After last week's program I bought this new book by Mike Berners-Lee,
and having read through the first chapter, I realized that almost everything I was going
to research and present in this week's program about land use and intensive livestock farming
has already been superbly and comprehensively laid out by Mike in the first 50 pages. So there was
a very strong temptation to simply say buy this book by Mike Berners-Lee, read it carefully and
follow its recommendations. Easy weekend for me. 'Lovely jubbly'! But that would be lazy, so what I
thought I'd do instead is quite shamelessly use most of the statistics in Chapter one of this
book - a chapter all about food - to illustrate how our eating habits are impacting on our climate
and environment. Because as the title of the book quite accurately points out, there is no planet B!
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. The subtitle of this book is 'A handbook for the
make-or-break years' , and it's written in exactly that way - a handbook that you can dip in and out
of depending on what you need to learn about for any given aspect of climate change. And because
food and animal agriculture is a pretty convoluted subject, this week I'll mostly be bombarding you
with charts and statistics, because you know I like doing that! They're not good statistics,
don't get me wrong. They're all terrible. But, you know, it is terrible isn't it! So buckle
up friends, and here we go. As of 2019 our planet is made up like this... 71% is oceans,
which leaves 29% habitable land. Although sea level rise is constantly changing that
ratio of course. Of that habitable land, 50% is currently used for agriculture, 37% is forests,
and 11% shrubland, leaving just 1% of the land for urban areas, where we mostly live,
and 1% for freshwater sources. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
human beings on average require two thousand three hundred and fifty kilo calories per day,
which from now on we'll just called calories. Globally we grow 5,940 calories worth of crops
per person per day, which is nearly two and a half times what we consume. It varies from region
to region of course. Here's the chart that shows that variation. North America and Oceania are way
out in front, growing eight times their actual calorific requirement. In Europe we grow about
four times what we need, and even in Sub-Saharan Africa they still manage to extract one and a
half times their calorific requirements from the land. Of that global average of 5940 calories,
340 calories worth will stay in the ground and another 330 will be lost, mainly as a result of
poor storage facilities. We use 810 calories worth as biofuels, mostly for vehicles in many parts of
the world - especially South America. And then 1740 calories of the overall 5940 gets fed to
animals. So a quick check at this stage tells us we've got 2520 left for human consumption.
Meat and dairy produce 590 calories per person per day. We lose 320 of those calories in processing
and distribution. So if we add net animal protein to net plant protein at this stage, we get a total
of 2790 calories available for human consumption. We throw about 260 calories away each day in our
household waste, but that still leaves 2530 which is 180 calories more than we really need. But of
course, because of the incredibly unequal way this food gets distributed around the planet,
around 800 million people still go undernourished through a simple lack of calories, and a further
two billion have deficiencies in their diets of essential micronutrients like iron, zinc,
Vitamin A or iodine. And let's just think about those 590 calories per person per day that come
from the animals that we kill and eat. As we've just seen, to get those animals to a size we
want requires 1740 calories of food that we could directly eat ourselves, as well as another 3810
calories of stuff that humans can't digest, like grass and pasture. So the average farm animal only
converts just over 10% of the total calories eaten into meat and dairy products. The human
edible food that we grow and feed to animals equates to 75% of the calorific requirement of
the entire human species. And the calories we get back as a result equate to only 23% of our
calorific needs. And the conversion rate varies wildly from eggs and milk at about 18% efficiency
right down to beef at about 3% efficiency. And all that land we set aside to provide the extra
3810 calories of grass and pasture could just be left well alone to remain as forestry land,
locking up vast quantities of carbon dioxide, or as wild areas of broad biodiversity to give all
the other species that exist on our planet bit of a fighting chance of not going extinct! So,
that's calories. But you might argue that the calories we get from animals are more
important because they contain all the essential proteins that are not available from plants. Well,
let's just have a think about that. According to Mike Berners-Lee's research, the average human
requires about 44 grams of protein per day. Here's how we produce our protein globally at the moment.
