Meat-eating `damaging environment`
Giving up eating meat would do more to save the environment than cutting down on car usage, says 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
The chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has sparked controversy by calling on families to stop eating meat for at least one day a week.
He said: "Meat production represents 18% of global human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, including 37% of global methane emissions.
"These have 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide and 65% of nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide."
But Government ministers and farming groups say the meat industry had been unfairly targeted. Said health minister Ben Bradshaw: "I haven’t looked at the details, but I suspect meat consumption is not the biggest contributor to climate change.
"There are very sensible reasons to have a healthy balanced diet, and I think some people eat too much meat, but I think there are other more useful things one can do to reduce one’s carbon emissions."
The National Farmers Union said "simplistic measures" to reduce meat consumption will actually "create more problems than they solve".
Copyright © PA Business 2008
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