The Anthropocene In Two Pie Charts

All the mammals in the world today weigh more than five times as much as ten thousand years ago. 

1greenblogger | ecologue

1greenblogger | visualcapitalist

Cattle alone (416 megatons) weigh more than twice as much as all of the mammals on earth before humans domesticated animals, and releases 12,283 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases during the collective animals’ life span.*

Most of the rest of the world’s livestock animals are, like cattle, ruminants; they and their compartmentalized stomachs belch and excrete methane, whose wiggly molecules are 80 times more powerful at bouncing heat back to earth rather than letting it escape into the atmosphere.

Our pets are small in number, but mighty in impact: cats and dogs contribute almost another megaton of greenhouse gases every year, in large part because they eat a fifth of the world’s meat and fish (and a third of the food from animal sources) in the US — more, per capita, than many humans. 

In short: the livestock we breed is a huge contributor to human impacts on earth.

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* Approximately 42 percent of a cow or steer is edible (pdf, p. 11); 416 megatons of cattle yields 173 megatons of meat; beef production is responsible for 71 kg of CO2-eq per kilogram.