The Sceptic Tank is a committed environmentalist – and we don’t mean we’re in an asylum. No, we’ve put those days behind us, much like that time Tim Webb from up the road forced us to eat a slug.
Despite our feelings at the time, it turns out Tim might just have been a green visionary. You see, those of us fond of ribs or a lean porterhouse steak dripping in béarnaise sauce, are inadvertently contributing to soaring worldwide emissions.
According to US restaurant equipment store FoodServiceWarehouse.com, livestock is responsible for 35 to 40 per cent of the Earth’s methane emissions, 65 per cent of its nitrous oxide output and nine per cent of its carbon dioxide output.
This amounts to 2,850 CO2e grams per kilogram of mass gain for cows, and 1,139 of CO2e for pigs.
You can probably guess where this is going if we tell you they say that a cricket produces just 1.57 grams of CO2. That’s right, bug burgers, spider soufflé, the whole Bear Necessities.
FoodServiceWarehouse.com reckons swapping pork and beef for crickets and locusts could reduce livestock green house gas emissions by up to 95 per cent.
“The farming of insects would be a more sustainable and affordable form of meat production,” said Ashley Howard at FoodServiceWarehouse.com. “It may sound crazy, but with the huge impact that livestock is having on GHG – in much the same way as the burning of fossil fuels – we need to come up with other viable options.”
Now, the Tank is all for unconventional schemes to cut emissions, but we rather suspect that, like Tim Webb’s slug all those years ago, flambéed beetles may be much harder to swallow.
(Source: www.businessgreen.com )