Who doesn’t have a soft spot for cows? Their languid walk typifies a day in the country, their unique ‘moo’ is recreated in classrooms up and down the land and they produce gallons and gallons of milk, which for years has become a key way of our bodies getting calcium. It’s also something nice to put on our cornflakes – where would Kellogg’s be without cows?
Yet they also produce huge quantities of nitrous oxide and methane, which contributes significantly to greenhouse gases. Methane traps 30 times the heat of CO2 - “Cutting methane is the biggest opportunity to slow warming between now and 2040,” Durwood Zaelke, a lead reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There are 1.4 billion cows on the planet, and each produces between 250 and 500 litres of methane per day. So yes, cows really are bad for the environment. And we have way too many of them to have any hope of dealing with climate change. There’s no choice but to massively reduce our dependence on them for diary produce and meat.
Dairy is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than aviation and shipping combined. Estimates of the contribution to global warming emissions of the dairy industry amount to 3.6%. The figure for the airline industry is 2.5%.
Ready to drink plant milks make a significant contribution to reducing the problem but they only go part of the way. They still follow the same method distribution from the factory to the end-user – a method that involves shipping heavy liquid in chilled trucks all around the country and the world.
Now really is the time for a different way of thinking…
