Marketers Discover: Climate Conscious Consumers are Eating for Cooling
March 10, 2023
Greenhouse gas emissions from the way humans produce and consume food could add nearly 1 degree of warming to the Earth’s climate by 2100, according to a new study.
Continuing the dietary patterns of today will push the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit of warming sought under the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the study published Monday in Nature Climate Change, and will approach the agreement’s limit of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
The modeling study found that the majority of greenhouse gas emissions come from three major sources: meat from animals like cows, sheep and goats; dairy; and rice. Those three sources account for at least 19% each of food’s contribution to a warming planet, according to the study, with meat contributing the most, at 33%.
All emit large amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, in the way they are currently farmed. The researchers calculated that methane will account for 75% of food’s share of warming by 2030, with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide accounting for most of the rest.
“I think the biggest takeaway that I would want (policymakers) to have is the fact that methane emissions are really dominating the future warming associated with the food sector,” said Catherine C. Ivanovich, a climate scientist at Columbia University and the study’s lead author.
Ivanovich and colleagues from the University of Florida and Environmental Defense Fund calculated the three major gases produced by each type of food over its lifetime based on current consumption patterns. Then they scaled the annual emissions over time by gas based on five different population projections.
And then they used a climate model frequently used by the United Nations’ panel on climate change to model the effects of those emissions on surface air temperature change.
Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who wasn’t involved in the study, said it used well-established methods and datasets “to produce a novel, sobering conclusion.”
“The study highlights that food is absolutely critical to hitting our Paris Agreement climate targets — failure to consider food is failure to meet our climate targets globally,” said Meredith Niles, a food systems scientist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the study.
The study offered some ways to change global food production and consumption that could limit warming.
Many of these changes are already being called for or adopted. U.S. President Joe Biden touted the climate benefits of planting cover crops that can draw down carbon from the atmosphere in an April 2021 address to Congress. Multiple recent studies and reports have recommended eating less meat in order to reduce greenhouse gas creation by animals raised for consumption. And California started a mandatory food waste recycling program in 2021 to reduce the emissions created by decaying food.
But reducing methane may be the most important goal of all. Although methane is far more potent than carbon, it also is much shorter-lived — meaning cuts in methane emissions can have a quick benefit, Ivanovich siad.
“So that’s going to help us stay under the dangerous warming target,” she said, “as well as give us some time to build up resilience and adaptation to climate change in the meantime.”
A major question that remains is whether food producers and consumers can change their behavior in order to achieve the reductions in greenhouse gases laid out in the study. There’s a roadmap, but will it be followed?
Given the seriousness of the climate crisis and the effects experienced across the globe already, we are pursuing the following 2025 short-term targets to reduce our footprint:
- Increasing the percentage of Cool Food Meals to 60% of bakery-cafe entrees.
- Transitioning to 100% circular – reusable, recyclable and compostable – packaging.
- Using green, renewable electricity for at least 50% of Panera Bread owned operations.
In addition, Panera is developing a long-term roadmap to reduce its emissions in line with a 1.5°C science-based target, committing to first reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and then use credible carbon removal and sequestration projects to reach our goal of becoming climate positive.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
March 10, 2023 at 2:52 pm
70% – 80% of global food methane emissions are from the developing world – note that at the end of the interview they finally use the word “global”.
People in the developed world not eating meat or dairy will make a minimal – if any – change in emissions, because that missing protein and calories will have to be made up by substantial increases in crop agriculture, which, in the US at least, has a larger climate footprint than the entire US livestock industry, which produces 500+ products that are not meat, dairy, or eggs.
And, btw, the sloppy way the impact of livestock methane on Global Warming Potential is calculated over-estimates the impact of livestock methane by a factor of 3 to 4. So says the IPCC. So take the global figures, and divide by 3 or 4, and then divide by 4 or 5 to get the true impact of the livestock industry on global warming for the developed world. It’s about 1/3 to 1/4 the amount that passenger aviation represents. Well under 0.5% of our total emissions in the US. Tiny.
This hyperbolic fixation on meat is madness.
March 12, 2023 at 2:24 am
Operations like those growing bison on rotating pasture, or chickens grown with grazers under solar farms are a good alternative to growing crops specifically as livestock feed.
