Eat a carrot, hurt the economy? Bad reporting, false choices.

I was stunned this morning to see a headline over an AP article saying, Eat a carrot, hurt the economy? Sometimes. The story summarized a study in Lancet, saying that:

In Britain, experts estimated that fixing the country's bad eating habits might prevent nearly 70,000 people from prematurely dying of diet-related health problems like heart disease and cancer. It would also theoretically save the health system 20 billion pounds ($32 billion) every year.

In Brazil, however, the rates of illnesses linked to a poor diet are not as high as in the U.K. So Brazilians would get relatively few health benefits while their economy might lose millions.

Yet even a quick look at the Lancet series on The Health Benefits of Tackling Climate Change finds another conclusion. The first paragraph says making technical and lifestyle changes to combat global warming would not be "socially uncomfortable and economically painful" as is commonly thought, at least from a public-health point of view. In fact,

If properly chosen, action to combat climate change can, of itself, lead to improvements in health.

The series highlights several areas where climate-inspired changes would make people healthier, by reducing household energy emissions, changing urban land transport, and finding low-carbon ways to generate electricity.

But what about those Brazilian ranchers? They would have a greater health benefit than in the UK:

A 30% fall in the adult consumption of saturated fat from animal sources would reduce heart disease in the population by around 15% in the UK and by 16% in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. If the study had used additional health outcomes such as obesity and diet-related cancers, the health gains might have been even more substantial.

The study lists a "key message" as being:

Achieving a substantial cut in greenhouse-gas emissions will depend on reducing the production of food from livestock and on technological improvements in farming.

The full journal article itself, Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: food and agriculture, does address the benefits of raising animals for meat in certain situations:

For example, ruminant livestock in upland and marginal areas can help to maintain and build the carbon-sequestering properties of soil. Where grazing cattle are reared without use of feed inputs or additional fertiliser, and at low stocking densities, carbon sequestering can outweigh methane and nitrous oxide emissions....Further, in many geographical regions (including the uplands in the UK) no form of food production other than livestock rearing is feasible at present. Livestock rearing also has a key cultural and economic role in many parts of the world and is estimated to create livelihoods for a billion of the world's poor people.

False choices. The AP story presents a false limit on the choices involved. Certainly if people worldwide were suddenly told to quit raising animals for food and offered no other way to feed themselves, misery would ensue. But for the most part, the choices are not limited to "raise meat or starve."

Limited consequences. The AP article doesnt' mention other consequences not slowing global warming by all means possible, including the easy and healthy choice of eating less meat. More carbon emissions creates increased human aggression and ever more environmental refugees, already 20 million strong and growing rapidly, "more than those displaced by war and political repression combined" according to a U.N. study. We also hurt or kill other living beings and environmental systems.

So unless you are a subsistence farmer raising livestock on the thin, rocky pastures, go ahead and eat that carrot. Before you pick a burger over beans for lunch, check out these pictures showing the effects of rising sea levels on everything from the property value of beach houses to the displacement of 13 million people in Bangladesh to the very existence of the tiny island country of Tuvalu.