For the the World Watch Institute , two environmental scientists of the World Bank have rechecked the numbers of that UN report, which you might remember me mentioning not to long ago.
While rerunning the numbers, the World Bank scientists noticed some major omissions, drastically underestimating the true impact of livestock production on the global climate. The report did not count 8' million tons of CO2 equivalents caused by the respiration of the livestock. Nor did the report account for the at least 2' million tons of CO2 equivalents that would be absorbed by the improved CO2 balance of reduced land usage for food production, allowing forests to regenerate, absorbing more CO2.
The report also undercounted methane gas emissions by an additional 5' million tons of CO2 equivalents. For example, it uses citations dating back to such years as , , , , and , where emissions today would be much higher.
While the report based its calculations on Taking several additional categories of overlooked, undercounted and misallocated emissions into account, would add at the very least another 8' million tons of CO2 equivalents.
Even if we would switch the entire planet completely to renewable energies, suppress all industrial CO2 emissions worldwide and ban all cars, truck, airplanes and boats, new and old, everywhere, the effect for the climate would be smaller than switching to a vegan diet.
