone didn’t affect them, but when it was coupled with warmer waters, crabs grew faster, molting old shells more frequently, and they also ate more food.
Previous research has already shown that oysters, mussels and similar shellfish could struggle in acidifying waters. They build their shells out of a compound in the water known as calcium carbonate, and scientists have found there will be less of those building blocks available as ocean carbon dioxide levels rise.
So Glandon’s colleagues Cornwell and Jeremy Testa are investigating what that could mean for restoration of the Chesapeake Bay’s oysters. They’re getting input from researchers in Oregon, where acidification has already challenged aquaculture efforts by killing oyster larvae. Though they don’t expect the exact same conditions in the bay, they are watching pH levels closely in places such as Harris Creek, one of three Choptank River tributaries where millions of dollars have been spent on building and seeding new reefs.
Any changes could throw off a complex food web. While crabs could be thriving in warmer and more acidic bay waters in the future, the oysters and mussels they eat could be struggling.
“Crabs don’t exist in a vacuum,” Glandon said. “If food they’re going to be eating is less abundant, there may be negative effects.”
Tom Miller, director of UMCES’ Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, said the stakes demand that more resources be put into measuring and understanding acidification. In the same way state and federal officials have tried to limit pollution to protect crabs, oysters, marshes and underwater grasses, he said, acidification should be getting more attention in bay policy discussions.
“It has the potential to fundamentally change the pattern, the seasonality and the location of fishing in a way that the grandfathers of today’s watermen wouldn’t recognize,” he said. “We should be having those discussions now — not in 20 years or so, when it becomes, I wouldn’t say too late, but when it becomes much more contentious.”
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EPA's climate rule withdrawal will include big changes to cost calculations.
In nixing the Clean Power Plan, EPA will suggest changing the benefits it counts, which would bolster its arguments that the rule’s economic burdens would outweigh its gains from cleaner air, reduced illnesses and greater energy efficiency.
The Trump administration will consider fundamentally limiting the way the federal government counts benefits from curbing climate change and air pollution in an upcoming proposal to rescind former President Barack Obama’s signature climate regulation, according to multiple sources familiar with recent drafts.
In nixing the Clean Power Plan, EPA will suggest changing the benefits it counts, which would bolster its arguments that the rule’s economic burdens would outweigh its gains from cleaner air, reduced illnesses and greater energy efficiency.
President Donald Trump has long vowed to erase Obama’s restrictions on coal plants, and then announced he was pulling out of the Paris climate accord, so it's no surprise he plans to eliminate the rule. But the fine print will have big implications for the inevitable yearslong legal fights to come. It could anger environmental advocates while satisfying some industries and conservative states.
“It may seem like inside baseball, but this is going to set the tone,” said John Larsen, a director at the analysis firm Rhodium Group. “We haven’t seen the details of any sort of regulatory plan from this administration yet on climate.”
EPA could release its withdrawal proposal in the coming days, while leaving the door open to eventually replace the rule with one that would pose minimal costs but provide few climate benefits, as POLITICO reported last month.
Among other changes, Trump’s EPA will drastically alter how it uses the social cost of carbon, a metric for assigning a monetary value to curbing emissions. The agency will decline to consider any social or economic benefits the rule creates outside the United States — unlike the Obama administration, which included worldwide impacts in its calculations.
And it will count far fewer of the health benefits that might have come from reducing air pollutants that cause premature deaths, heart attacks and asthma hospitalizations.
Taken together, the sources say, the recalculations eliminate tens of billions of dollars of the rule’s benefits, which Obama’s EPA had contended would outweigh the costs of enforcing a faster shift away from coal-fired power. The new numbers could be meant to aid EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s legal case for scrapping the rule.
The rule’s supporters are already accusing Trump and Pruitt of promoting fake math. They say the administration is ignoring the reality that power companies are making the transition to green energy even faster than Obama anticipated.
“Like so many things, they seem to be completely ignoring what’s happening in the real world,” Janet McCabe, who led EPA’s air office under Obama, said of Trump’s team. “Every other story is about how costs are coming down, about how emissions are reducing, about how power companies are making choices to close their coal plants or run them less because they’re so expensive.”
David Doniger, climate director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “the courts are going to look very, very hard at this kind of cooking of the books.”
“There are two kinds of ways to get the law wrong, to play fast and loose with science and facts or with the economics, and you can lose for either or both reasons,” he said.
But EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that if anyone's numbers were questionable, it was Obama's.
“While it appears you are writing a piece based on rumors about CPP, the facts are that the Obama administration’s estimates and analysis of costs and benefits was, in multiple areas, highly uncertain and/or controversial," she said in an email Thursday night.
The businesses and states that opposed Obama’s regulation say it’s about time EPA reconsidered the costs. For example, it’s reasonable to count only the rule's U.S. benefits since Americans would be paying the costs, said Jeff Holmstead, an industry lawyer who was EPA’s air administrator under former President George W. Bush.
The math surrounding the rule has long been a political lightning rod.
The Obama-era EPA said the rule would be a net gain for society because shifting to cleaner energy sources would slow climate change and reduce pollution-related illnesses, among other benefits. In contrast, studies financed by conservative groups estimated that the regulation would cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars during the same time frame.
The rule sought to cut the U.S. power industry’s carbon pollution 32 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels — and as of two years ago, the country was more than halfway there. The regulation was the centerpiece of Obama’s pledge that the U.S. would fulfill its part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Trump has since announced he’s pulling the United States out of Paris, unless he can “negotiate” a more favorable deal, and he’s ordered EPA to undo a host of Obama-era regulations, chief among them the Clean Power Plan.
He has also directed his agencies to recalculate Obama’s math on the social and economic impacts of climate change.
In a March executive order, Trump disbanded an interagency team that had been working on revising the social cost of carbon.
He also told his agencies to revert to White House guidance from 2003, which directed regulators performing cost-benefit analyses to “focus on benefits and costs that accrue to citizens and residents of the United States.” Any look at international implications should go into a separate report, the George W. Bush-era guidance said.
That “America First” approach to regulation is a big departure from Obama’s methods, which considered the worldwide effects of reducing U.S. carbon pollution, but it will help Trump’s EPA justify repealing the rule.
In the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration had estimated that each metric ton of carbon dioxide imposes about $40 of costs on society. That means the plan would yield about $30 billion in global climate benefits by 2030 — but only $2 billion to $7 billion in domestic gains, less than the rule’s estimated cost, according to the think tank Brookings.
Experts who support the international strategy say going back is misguided. Michael Greenstone, the chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in 2009 and 2010, told lawmakers in March that using a social cost of carbon that incorporates only U.S. benefits is "essentially asking the rest of the world to ramp up their emissions."
Noah Kaufman, an economist for World Resources Institute’s climate program, said that “because climate change is a global problem, it requires a global solution.”
“If countries try to solve it only for themselves, not taking into account how U.S. emissions affect the global community, and the global community doesn’t consider how it affects us … you’re just never going to solve the problem,” Kaufman said.
EPA will also refuse to count many of the health benefits that the Obama administration estimated would arise as side effects of reducing carbon emissions, the sources said. Specifically, Obama’s regulators accounted for the fact that levels of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter — pollutants already regulated by other EPA rules — would decline along with the greenhouse gases.
In contrast, Trump’s EPA won’t count those ancillary reductions if the pollutants were already below levels that the agency has deemed safe in other standards.
Environmental advocates say that logic is wrong, because further curbing those pollutants means people will be even healthier. But Holmstead said that while it’s legitimate for EPA to look at the other pollutant reductions the rule might achieve, the agency shouldn’t count them to offset costs.
The changes to the cost-benefit analysis will come in a regulatory impact analysis that aims to highlight a wide range of cost estimates for the rule. The analysis will accompany EPA’s proposed rule for rescinding the Clean Power Plan and its advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on options to replace the regulation.
Obama's critics estimate the rule would force consumers to pay $200 billion more by 2030 and saddle electricity customers with double-digit price hikes in many states, according to a study contracted by the conservative American Energy Alliance’s Institute for Energy Research.
The Obama-era EPA and many academic institutions and think tanks have argued that the rule would cost far less, between $5 billion and $8 billion in 2030 by the agency’s previous calculations. Plus, they have said, the social benefits of reducing carbon levels, slowing climate change and ratcheting down illness-causing air pollution would far offset the costs, achieving $26 billion to $45 billion in net benefits by 2030.
Advocates say costs are already proving to be even lower than expected as power companies move away from coal on their own.
The Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law this week released a paper compiling multiple studies that have found that Clean Power Plan compliance costs have fallen dramatically since the rule came out in 2015. That included an analysis from the American Petroleum Institute that estimated lower costs than EPA’s original expectations.
