Narmeen Maria

I was able to watch the documentary Cowspiracy over this past weekend. It was very, very interesting and taught me about problems within the animal agricultural industry. It was unbeknownst to me that the livestock industry was a major contributer to climate change. The documentary had provided its audience with graphs and visuals depicting how much of a heavy impact raising and tending to cattle for our consumption purposes has on our environment. I was supposed to enter a screenshot of one of the graphs but since my last post didn’t go through entirely, the graph essentially depicted the way that emissions from animal agriculture are expected to increase by 80% by 2050, in comparison to fossil fuels which are only supposed to increase by 20%.

While the documentary was actually great I was a little skeptical on the numbers that were being given, and am in the process of doing my own research into them. But according to the World Bank Group, animal agriculture is responsible for 51% of human climate change. Not only that, but animal agriculture produces 65% of the world’s nitrous oxide, a global warming potential of 296x greater than CO2 emissions. Raising livestock for our consumption, according to the documentary, also uses 30% of our world’s water, 45% of the planet’s land, and is responsible for 91% of amazon destruction.