Le mucche che ruttano stanno alimentando la crisi climatica. Questa azienda dice di avere una soluzione

Animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, making it a significant contributor to climate change. Of those emissions, 65% come from beef and dairy cattle.

Reducing beef consumption is an effective way of curbing global emissions. According to the NRDC, Americans now consume 19% less beef than they did in 2005. This is equivalent to a reduction of 185 million metric tons of emissions, or the annual tailpipe pollution of 39 million cars.
But why is beef so bad? “The feed is largely produced using lots of pesticide and fertilizer, which requires fossil fuels,” explains Sujatha Bergen, one of the authors of the study. “Anche, the digestive system of the cows produces methane, che è 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. And the manure emits additional greenhouse gases.”

Meat production also requires large amounts of animal feed, mainly the resource-intensive corn and soy. The synthetic fertilizer and the manure used to grow these also releases nitrous oxide, a climate-warming pollutant 298 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

While Americans have greatly reduced their consumption of red meat in recent years, the NRDC reports that butter and other dairy products such as cheese and yogurt actually enjoyed a surge in the observed period, a partire dal 2005 per 2014.

Butter is the most climate damaging of all dairy products because there are several steps involved in producing it that are energy-intensive: “Per esempio, butter production requires separating raw milk into low-fat milk and cream, pasteurizing the cream, cooling the cream, ripening and churning,” Sujatha Bergen told CNN.

The problem is mostly in the air miles. NRDC’s Sujatha Bergen explains: “Much of the asparagus in the United States is flown in from Latin America, which results in greater climate emissions than foods that are transported by trucks. While it’s not the only produce item that is flown into the country, a higher proportion of it is transported this way than most other common fruits and vegetables (many of which we import from Mexico). In generale, if people are looking to minimize their climate impacts, they should avoid air freighted foods as much as possible.”

The NRDC has excluded from this list some foods that most people are not familiar with or are difficult to deliberately avoid, because they are often used in ingredients in other products as opposed to purchased directly by consumers in large amounts. These include: lard and beef tallow (11.92 kg of CO2 per kg of food), dry milk products (10.4 kg of CO2 per kg of food), and other added fats and oils such as palm oil (6.30 kg of CO2 per kg of food).