- Climate change mitigation describes efforts
to reduce climate change through either
decreasing the sources of greenhouse gases
or increasing the sinks of greenhouse gases.
So agriculture is important to climate change mitigation
because agriculture accounts
for one third of all of our greenhouse gas emissions.
These emissions are from three different gases.
So the first is most familiar it's carbon dioxide,
that comes from energy use.
So that would be the energy that we need
to make synthetic fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides.
It comes from land clearing for agriculture.
So when we cut down forest or burned forest
to make room for agriculture, we release all that carbon
that's locked up in the trees
into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
In addition to carbon dioxide, agriculture produces
two particularly potent greenhouse gases.
The first is methane.
So methane comes from flooded rice paddies.
It's organic matter breaking down in the absence of oxygen
because it's underwater and it comes from cows.
It comes from ruminant digestion.
The other potent greenhouse gas
that agriculture emits is nitrous oxide.
And that comes from us putting fertilizers on fields.
So when we put fertilizer on fields that has nitrogen in it
that helps our plants grow,
but it also if it's just sitting on the soil
it can react with oxygen and become nitrous oxide.
There are a variety of ways
in which agriculture can reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
For carbon dioxide,
we can fix the footprint of agriculture.
So we cannot clear any more land and intensify agriculture
on the land that we're currently growing on.
We can also use renewable energy to make those fertilizers
and pesticides and herbicides.
And finally, we can increase the carbon content of the soils
by taking organic matter and incorporating into the soils
through things like low till agriculture,
no-till agriculture and cover cropping.
For nitrous oxide,
we need to get better at applying fertilizers,
so more precise.
So this includes both not putting too much fertilizer
on our field, which we tend to do
in developed countries just to ensure a good crop.
And it also includes splitting that application
into a couple different applications
that there's never a lot of nitrogen sitting on the soil,
ready to react with oxygen and create nitrous oxide.
For methane, well you can intermittently drain rice paddies
and that tamps down on the methane production
from that biodegrading organic matter.
And also there are ways in which you can both
manage manure coming from ruminants from cows
and also amend their feed to cut down on methane emissions.
I'll give three suggestions for how you can reduce your own
personal greenhouse gas emissions footprint in your diet.
So the first is to vote.
Federal action is really needed to address climate change
and it's needed in two different ways.
First, to either directly or indirectly
set a price on carbon.
When there's pollution, you need to pay a price
or somehow clean it up.
And it's the same thing with carbon dioxide.
So we need to set that price
and then we can use that price to incentivize
and pay farmers to do the kind of climate change mitigation
that I was just talking about.
The other thing that having a federal government
strong on solving the climate crisis does
is it pulls in the rest of the nations of the world
and it ensures accountability for us.
The US has traditionally lagged
in climate change emission reductions
and it importantly pulls in rapidly developing economies
like China and India, who have greenhouse gas footprints
that are near ours or if not larger at this point.
The second thing you can do
is reduce your consumption of red meat.
There's nothing that you put on your fork likely
that has more greenhouse gas emissions than does beef.
So it comes from the energy to create the feed
to the methane emissions from the cow
to the entire cold chain that you need to get the meat
from the cow to your supermarket.
If you can go vegetarian, that's even better
but if not, at the very least cutting down red meat helps.
And finally you can reduce food waste.
So 30-40% of the food that we grow is wasted.
So in developing countries. this food waste
often occurs from field to market
but in developed countries like the United States
this food waste disproportionately occurs
at the consumer end.
So it occurs in our refrigerators,
it incurs at our restaurants and in our supermarkets.
So just being smart about the food you buy
making sure you use it up,
freeze it if you're not going to use it.
And that just ensures
that the food that we've already paid that carbon
or greenhouse gas price for is actually consumed and useful.