“..India tells West to stop eating beef..”
“..India has urged the West to give up eating beef .. to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.
The environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said if the world abandoned beef consumption, emissions would be dramatically reduced ..
.. and global warming would slow down.
“The solution to cut emissions is to stop eating beef.
It leads to emission of methane which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide,” he said.
“The best thing for us, India, is we are not a beef-eating nation.
The United States, the world’s largest emitter along with China, is also the world’s greatest beef-eating nation ..
.. and consumes 25 per cent more than Europe.
His comments follow a call last month by Lord Stern, the author of a British Government study on climate change, for people to give up eating meay to reduce emissions.
“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” said Lord Stern.
“It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources.
A vegetarian diet is better.”
go to source/story>>India tells West to stop eating beef - Telegraph
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
“The United States, the world’s largest emitter along with China, is also the world’s greatest beef-eating nation and consumes 25 per cent more than Europe.”
from other sources -
Lord Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, predicts that eating meat could in the future become as socially unacceptable as drink driving.
Livestock farming has come under fire in recent years from environmental campaigners because methane from cattle and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases.
A 400-page United Nations report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that cattle farming is “responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases.”
The world cattle population is estimated to be about 1.3 billion head. India is the nation with the largest number of cattle, about 281,700,000 or 28.29% of the world cattle population. The United States: 96,669,000, 34.32% of India’s total, 9.71% of world cattle population. New Zealand is included among “other countries”: 49,756,000 5.00%.
So India has 2.9 times [very near three times] the number of cattle as does the USA, and don’t Indian cows live longer because they aren’t killed and eaten.