“The takeaway from this should be, if we’re going to do anything with the Clean Power Plan right now, given these trends we should be strengthening the goals,” said Jack Lienke, an author of that paper and regulatory policy director for the institute. “Emissions can be reduced much more cheaply. That’s a reason to set more aggressive targets, not to weaken targets or repeal them altogether.”
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The Trump administration doesn't care about our air.
An asthmatic child struggling to breathe on a hot summer day in Baltimore could be the victim of a coal plant in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or another upwind state.
An asthmatic child struggling to breathe on a hot summer day in Baltimore could be the victim of a coal plant in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or another upwind state.
About 70 percent of Baltimore’s ground-level ozone (air pollution) problem is the result of emissions from power plants and vehicles in upwind states, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
What is difficult to believe is that 19 power plants in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, could be choosing profits over the health of Baltimore residents. These plants already have pollution controls installed, but they don’t fully turn on those controls during hot summer months. As a result, the plants’ owners saved $24 million in one recent summer while their plants’ emissions drifted to Maryland, according to MDE.
Most astonishing of all, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is allowing this to happen, in violation of the Clean Air Act’s “good neighbor” provision, which requires states to ensure that pollution not damage air quality in down-wind states.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) along with other environmental and human health partners, including Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Physicians for Social Responsibility, have gone to court to prod EPA into action. The State of Maryland recently filed a similar suit.
Forcing the 19 plants to run their pollution controls effectively throughout the summer would not only benefit our family members. It would benefit the Chesapeake Bay. Here’s why.
Emissions from a coal-fired utility plant form a toxic cloud containing carbon dioxide, mercury, soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. This cloud can drift for hundreds of miles.
Nitrogen oxides, or NOx for short, turn to ozone in the hot summer. On 14 days this past summer ozone levels were so high a Code Orange Air Quality Alert was issued for the Baltimore area, meaning the air was unhealthy for seniors, children and others with sensitivities.
NOx also is a major and particularly damaging source of nitrogen pollution in the bay. Excess nitrogen fuels algal blooms that result in underwater dead zones where aquatic life can’t breathe.
Emissions from coal plants as far away as the Ohio River Valley to the west and North Carolina to the south can drift to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, and cause harm. The bay is vulnerable to NOx traveling from a massive 570,000 square-mile area called the Chesapeake Bay airshed. Nearly one-third of the nitrogen entering the bay arrives from the airshed.
By not running their controls effectively through the “ozone season” of the summer, the 19 plants sent 39,000 tons of additional NOx to Maryland, according to MDE. All of that adds to the distress of our vulnerable residents and the bay’s marine life.
Maryland petitioned the EPA last year to respond to this problem. And what have we heard? Not a word from the highest environmental agency of the land. So, we have sued to get a response.
It’s important to note that the air we breathe in Maryland is a lot cleaner than it used to be just a decade ago. The level of ozone-causing pollution in Maryland has dropped significantly since then. We can thank the Clean Air Act, and Maryland and federal actions that required stricter emission controls on power plants, vehicles and other sources. Even many utility plants upwind of Maryland have reduced their emissions
But the job is not done. The 19 plants in the five states now must be made to comply with the “good neighbor” provision of the Clean Air Act. They need to run their pollution controls throughout the summer.
The trouble is the current federal administration. Cleaning the air and water is just not a priority. The Trump administration, in fact, has promised to roll back or prevent the implementation of clean-air rules that have been responsible for improvements in human and environmental health in Maryland.
CBF and our local and national environmental partners join Maryland in court on this issue, hoping a federal judge will see what the Trump administration, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, refuses to: Government should side with children and fish who can’t breathe, not utility owners looking to pad their bottom line.
Alison Prost is the Maryland Executive Director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. She can be reached at aprost@cbf.org.
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Eating grass-fed beef isn’t as climate-friendly as you may think.
With the global population climbing, researchers wanted to know whether grazing could help rein in climate change. This is what they learned.
Of the many terms attached to our burgers and steaks, "sustainable" and "grass-fed" often sit next to each other. But a new study finds that raising livestock on grassy pastures is far from sustainable and doesn't have the climate benefits proponents have claimed.
"Can we eat our way out of the climate problem by eating more grass-fed beef?" Tara Garnett, of the Food Climate Research Network at Oxford University in the UK, and her colleagues asked. The answer, they found, is no.
