People Still Don't Get the Link between Meat Consumption and Climate Change

[GliderGuider]

32. Meat, energy, people

Most people don't unpack the impact produced by our population and our activity levels (I=PAT), relative to the amount of human impact that Earth systems can sustain over the long haul.

For example, as I say in a sustainability analysis written in 2013, I think the absolute maximum sustainable human impact is equivalent to about 50 million hunter-foragers, with each of them using about 125 watts of non-food energy. If we use our energy consumption as the proxy for our activity levels (since all activity requires energy) this gives us a maximum sustainable global power consumption of about 6 Gigawatts.

Current human power consumption is about 18 Terawatts, or 3000 times greater than my estimated maximum sustainable level.

We have a variety of options in order to meet the proposed 6 GW global sustainability limit:

1. We might reduce our numbers while leaving average per-capita energy consumption the same as it is today (the iso-energetic option);

2. We might reduce our overall energy consumption while leaving population levels the same (the iso-numeric option); or

3. We might arrive at some combination of population level and per-capita energy consumption that multiplies out to the required 6 GW.

Here are the endpoints of the sustainability equation under these assumptions:

1. The iso-energetic limit requires a global population of ~2.5 million people using the same average 2.4 kilowatts of primary energy that we do today.

2. The iso-numeric limit requires a global population of ~7 billion people using an average of less than one watt of power each.

Of course neither of these options is achievable.

A more probable outcome is that our population and energy use might both fall over time until they stabilize at some mid-point that can be supported by the remaining biosphere. An example might be the one I used to start the analysis - a global population of 50 million or less, living at the average hunter-forager level of energy consumption of 125 watts per capita.

Much of the outcome depends on just how much we have already damaged and destabilized the biosphere by our predation and pollution, and how much more damage we will inflict before the situation stabilizes. Given the effects we are already seeing and the inordinate resistance to the concept of de-growth among all societies, I do not expect we can avoid outright extinction sometime over the next couple of hundred years.

Frankly, to me meat consumption seems to be just one relatively minor component of a much larger complex problem set. Perhaps there are ways of leveraging meat production to enhance rather than degrade the ecology - e.g. the work of Allan Savory? Not that I'm totally sold on Savory's analysis, but it holds at least as much promise as trying to browbeat people into giving up hamburgers.