Interesting Thought: Vegetarian Diet and Global Warming

Would vegetarian diet help climate change mitigation?

 Though I am personally not a vegetarian, I should admit that vegetarian diet helps to reduce global warming. According to Noam Mohr, in a short term, CO₂ cannot be responsible for global warming because CO₂ emission mainly produce aerosols, which is actual cooling materials on global temperature.

 Mohr claims that other than CO₂, the most important greenhouse gas causing global warming is methane primarily emitted by animal agriculture. Since pre-industrial period, atmospheric methane concentration has been doubled as animal agricultural industries dramatically increased. As a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO_2, methane became a primary cause of short term global warming(12).

Original figure:
Negative feedback of vegetarian diet and global warming

  Then, how would vegetarian diet help reduce global warming? The answer is straightforward. Vegetarian diet has negative feedback on global warming. Increase in vegetarian diet will reduce meat consumption, which will cause decrease in animal agricultural industries meaning that there will be decrease in growing livestock. When ranching is decreased, greenhouse gases such as CO₂ and methane largely emitted by animals will decrease and cropland reforestation will increase. These factors will eventually decrease amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases, which further decrease global warming(17). 

 Some people might ask, why not just reduce CO₂ emission?  It is mainly because change in diets is much more efficient and give fast result than change in amount of CO₂ consumption is. Like Mohr said, CO₂ almost has no effect on global warming in short term period, but methane does. So reduction in meat consumption will result in “immediate drops in methane emissions,” which will result in fast decrease in short term global warming. Also, since our economy depends so much on fossil fuels, which is one of the main source of CO₂ emission, sudden stop in burning fossil fuel will have significant damage on our economy(12). Development of technologies to stop the fossil fuel use might be considered, but it will take too much time while we need immediate measure to stop further severe global warming.

 So, why don’t we try to be a vegetarian? I do not insist on becoming a complete vegetarian but at least we can try to reduce the meat consumption. Eating right by consuming more plants than animals should be healthy for our earth and us!