One of the persistent, shallow global food myths is that the world could feed more people if we gave up eating meat. Ezra Klein wrote another misguided column about this—“The Meat of the Problem”—in the Washington Post of July 29. Klein cites as his authority a naïve “study” by the kids at Carnegie-Mellon University.

 

Klein asserts, “It is more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people.”

 

No, Mr. Klein, it isn’t. Either your kids haven’t done their homework, or they deliberately set out to promote vegetarian diets.

 

Point One:  Our biggest source of livestock feed is . . . (drum-roll) . . . grass! Humans can’t get nourishment from it, but huge tracts of the earth’s land are too dry, too steep or too rocky for grain. We let cows and calves harvest sparse crops of grass from massive tracts of the American Great Plains, Canadian Prairie Provinces, the Australian Outback, New Zealand, the sandy steppes of Hungary, and huge tracts of Khazakstan—to name but a few grasslands.

 

Point Two:  If these grassy areas aren’t grazed by animals, the dry grass will ultimately be struck by lightning, ignite, and release fiery clouds of CO₂!

 

Point Three:  Livestock happily and constructively eat lots of other stuff that humans can’t or won’t consume, including millions of tons of peanut hulls, citrus pulp, molasses, feather meal, wheat bran, meat and bone meal from slaughter plants, corn gluten meal, and on down a long list. Without livestock, you have no more food for humans, but a huge waste disposal problem.

 

Point Four:  Globally, animals thus produce one pound of nutritionally-complete protein for each 1.4 pounds of human-edible protein they consume. (Much of the vegetable and grain protein we consume is incomplete, lacking key amino acids and nutrients.) The biological value of the animal protein is 1.4 times that value in the plant foods. Thus, the higher-quality animal protein comes at virtually no cost to the ecosystem!  This gem of information is from a broad-gauge task force report by the U.S. Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, Animal Agriculture and Global Food Supply, July, 1999. That report should have been basic background reading for the Carnegie-Mellon team—but it wasn’t.

 

Point Five:  Livestock products are key sources of the amino acids lysine and tryptophan. Also such key micro-nutrients as iron, zinc, and vitamins B12 and A. These nutrients are especially important to the growth and development of children. That’s why I don’t get excited about Carnegie-Mellon telling me that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact on my carbon footprint than switching from a gas-guzzler to a Prius. My car already gets better fuel mileage than a Prius, and I think meat consumption is important to maintaining our health.

 

Point Six:  Our Center has documented a doubling in U.S. meat production per acre since 1970. Much of this is due to pesticides, veterinary chemistry, and better plant breeding—including the boost in U.S corn yields from 71 bushels per acre in 1971 to more than 150 bushels per acre recently. That means the corn-fed efficiency of livestock is rising!

 

If you really want to help people, stop wasting corn on ethanol and soybean oil in biodiesel. We’ll need to double the world’s output of food and feed in the next 40 years just to meet the food needs of 9 billion people and their pets. Biofuels are a trivial waste of good land. If you also want to save room on the planet for wildlife, invest in more yield-enhancing agricultural research.  It’s called high-yield conservation.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—What a world!! Global warming alarmists bring us to the brink of world food shortage and economic collapse—using words and computer models, not higher temperatures. As a result, more wildlife species are threatened by palm oil plantations growing biodiesel than by climate change. Heavy sea ice just trapped a big Russian ice-breaker for seven days in the Arctic’s Northwest Passage, which the alarmists told us last year would soon be open sailing. The sunspots and a Pacific Ocean cooling phase are forecasting the earth will cool further over the next two decades. In the past, both have accurate in their in their predictions.   

 

The blue collar world sees no warming, but they surely see economic ruin staring them in the face.  Finally, the workers of the world are crying, “Enough of this man-made warming hype without warming!”

 

• Fishing fleets have gone on strike across Europe against ultra-high diesel prices, while  the Greens demand that fuel become even more scarce and expensive
• Truckers are staging fuel-protest slowdowns in major European cities.   
• Protesting French farmers have blockaded fuel stations.
• More than 70 percent of Britons now say they will not pay any extra taxes to “save the planet.”

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Meanwhile, the Vatican, widely flung governments, and dozens of universities have scheduled conferences on the global food shortage.

 

Guess whose advice we took on shifting much of our cropland from food to biofuels?  The advice of the same Greens who told us not to burn coal or oil. We shifted too much of our scarce cropland into corn ethanol and palm oil biodiesel. We forgot that the world’s food and feed demand was in the process of doubling due to 1) the last surge in human population growth; 2) rising Third World incomes and expectations; and 3) millions more beloved cats and dogs as households have fewer children and more affluence

 

Assuming society is not yet ready to starve the poor or euthanize their pets, we must feed them. That means at least twice as much global food and feed per year by 2040. Nor do we want to clear the forests or drain the wetlands to grow more crops. That means there is no “spare” cropland for corn ethanol

 

Unless the planet starts warming again, quickly and significantly, the Green momentum for a low-carbon society will come to a screeching stop. There are many indications that we are in a long, moderate warming cycle, which  began 150 years ago with the end of the Little Ice Age, and may continue for several more hundred years. There is no indication that this modest warming will be bad for humans, or for the wildlife. The thermometers show a net global temperature increase of just 0.2 degree C since 1940 —and even that tiny increase has been inflated by the urban heat island effect.

 

The big temperature increases are all in those unverified computer models so beloved by the Green movement. The mothers of the world’s kids and the workers who grow and catch its food now demand to see the thermometers climb more than .2 degrees before they renounce their food and jobs. Without energy, the workers can’t work, the farmers can’t farm, and the children can’t eat.

 

Until and unless the Greens and the UN can offer some evidence beyond the guesses of computer models that consistently over-estimate the warming that is occurring, we’ll accept the unsung voice of the thermometers

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442 or email to cgfi@hughes.net