The Game Changers, a recent film that advocates for a plant-based diet... quote:
“The livestock sector is responsible for 15 percent of global man-made emissions. So, to put that in perspective, that’s about the same as all the emissions from all the forms of transport in the world, all the planes, trains, cars, vans and ships all added up.”
This 15 percent claim comes from commonly cited statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which found that GHG emissions from cattle are 14.5 percent compared to 14 percent for the entire transportation sector.
However, these statistics are misleading, because the FAO compared a full life cycle analysis (LCA) for livestock with only direct (aka “tailpipe”) emissions from transportation.
An LCA considers the environmental impact of a product through its entire life cycle, which includes everything from extraction and processing of the raw materials, to manufacturing, distribution, use, recycling, and waste disposal.
For livestock, that would include not just the methane emitted by burping cows, but also the carbon needed for feed, transport, and processing.
For transportation, it would include not just the gases emitted by cars, trucks, planes, and other vehicles, but also the inputs required for making the fuel (feedstock production and distribution, fuel production and distribution, and final use of the fuel).
It is ridiculous to compare the full LCA of livestock with only the direct/tailpipe emissions for transportation —yet that’s exactly what often happens.
The senior author of the FAO report that was initially responsible for these misleading statistics has since admitted his error. Unfortunately, few people are aware of this, and the
numbers from that initial report have been repeated so often that most people just assume they are true.
....
Research has shown (
https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/96/4/1519/4833918 ) that
holistically managed, regenerative beef operations not only don’t contribute to GHG emissions, they actually sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
So, as is often the case, the claims you hear in the media can’t be taken at face value. You have to dig a little deeper to get to the truth.