Cars or cattle?

dancing around the statistics

I like to propose some music to go with these articles and in light of Jet Black’s recent passing … well the link is down the bottom.

Full disclosure : I would have been a genius but I breathed in too much lead pollution growing up so I am really a bit pissed off with cars. If you think I’m joking then visit this link

There are any number of people running around and shouting about what we should do to ‘save the planet’. One of the things that gets shouted a lot is “save the climate, stop eating meat” a favourite meme of people like George Monbiot.

Ok, joined up thinking, global strategies, holistic Earth repair approaches (Permaculture!) these are the kind of things that we need. So continuing this thread where I look at how we use Permaculture design science to design and rebuild our rapidly eroding systems I’d like to look at some more strategic thinking.

Chris Dixon is writing about planetary limits at the moment over here

For a start a Permaculture designer will analyse the situation, one reason for this is to find potential positive tipping points where an input at the right time and place will multiply it’s way through the system creating a positive domino effect.

Analysis and please note that this is not a comprehensive one, I’m skipping over a few things, otherwise I’ll be here all day and it’s getting late. I’ll note some of the things skipped over from time to time.

Road transport = 11.9% (not including, cradle to grave GHG emissions, nor road building and not NOx and PAH)

Livestock/ manure = 5.8% (not including GHG from maritime transport of animal feed)

Road transport GHG are a bit more than double livestock emissions.

You are seeing this I hope? Private cars account for 45.1% of transport emissions even when including aviation. Around 3 608 000 000 tonnes of CO2 a year

Transportation emissions again more than double the total agricultural sector

60.6% of GHG transport sector emissions in the EU come from private cars, which is to say that the majority of transport sector climate change gases are produced by private cars.

“Emissions of methane across the EU-28 from agriculture decreased by 64 304 kilotonnes of CO2 equivalents between 1990 and 2015, a reduction of 21 % compared with 1990 levels. Emissions from the two major sources of methane, enteric fermentation and manure management, decreased by 22 % and 17 % respectively over the same period.” EU

“Because electric cars store power in large lithium-ion batteries, which are particularly material- and energy-intensive to produce, their global warming emissions at this early stage usually exceed those of conventional vehicles. Manufacturing a mid-sized EV with an 84-mile range results in about 15 percent more emissions than manufacturing an equivalent gasoline vehicle. For larger, longer-range EVs that travel more than 250 miles per charge, the manufacturing emissions can be as much as 68 percent higher. By the end of their lives, gas-powered cars spew out almost twice as much global warming pollution than the equivalent electric car.” Union of Concerned Scientists

Hang on a bit! We are being told that electric cars will save the climate. Petrol/diesel cars produce twice as many GHG emissions that electric cars? So electric cars produce half as many GHGs. 3 608 000 000 tonnes of CO2 /2 = 1 804 000 000 tonnes of GHGs a year, nearly 2 billion tonnes. That doesn’t sound such a good result really.

Death

Approximately 1.35 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. Around 3700 people a day. At least half of those killed are pedestrians, cyclists or bikers.

An estimated 420 000 people fall ill and die every year from eating meat

Plastic waste

“As much as 19,000 tonnes of microplastic pollution could be entering UK waterways every year from vehicle tyres, a new report for Friends of the Earth has found.”

Livestock rearing will contribute to plastic waste through using black plastic sheet for sillage and plastic warp for roundbales, some of this is ‘biodegradable’ plastic but we have little evidence yet about how well this breaks down. That said, the quantities which were impossible to find, will not be anything like the 19,000 tonnes coming from tyres and brakes in the UK. Levels will be lower or higher in other countries depending on the number of vehicles and road miles.

Some conclusions

Yes, cars produce CO2 and livestock is predominantly CH4. The latter is a more powerful GHG than CO2 (The bigger the molecule the bigger the effect) but has a shorter residence time in the atmosphere and. One reason why we must reduce CH4 emissions fast. That said the quantities of GHG produced by the 2 sectors are radically different, as seen above. Cars slaughter over a million people a year and produce horrendous amounts of microplastic waste. By the way, electric cars have greater mass and so they use tyres quicker which equals more microplastics. I haven’t even included road building and repair in this analysis which is a global ecological disaster. I haven’t included other major problems associated with cars such as the noise which also has impacts on health and wellbeing.

Attacking livestock producers is the easy target. Allies from the vegetarian, vegan and animal welfare movements will fall over themselves to rally to this war. The question is whether or not it is, strategically, a good idea.

One consequence we have seen is governments increasingly promoting electric cars as a heavy hitting 'climate change solution’ and spreading the word that they intend to act on livestock emissions. The latter, if done right would be good, it would of course mean wrenching control from the multinationals that currently control the industry, something unlikely to happen, the electric car push is as we have seen just greenwashing.

Cars destroy communities, cars kill and maim, cars pollute the air, the water and our food. So does road building and road maintenance. The presence of cars on the road make cycling and walking extreme sports as so many cyclists and walkers are going to get slapped by a car and end up on a slab. So lets imagine that we set about eliminating the need for cars and check whether this might be a better strategy than beating up livestock producers.

What would happen if there were no more cars in your village or neighbourhood? We would all be walking, taking the bus, tram, metro or bicycle and probably speaking to each other more. The comfortable roaming range is reduced and people would thus be encouraged to shop locally rather than taking the bus to a shopping mall or supermarket. Coupled to a local push towards locally produced food and other goods, as described here the social, economic and health impacts would be enormous. A move away from supermarket shopping and towards higher quality real food could very easily flow in the direction of less meat consumption based on the axiom ‘quality rather than quantity’. The local livestock production would be integrated into a holistic land management plan, helping (I’ve talked about this before) reduce wild fire risk, cutting lawns and public parks and run in local agro-sylvo-pasturalist systems that increase CO2 draw down and soil storage. It would also mean a move away from the current shockingly inhumane intensive animal rearing systems, their dependency on antibiotic use and the destruction wrought by inappropriately disposed of animal slurry/manure.

Local food production will of course remove a lot of freight off the roads, another positive impact.

We got roads all over the place, without cars they can be used differently, after all we’re not going to rip them up. Tramways, light trains, cycle paths etc etc. I asked an road engineer once how long it would take to wear a road out if it was only bicycles or foot passengers, after thinking a bit she replied “a bloody long time multiplied by 3,141592653589793 x 2” It took me a while to get it.

Don’t panic, of course there would be a few vehicles around, maybe community owned, for those trips, removals, local transport that can’t be done any other way.

It is increasingly likely that the younger generation are going to start legal action against car manufacturers and governments who have encouraged car use. It would be a good idea, if your local authority won’t act to get rid of cars, to sue them too and then, come the next elections get rid of them.

Once upon a time there was a rock group called the Fatima Mansions and they had a hit with a song called “only losers take the bus”, in tomorrows world it’s only losers who drive a personal private car.

If you subscribe, there is no paywall, you can leave comments, suggestions and tell us about your local initiatives. Together we can!