Climate change and meat: what's the beef?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2019
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would cutting back on meat consumption help tackle climate change?
What impact would this have on individuals, governments and businesses? Livestock farming accounts for at least 14.5% of all human emissions - with beef making up the highest proportion of this.
Meat free burgers are now available at fast food restaurants across the western world; veganism is on the rise, as is flexitarianism - a largely vegetable-based diet supplemented occasionally with meat. But how far can these eating trends help to reduce carbon emissions?
David Aaronovitch is joined by:
Dr Hannah Richie - Head of Research at Our world in data, University of Oxford Tim Searchinger - Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute and Princeton University Professor Louise Fresco - President of the Wageningen University Laura Wellesley - Research fellow in the Energy, Environment and Resources Department at Chatham House Toby Park - Head of Energy and Sustainability, Behavioural Insights Team
Producer: Serena Tarling Editor: Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:09.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David O'Ronovich. |
| 0:14.0 | In this striplit, chart-bedecked virtual room, we're joined by the world's leading experts, |
| 0:18.9 | who inside half an hour can tell us everything we might want to know about a burning issue of the day, |
| 0:24.4 | which today is whether our love of meat is really a danger to the planet. |
| 0:29.5 | And if you enjoy this podcast, you might enjoy some of our other episodes, including ones on vaping, vaccinations, and the British Constitution. |
| 0:37.1 | That's three separate podcasts, |
| 0:38.8 | by the way. You can find them all on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:50.6 | We're often told that our diets are killing us individually, but might they kill us collectively? |
| 0:57.5 | Climate protests came to Smithfield Market in London this week under the slogan of |
| 1:01.8 | beef equals grief. So some simple questions this week, is it true? Do meat eating and animal |
| 1:09.4 | rearing contribute significantly to global warming and other environmental problems? |
| 1:14.5 | And if they do, what needs to change and how might we go about it? |
| 1:19.0 | Step inside the briefing room and let's find out. |
| 1:25.4 | First, I want to understand how much meat we humans eat |
| 1:29.1 | and how our habits have changed in recent years. |
| 1:33.3 | Dr Hannah Ritchie, from Our World in Data at Oxford University, |
| 1:37.0 | has crunched the numbers from the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation. |
| 1:45.5 | Globally, the largest consumers of meat are typically Western countries. |
| 1:50.2 | So the standouts are the US, Australia and New Zealand. |
| 1:54.2 | Argentina is also a large consumer of meat. |
| 1:57.5 | So the global average is around 40 kilograms per person per year. So these countries are eating more than double meat. So the global average is around 40 kilograms per person per year. So these countries |
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