Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

“These bare hills were once covered with a rich mosaic of trees”. Here’s a paper showing where you would expect to find temperate rainforest in Britain. Almost the entire Lake District is in this zone. kundoc.com/pdf-oceanic-an… …

“just a bit over five percent is where we live and where we work”: sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-c…

“the bit where we grow most of our food, arable farming, all the cereals, the potatoes, that’s nineteen percent of the United Kingdom.” assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

“What about our fruit and vegetables, horticulture? Less than one percent of the total UK area. “
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

“Fifty-one percent of the surface of the UK is used for grazing livestock and growing grass.”
This is the sum of the following data from Table 2.1:
Common rough grazing
Temporary grass under 5 years old
Total permanent grassland
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

“trees cover just over one tenth.”
sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-c…

“amongst the most deforested landscapes on Earth”
data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.L…

“When you take into account the forests and other ecosystems that would otherwise grow on land used by livestock, scientists estimate the carbon cost of just 4 kg of beef is equivalent to taking a flight from London to New York and back again.”
nature.com/articles/s4158…
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Searchinger et al estimate the global av carbon opportunity cost of beef is 1250kg per kg of protein. The protein content of beef ~ 25%. Figures from Atmosfair suggest a return flight from London to New York generates about 986kg of CO2 per passenger. theguardian.com/environment/ng…
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“Government figures show that livestock farms in the UK receive on average £26,000 a year in subsidies.”
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…

“Remember those 23m sheep that occupy so much of the UK? Well, they provide just over 1% of our food, in terms of calories.”
Total av consumption of lamb + mutton in UK is 5.0kg per person per year: beefandlamb.ahdb.org.uk/wp/wp-content/…
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100g of lamb contains approximately 294kcal. google.co.uk/search?q=lamb%… So annual av calorie intake from lamb is ~14,700kcal. Annual av total calorie intake per person in the UK is ~1,250,000 kcal: chartsbin.com/view/1150. Therefore lamb provides roughly 1.18% of our calories.
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“But, the surprising truth is that it [free range meat] causes more damage to the living world than indoor livestock farming, because it uses much more land, mostly for pasture:
nature.com/articles/s4189…
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

“One third of the world’s crops are being grown to feed to livestock.”
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…

“ninety percent of all the soya humans consume is embedded in fish, eggs, meat and dairy.”
d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/mapp…

“you look at the net carbon impacts of livestock, they’re horrendous.”
fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/…

“Rivers which are now polluted more by farming than by any other industry.”
publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…

“only fourteen percent of rivers in England and Wales are in good ecological health – an even worse figure than a few years ago. “
theriverstrust.org/2019/01/23/how…
publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cm…

“In America, factory farms are producing thirteen times more sewage than all the humans put together.”
foodandwaterwatch.org/insight/factor…

“It is being damaged so quickly that, according to the UN, we have just sixty years of harvests left.”
scientificamerican.com/article/only-6…

“At this rate, farming won’t be able to feed the growing human population.”
fao.org/state-of-food-…

“The number of farm animals is increasing twice as fast as the number of humans.”
monbiot.com/2015/11/19/pre…

“In Britain alone, we eat so much meat that we use twice as much farmland as the country possesses.”
The UK’s agricultural land footprint is 408,090 km2. The area of land in the UK used for agriculture is 171,900 km2. bio-fuel-watch.blogspot.com/2013/03/biofue…
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…

“Food’s global footprint would be miniaturised.”
Currently the most land-efficient means of growing protein is South American soya, which produces 2.5 tonnes per hectare per year. Solar Foods’ manufacturing projection is 50,000 tonnes per hectare per year.

“the team claims they could supply enough protein to feed all the world’s people in an area the size of Ohio.”
Daily protein requirement: 50g. x 7.5 billion = 140mt pa. 50,000t per ha pa means 2800 hectares. Including solar panels, that makes 5.6 million hectares of desert.”
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This is actually half the size of Ohio. For safety, I doubled the area to take account of inefficiencies/downtime, extra infrastructure etc that might not be included in their estimate.
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Their population has exploded
nature.com/articles/42926…

“the rewilders’ research suggests five times as many jobs have been created through eco-tourism and its wider effects on the local economy.”
ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a…