Who knew it would be so easy to save the planet? This is the first paragraph from a disconcertingly encouraging story in yesterday's Independent: "Curry spices could hold the key to reducing the enormous greenhouse gas emissions given off by grazing animals such as sheep, cows and goats, scientists have claimed."
Apparently, researchers at Newcastle University have discovered that coriander and turmeric, when ingested by said grazing animals "can reduce by up to 40 per cent the amount of methane that is produced by bacteria in a sheep's stomach and then emitted into the atmosphere when the animal burps" – as they all do, epically.
How to stop cows burping is the real front line in the greenhouse gas reduction business. Methane is approximately 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2: each day one of Britain's 10 million or so cows pumps out (from its front end, mostly) up to 200 litres of methane – equivalent in its so-called "greenhouse effect" to significantly more than the amount of CO2 produced by a Land Rover Freelander on an average day's drive of 33 miles.
This is where Sir Paul McCartney comes in (and I don't mean driving a Land Rover). At the weekend the ex-Beatle produced an entire Sunday magazine colour supplement devoted to the benefits of vegetarianism; among its many fascinating assertions was that "the UN has calculated that the combined climate change emissions of animals bred for their meat were about 18 per cent of the global total – more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together".
If that's the case, why is it that whenever the world's leaders meet to pretend to do something about "saving the planet from climate change", the topic of converting mankind to vegetarianism never comes up? I can think of some reasons. First among them is that if an elected leader in the West were to make such a suggestion to his own people, he would face ridicule, or even electoral annihilation. We love our meat (or at least, the vast majority of us do) and the idea of a government making it much more expensive, let alone banning it, would be seen as a grotesque infringement of a basic freedom – to eat what tastes nice to us.
Lord (Nicholas) Stern is generally accorded a respectful audience when he preaches the need to reduce our use of fossil fuels; yet when, nine months ago, the author of the Stern Review on climate change raised the idea that we should switch to a vegetarian diet, he was greeted with abuse – and has not repeated the suggestion in public since. Yet, objectively, making meat more expensive is no more of an infringement of a fundamental freedom than making travel cost more. In fact, freedom of movement – which is what affordable petrol provides, especially in rural areas – is a more important form of liberty than the right to a meat-rich diet.
More to the point, the eating of meat rather than any alternative diet is neither here nor there as far as the wider economy is concerned: its abandonment would be terminally bad news for livestock farmers, but that's all. Without fuel for transportation, however, not only would the entire country grind to a halt, but people might actually begin to starve.
It is, in this context, inherently odd that petrol is taxed at punitively high levels throughout Europe, while the production of meat is subsidised. Producers of crude oil in the North Sea are taxed at up to 75 per cent on the stuff they bring ashore, and then we, the end users, are taxed a further 70 per cent or so on what we put in our cars. These taxes on energy consumption are set to rise dramatically, as the coalition government seeks to honour its Labour predecessor's proposed "environmental levy" on electricity bills.
Last week the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group said that "fuel poverty" levels had almost quadrupled over the past six years, with nearly five million households so affected. It went on to argue that the bipartisan approach of ever-increasing tax on fuel was "regressive" and having "a disproportionate impact on those on low incomes".
Meanwhile, the same poor, insofar as they pay taxes, will simultaneously be subsidising the EU's grotesque Common Agricultural Policy, which in all costs consumers €55bn a year. Many of those subsidies exist solely to maintain the continent's production of red meat; for example, 38 per cent of the income of Welsh cattle and sheep hill farmers consists of straight subsidy.