Eating grass-fed beef doesn't get climate-conscious carnivores off the hook.
Cattle and other ruminants have long been considered a major source of greenhouse gases, largely because of the methane they emit through belching and the carbon dioxide released when forests are cleared for grazing or growing feed.
But in recent years, researchers have found that cattle raised on pastures, munching on grasses and treading the ground underneath them, have the potential to sequester carbon in the soil. Some have made the argument that certain kinds of managed grazing practices not only provide the key to feeding calorie-dense beef and dairy products to a growing global population—predicted to hit 9.8 billion by 2050—but are critical to controlling greenhouse gas emissions because of their ability to store carbon in the soil and potentially offset their emissions
Not everyone is convinced.
"This is an area of contestation," Garnett said. "We wanted to look at the evidence."
The Argument for Grass-Fed Beef
With the world's population climbing and as more countries, notably China, develop the wealth and appetite for animal products, food and agricultural researchers have puzzled over how to feed everyone.
Some proponents of grass-fed beef have argued that managed grazing on pasture provides not just more protein for a meat-hungry planet, but an essential climate benefit.
Here's how that argument goes:
Plants grow, they take carbon out of the atmosphere, then they die. Their roots and aboveground biomass contain carbon. If that carbon is left undisturbed, then the carbon stays in the ground in a stable form. If animals nibble away at plants, that stimulates growth, causing plants to put down deep roots that contain carbon. At the same time, animals eat the plants and excrete manure, which contains carbon and nitrogen—a process that returns carbon and nitrogen to the soil and fosters more plant growth, sequestering more carbon.
So, the argument goes, it's better to eat grass-fed, carbon-sequestering ruminants than "monogastric" creatures like pigs and chickens whose diets will require more grain and more carbon-storing forests cleared to grow those grains as demand for meat grows.
Problems with the Grass-Fed Beef Equation
"But," Garnett said, "there are a lot of buts."
Conditions—weather, rainfall, soil consistency, soil nutrients, plant species, stocking rates (the number of cattle per acre)—all need to be just right. They seldom are, the study says, which means that research emphasizing the possible climate benefits of pasture-fed ruminants has likely been overstated.
Garnett and her colleagues found that the carbon-sequestering potential of pasture-raised ruminants is quite limited.
Ruminants, they point out in a report published Monday, contribute 80 percent of total livestock emissions. But, they find, even under "very generous assumptions," grazing management could only offset up to 60 percent of average annual emission from the grass-fed sector, and only up to 1.6 percent of total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
To meet the growing demand for protein from grass-fed animals, the report said, "we would have to massively expand grazing land into forest and intensify existing grassland through the use of nutrient inputs, which among other things, would cause devastating CO2 releases and increases in methane and nitrous oxide emissions," both potent climate-warming gases.
The report finds that if projections for animal product consumption stay unchanged, livestock would take up one-third of the total emissions budget under the Paris climate agreement's 2-degree warming limit.
"Increasing grass-fed ruminant numbers is, therefore, a self-defeating climate strategy," the report concluded. The report, called Grazed and Confused, didn't determine whether grass-fed beef is better or worse than feed-lot beef; instead it looked at the ability of grass-fed production systems to sequester carbon and what that would mean for the future.
No Silver Bullet for Beef-Based Diets
The report's authors say the planet's consumers need to cut their intake of all animal products, no matter how they were produced.
"We can't escape the fact that if we're going to have a hope in hell of cutting our climate emissions, then we need to stop our consumption of animal products," Garnett said. "The high consumers of meat and dairy need to be cutting back their consumption. And that holds, whatever the animal type and whatever the system in which it's been produced."
Jonathan Kaplan, the food and agriculture program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has looked at the issue extensively but was not involved in the Grazed and Confused report, said there's research demonstrating that pasture-raised livestock sequester carbon, "but the case for arguing that it's a silver bullet to take care of beef's impact is not there."
NRDC has concluded that, pound-for-pound, beef releases about 34 times more greenhouse gases than legumes, including lentils and black beans. The group also recently found that a decline in U.S. beef consumption contributed to a 9 percent decline in greenhouse gas emissions.
"Our take is that grass-fed is better than conventional," Kaplan added, noting other benefits unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions, including better animal welfare and less water pollution. "But plants are better than either."
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