Cutting down on the horrors of the factory farms (and those nasty feed lots) and the abuses of immigrants (including child labor) in meat processing would also go a long way to improving public perception of the industry.
As for converting from meat to increased crop agriculture being anything close to a negative, you better get your calculator and your nutrition book out again. Human food crops get you the best bang for your buck. (While we’re at it, cutting down on flower production in Africa would be a good idea, too.)
March 12, 2023 at 12:18 pm
“Cutting down on the horrors of the factory farms (and those nasty feed lots) and the abuses of immigrants (including child labor) in meat processing would also go a long way to improving public perception of the industry.”
I think your choice of the word “perception” is very apropos here. If you Google “How many factory farms in the US 2022”, the very first listing states that 99% of all US farms are factory farms. 99%.
This is a complete Crock of sh*t. The term “factory farm” doesn’t even have a useful definition; it has come to mean any farm with more than 5 people doing work on it. Probably 99.95% of all true family farms therefore qualify as a factory farm.
I think most people would define a factory farm as a huge warehouse operation where animals are kept confined for their entire lives before they are then slaughtered. And yet this is how almost all chickens and turkeys have been raised for a hundred years. Quite happily, btw, as they are flock animals.
Pigs, on the other hand, being raised and kept in cages is deplorable. I have no information on how many operations like this exist. But I would bet most pig farms do not operate like that at all. Do you have any information on the topic?
And, again, I would bet that almost all of the cattle/sheep ranchers in the country do not warehouse their livestock, simply because it is more economical to let cows/sheep eat free grass for most of their lives. And that is what these ranchers have in abundance – huge tracts of land suited to nothing but the growing of grass.
So, one can cite (mis)perceptions as if they are real problems or one can contribute to the education of people on the topic. I frequently find myself the lone nonfarmer who speaks up online. And I gotta tell you, aside from AGW, the question of livestock and meat is largely the one other issue that is as rife with bullsh*t that I encounter.
“As for converting from meat to increased crop agriculture being anything close to a negative, you better get your calculator and your nutrition book out again. Human food crops get you the best bang for your buck.”
Not from an emissions standpoint, they don’t. I’ll put up the EPA graphic for the tenthteen time which shows that in the US human crop ag is associated with more emissions than the entire livestock industry, which produces meat. milk, and eggs as a minority product:
The same appears to be true globally as well:
And, for the umpteenth time I will point out to you that the calculations behind the numbers on these graphs overestimate the true emissions of livestock by a factor of 3 to 4. So says the IPCC and most food scientists, because almost all livestock emissions have to do with methane, while almost all human crop ag emissions are N2O and CO2 and appear to be accurate.
And if you think that replacing the nutrition from livestock will require minimal extra crop ag, let me remind you that in the US (I do not have figures for the rest of the developed world) livestock provide 23% of our calories and 63% of our protein. Not to mention essential fatty acids and certain nutrients not found in plant agricultural products. (Not that it is going to happen anyway, but I am not sure we could even accomplish it.)
Getting rid of livestock would also mean getting rid of the 500+ byproducts that livestock provide which are used in our food products and manufacturing. So you are going to have to build new factories to produce these, and that will cause new emissions now only attributable to human crop agriculture.
So, yeah, I think that eating less meat and eating more crop ag products is not justified based on global warming emissions, and is basically missing the mark completely. The mark being stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
March 12, 2023 at 7:49 pm
My cousin had a commercial-grade chicken farm. I would say that their air-conditioned housing was more humane than many that just let chickens occasionally bake to death in the Louisiana heat, but treating livestock humanely just increases the margins.
March 10, 2023 at 2:54 pm
Interesting. When I think “Green house emissions”, I automatically add “caused by fossil fuels”. I hadn’t realised how much other stuff falls into that category.
“But reducing methane may be the most important goal of all. Although methane is far more potent than carbon, it also is much shorter-lived — meaning cuts in methane emissions can have a quick benefit, Ivanovich said. “So that’s going to help us stay under the dangerous warming target,” she said, “as well as give us some time to build up resilience and adaptation to climate change in the meantime.” ”
Food for thought…
March 12, 2023 at 2:29 am
It’s the incremental change from human activities that is what’s been making the difference especially over the past 100 years. Here’s a great nerdy view of the system: