This is a shocking change for New Zealand. It’s usually livestock entries they try to hide.
Yeah probably, without looking at tis article I can 100% see this being the case. We don’t move fast enough and the government doesnt prioritise well. That said anecdotally, farmers have made greener changes in recent years. I know a lot with solar and wind and other such technologies.
Most farm emissions, especially for animal agriculture, are not from electricity or fuel usage. They could use 100% renewable powered everything and that will still leave 80-95% of the emissions.
direct energy consumption (i.e., transportation, heating/cooling facilities, etc.) accounts for an estimated 5–20% of emissions from energy use in livestock supply chains, including feed production and processing, and is the lowest source of emissions in animal agriculture, according to FAO’s Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM) (Gerber et al. 2013; FAO 2020).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-021-03047-7
There is not much way around the fact that the production levels and consumption levels of meat, dairy, etc have to be reduced to make emissions go down in a larger way. Eccentric fermentation (methane from ruminant digestion) alone is 30% of the all global methane emissions. Another 4.5% of all global methane emissions come from farm animal waste as well. On top of all the emissions producing animal feed
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
the owid link you provided relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which i find to be problematic. do you have another study which supports your claim, but doesn’t rely on combining LCA studies conducted with disparate methodologies?
