Meat Free COP16 is the name given to the movement, which encourages global leaders at the 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to make what campaigners call an ethical lifestyle choice for world health, for the environment and for animals.

The view from campaigners is that emissions from animal farming are not sufficiently taken into account in international climate talks, even though the United Nations has produced reports that suggest that animal agribusiness is detrimental to the environment and promotes global warming.

According to a recent report from the UN, Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Production and Consumption: Priority Products and Materials from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), shifting to a meat and dairy free diet could be an effective approach to dealing with climate change and its consequences.

“Both meat and dairy, in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives,” states the UN report. According to the report, agriculture contributes 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

There is no question that to stop global warming, CO2 emissions need to be cut, however according to a 2009 New Scientist article written by Kirk Smith, only about half the warming that has occurred up to now is due to CO2. Methane and nitrous oxide are widely considered to be the most significant GHGs. According to the article, livestock agriculture is a major source of methane and nitrous oxide.

Smith writes that methane is an attractive target for manipulation because “methane is removed from the atmosphere much more rapidly than CO2, with a half-life of 8.5 years compared with many decades for CO2″. Therefore tackling methane could have an earlier impact on the pressing issue of global warming, he suggests.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, as well as being a main emitter of methane, the animal agriculture industry is one of the largest users of land and water, and a major cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss. It also leads to wide-scale land degradation, and is a major polluter of our rivers, oceans and drinking supplies, states the UN department.

“Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale and its potential contribution to their solution is equally large. The impact is so significant that it needs to be addressed with urgency,” stated the FAO, in 2006.

The Meat Free COP16 organisation states that it hopes delegates in the conference will set a good example by making a stand against animal agriculture. Furthermore they will push for COP16 organisers to provide only plant based meals during the conference, to show their complete resolve to tackle climate change as well as other environmental issues.

In addition, the organisation invites all members of the public to adopt what they call an “environmental, healthy and compassionate choice”.

Although the UN makes statements regarding the detrimental effects of animal agriculture, the issue is not high on the agenda for discussions in COP16. Campaigners of Meat Free COP16 anticipate that highlighting the issue will raise its standing in international talks, so that policies and regulations could be put in place if a collective agreement is reached.

Author: Marianna Keen | Climate Action

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.
He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.
He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.
He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.
Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees centigrade. Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes.
UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.
Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry.
Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: “Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It’s not a view shared by the NFU. Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us.”
On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day — the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.
Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern’s remarks. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment,” she said. “Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet.”
The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century.

A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock’s Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to livestock….however recent analysis by Goodland and Anhang co-authors of “Livestock and Climate Change” in the latest issue of World Watch magazine found that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions!

http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf

Based on their research, Goodland and Anhang conclude that replacing livestock products with soy-based and other alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change. They say “This approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrations-and thus on the rate the climate is warming-than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.”

The fact is that we are being informed of the dangerous path we are on by depending greatly on animal flesh for human consumption.
The information has been provided to us, therefore citizens like you and I, need to take the lead moving in the direction necessary so that those in power, governments and other unaware individuals realize that we are currently facing a planetary crisis .

We still have the opportunity to make the most effective steps in saving ourselves an this planet. By simply choosing a plant based diet as well as changing light bulbs, shutting off lights , riding bicycles and recycling we can reduce our carbon foot print by a huge amount.

We are gambling with our lives and with those of our future generations to come. It’s madness to know we are fully aware of the possible consequences but yet are failing to act. Climate change is not an issue for a community or of one nation, it is the challenge that humanity and all life on this planet faces.

Please make a truly environmental, healthy and compassionate choice, choose to drastically reduce your meat intake or simply go vegetarian or vegan.

Society for the Advancement of Animal Wellbeing
www.SAAWinternational.org

The march will take place:
WHEN: Saturday the 24th of October from 4-5pm.
WHERE: South entrance of building A8 of the Mitsukoshi department store.(Less than a 5 minute walk from Taipei City Hall MRT station.)

Please take a minute to watch this video made by the organizers of Taipei350. By the way 350 ppm is the safe limit of CO2 in the air, we are already way past that number!