184 protein grams per person per day are available in the crops we grow. 51 protein grams per person
per day are available in grass and pasture. But of course we humans won't be eating that, at least
not without feeling quite poorly anyway! We lose about 10 grams through harvesting inefficiencies,
which leaves about 174 protein grams of crops per person per day. We lose a bit more in storage,
as we've discovered earlier, so that leaves a 167 grams of protein per person per day
currently produced globally. We keep 61 grams to feed to human beings and we use 89 grams to feed
to livestock. The total of 140 protein grams per person per day that we feed to animals from plants
grass and pasture turns into 38 grams of protein available for human use. The other 102 grams is
burnt by the animal itself for energy while it's alive. There's a bit more loss in processing and
distributing the animals, and that leaves us with a total of 88 grams of plant and animal
protein per person per day. On average, humans eat about 81 of those 88 grams of protein per day,
throwing about seven grams into our household waste. Of the 81 grams of protein we actually
consume on a daily basis, almost half is just excess consumption. Remember that we only need
44 grams of protein per person per day, so we could quite easily provide that from the plant
protein that we already produce. 'Ah yes!' say the naysayers, 'it's all very well promoting your
hippie-dippie new-age diets, and talking about land use for livestock farming, but look at all
the bleedin' rainforests getting cut down to grow soya beans for your poncy tofu, you hypocritical
bast...' No. Let's just have a think about soya. In fact, let's look at the bean itself first of
all so we can understand why it's so widely grown in the first place. Mike Berners-Lee tells us that
gram for gram a soya bean has more of almost every human essential nutrient than beef or lamb. But
when you feed one to a cow or a sheep you only get about one-tenth of the weight back in meat,
and when it comes to the accusation of land clearance for human soybean consumption, here's
some stats from some other sources that might help clarify things. The UN Food and Agriculture
Organization tells us that the Brazilian amazon rainforest has reduced in area by about 20% in
the last 50 years. The Rainforest Foundation tells us that animal agriculture accounts for about 91%
of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. This chart from Statista.com shows the rapid rate of
growth in soy production in Brazil since 2006. 95% of the soybeans farmed on Amazon land are
sent across the ocean to feed cattle and poultry in Europe and Asia, with Reuters reporting that
80% is sent to China. And this Bloomberg report from January 2019 assesses that that figure is
set to increase still further as China turns away from US soy markets following Trump's trade wars
and starts buying even more from Brazil instead. So getting rid of millions and millions of trees
means far less CO2 getting captured. And by the way, if you burn the trees down to get rid of them
then you release all their stored CO2 immediately - straight up into the atmosphere! In fact,
clearing of tropical forests and rainforests to get more grazing land and farmland is
responsible for about 2.8 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions per year. On top of that,
a cow produces about 55 gallons or 250 litres of methane every day. Now if you've got a herd of say
30 or 40 head of Aberdeen Angus cattle up in the highlands of Scotland, then that methane output
has a pretty negligible impact. The problem is that there are currently 1.5 billion cattle being
intensively farmed around the planet, and the methane they're spewing out equates to around
2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year. And that's just the farting and burping.
Mike Berners-Lee adds up all the emissions from the industry to tell us this. In rough numbers,
humankind's greenhouse gas footprint is 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year,
of which about 23% comes from food and land. And the main cause of that 23% is deforestation. Now,
the meat eaters among you will probably be bracing yourselves for the next part of the video where
I conclude that the whole world has to revert immediately to a vegan diet, and if you could see
your way clear to getting some sackcloth and ashes so you could do a bit of ritual self-flagellation
then all the better! Well not quite. But it is fairly likely that we will quite quickly need to
reduce our average global consumption of meat and dairy products by about 50%, and of course that
means here in the West our reduction will need to be far greater than that. I would say though,
that as someone who moved to a plant-based diet about 18 months ago, it seems I made the change at
exactly the right time because, as with just about everything else in our market driven economies,
when the big operators get wind of a change in public demand they generally throw a large amount
of cash at the challenge of meeting that demand - eager as they always are to maximize their profit
and the return on investment for their rapacious shareholders. So, at least here in the UK,
all the big supermarkets are now offering such a mind-bogglingly wide range of vegetarian and
vegan options that I find myself quite spoiled for choice. And very little of it is tofu by the
way. I can honestly say that I've knowingly eaten tofu no more than about two or three times in the
18 months since I'd changed my diet. I can highly recommend you get yourself a copy of this book.
It's an absolutely fantastic reference manual containing a wealth of information on all of
the really key areas of human over consumption currently affecting our ecosystem. And in case
you're wondering, I don't get paid to promote this or anything else on this channel. I just
think this is a really good book full of very useful information, and that's why I think you
should read it if you can. That's it for this week. Do give us a like and a share if you found
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very much for watching, have a great week, and remember to just have a think. See you next week