A large, and growing proportion of worlds methane emissions comes from the meat industry around the world. Methane is a far more powerful, if shorter lived warming gas, with 84 times the warming potential over 20 years (and still 28 times the warming potential over a century.
The average cow produces between 70kg and 120kg of methane a year. For now, let us just look at the meat industry. Cows are generally slaughtered for meat at 18 months old. This means that they have emitted between 100kg and 180kg of methane in their lives – does not sound like much right? Well over 20 years this is the equivalent of 8.4 tonnes of carbon at the lowest end (it could be almost twice that). The average cow produces around 500 pounds of meat, and with the average beef patty weighing around half a pound, we can find that the average beef patty will have the carbon footprint equivalent of 8.4kg (in terms of the warming it can cause).
So what you might say: well the UN published a study which gave this information and then had to cope with being censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimized for more than a decade, as a result of the incontrovertible fact, that the beef industry is a major factor in global warming.
Indeed, in the last few years, as scientists have been concluding that the impact of the meat industry was underestimated, this pressure has had the percentage of global warming caused by meat farming falling. The scientists say that the proportion of global warming that is due to the meat industry lies between 16 and 28%. Yet, at the same time the UN number has been going the other way, with its 2006 estimate being 18%, but its 2013 suggesting 14.5% and its current assessment suggesting around 11.2%.
While this pressure was not usually easy to put a finger on, it would involve not being invited to meetings, or not being asked to present at summits.
This is obviously a problem. It is highly likely that we will never hear an apology or anything like that. However, what should be done, is to publish the bad numbers from the UN alongside real scientists numbers – if the UN will not play fair, it must be totally discredited, which should not be hard.