Destroying The Meat Industry Essay

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Is the steak on your plate really worth all of the cruelty, the destruction, and the wasted resources that went into creating that steaming piece of dead animal? The environment pays a heavy price for the world’s greedy addiction to meat. The meat industry consumes eight percent of the world's water. The meat industry dumps a third of all nitrogen and phosphorus waste into our fresh water supplies. The meat industry causes fifty-five percent of land and sediment erosion. The meat industry accounts for nearly twenty percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The meat industry is destroying the planet.
Water makes up seventy percent of the earth, yet only three percent of that is usable freshwater and only one percent of that is available to humans. Pound for pound, meat has a much …show more content…

According to a 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a diet consisting of meat causes more greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide to spew into the atmosphere than industry or transportation. Burning fossil fuels such as oil/gas releases carbon dioxide into the air. According to an article on PETA’s website, it’s claimed that “producing one calorie from animal protein releases eleven times as much carbon dioxide than producing one calorie from plant protein”. The billions of animals that are crammed onto factory farms produce massive amounts of methane, both during digestion and from the giant cesspools filled with their feces. Direct emissions of nitrous oxide come from synthetically fertilized agricultural soils and livestock manure. It has been estimated that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the present rate, that within the next twenty years, there will be potentially permanent effects on delicate ecosystems, biodiversity, and the human

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