Learn more at:
http://350taipei.blogspot.com/
http://www.350.org/

Across the border: An animal rights group is accusing an Iowa company of grinding up live male chicks. A warning: the video you’re about to see may be unsettling to some of our viewers. Undercover video released Tuesday by Mercy for Animals shows live male chicks being fed into a grinder at a hatchery in Spencer, Iowa. The owners of the hatchery Hy – Line International say that the video appears to show an inappropriate action and violation of our animal welfare policies. But a company spokesperson would not specify exactly what the violations are. The company says they are investigating the situation and will discipline employees if any violations are found. We’ll have much more on this story tonight at six.

Cloud and the wild horses of Montana’s Pryor Mountains are world famous but fame it appears is not going to protect the herd from a drastic government round up planned to begin September 1st in their spectacular wilderness home.

There are currently only 190 wild horses (one year and older) living in the Pryor Mountains. The BLM plans to remove 70 of them, plus foals. According to the foremost equine geneticist, Dr. Gus Cothran, 150-200 adult horses are needed in the herd to ensure their genetic diversity, which is vital to their long term survival.

These 70 horses would be placed in jeopardy. Any horses over 10 years of age can be bought directly by killer buyers and transported over the Northern border to Canadian slaughterhouses or south into Mexico. Younger horses not adopted would be put into government holding with 33,000 others that the BLM has removed from the wild and has proposed killing because they can no longer afford to feed them.

BLM cites poor range condition as the reason to remove the horses but abundant snow and rain for the past two and a half years has produced wonderful range conditions according to all who have visited Cloud and his herd. The Agency is not listening to anyone. They want this herd gutted. Nearly all the mares returned to the range would be given an experimental two-year infertility drug, PZP-22.

Associated Press

POSTED: 12:54 p.m. EDT, Aug 21, 2009

SANTIAGO, CHILE: Chile said today that tests show swine flu has jumped to birds, opening a new chapter in the global epidemic.

A top United Nations animal health expert said the infected turkeys have suffered only mild effects, easing concern about a potentially dangerous development. Chile’s turkey meat remains safe to eat, the expert said.

Chile’s health ministry said it ordered a quarantine today for two turkey farms outside the port city of Valparaiso after genetic tests confirmed sick birds were afflicted with the same virus that has caused a pandemic among humans.

So far, the virus — a mixture of human, pig and bird genes — has proven to be very contagious but no more deadly than common seasonal flu. However, virus experts fear a more dangerous and easily transmitted strain could emerge if it combines again with avian flu, which is far more deadly but tougher to pass along.

The farms’ owner, Sopraval SA, alerted the agriculture ministry after egg production dropped at the farms this month. After initial tests on four samples, further genetic testing confirmed a match with the subtype A/H1N1 2009, the agriculture and health ministries announced.

”What the turkeys have is the human virus — there is no mutation at all,” Deputy Health Minister Jeannette Vega told Chile’s Radio Cooperativa today.

The Health Ministry said it ordered a complete quarantine today and alerted the U.N.’s World Health Organization. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, meanwhile was working closely with Chilean government scientists, said Dr. Juan Lubroth, the head of infectious diseases for FAO in Rome.

Chile is sending some samples outside the country for more genetic sequencing to confirm that it matches the pandemic strain, Lubroth said. ”As a scientist, I want to touch, smell, feel, taste it” before agreeing that it’s a match, he said.

There are some encouraging signs that this particular outbreak remains mild. Egg production and water consumption among the birds dropped — prompting the company to take action — but the birds aren’t terribly sick, let alone dying in large numbers, Lubroth said.

”My understanding is that with the ones that were sick, it was a very mild disease,” Lubroth said. ”It’s significant in that we don’t need to recommend any drastic measures, as far as culling the population of turkeys. Let them go through their illness and recover — 7 to 10 days — and if they are sound and healthy, they could enter the food chain.”

Sopraval veterinarian Andrea Campos said that won’t happen because the outbreak has been limited to birds raised to lay eggs, not those being fattened for meat.

”In all of the birds raised to be fattened to produce meat, we have not found any illness. This is an illness entirely limited within a reproductive group,” Campos said.

Lubroth praised the company and the Chilean ministries for the actions they’ve taken.

”If it were highly virulent then we would recommend stronger measures,” Lubroth added.

Chile, meanwhile, is acting to contain the outbreak by limiting the turkeys’ contact with people and wildlife, Lubroth said. But given the mildness of this particular outbreak, he said ”I don’t see that there is going to be a large risk from what we know today of this type of transmission occurring.”

The virus has infected at least 12,000 people in Chile and is responsible for 128 confirmed deaths.