U.N. emissions report found wanting

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

If Canada had a Frank Mitloehner, maybe this country's national news magazine wouldn't have gone on an apparently inaccurate anti-agriculture rant in late March. Mitloehner is the air quality specialist at the University of California, Davis, who scrutinized a 2006 United Nations report that charged meat production causes a much larger percentage of greenhouse gas emissions on planet Earth than transportation, and found it wanting.

Mitloehner says the meat production side of the U.N. equation included fertilizer production, land clearance, methane emissions, feed production, milk processing and vehicle use on farms to get the highest possible use. The transportation figure included only fossil fuel burning and nothing to do with how the steel in vehicles was made, for example. Mitloehner says just three per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are attributable to cow and pig raising, as compared to 26 per cent associated with transportation.

The March 30 Maclean's magazine article quoted heavily from the U.N. report, Livestock's Long Shadow. The U.N. report's author admits elsewhere that Mitloehner has a point. Oops! BF