Meat production, climate change and ethics.

Humans contribute substantially to the emissions of carbon dioxide causing global warming, and meat producing livestock contributes to this. Estimates of the global greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock sector vary from 5% to 50%. Nevertheless, the emissions are in absolute terms substantial, and the issue needs to be mitigated. The present paper analyses and discusses various solutions for how to mitigate climate change to the extent it is caused by animal production. The ethical problem of mitigation of climate change, to the extent it is caused by animal production, is an extremely complex anddifficult issue. There are different views on the nature and scale of impact and different mitigation approaches, as well as different ethical aspects of the mitigation approaches.