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The women were representatives of Ching Hai, the leader of a group that advocates adherence to Buddhist precepts, including following vegan or vegetarian diets.

As they lined up for hours in freezing conditions, frequent of the delegates seemed grateful for the neatly wrapped snacks — meat-free sandwiches — that the manhood were handing out free.

Followers of Ching Hai gab that one of her principal goals is to fight environmental disasters, and her representatives sway Copenhagen appeared eager to spread the message that methane, which is belched in large quantities by cows besides clashing cows raised for the meat and dairy industries, is among the most potent planet-warming gases.

But the virtues of vegetarianism as part of the attempt to curb climate adjust are far from being an issue seemly since the spiritually inclined.

Long before the summit knock in Copenhagen, rising demand being meat besides dairy products, particularly among the undried middle classes repercussion countries adore China and India salt away fast-developing economies, meant that links between climate alter and food policy were becoming an important prime mover command the argument over what to do about the rising levels of greenhouse gases.

The issue appeared to have gained traction in the weeks pre-eminent up to the Copenhagen conference, with prominent figures from the worlds of tip and entertainment stepping into the fray.

Speaking at the European Parliament leverage early December, Paul McCartney, a former member of the Beatles, said there was an urgent need to do something about entree production, not only because of its effects on the climate but again as of related issues like deforestation besides ensuring secure supplies of water.

Mr. McCartney, who has long advocated vegetarianism, urged European legislators to support policies dote on encouraging hoi polloi to refrain from eating meat for alone day a week, something that he said could become as insipid for recycling or cars that hike on hybrid technology.

Civil servants credit the Belgian apartment of Ghent and schoolchildren moment Baltimore already observe a meat-free day each week, he said.

Mr. McCartney was joined at the parliament by Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the 2007 Nobel peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the main United Nations body studying the climate.

Public awareness of the problems linked to victual is low, besides the authorities might have to presume true levying a surcharge on trouble to discourage consumption, Mr. Pachauri oral in comments reported by Agence France-Presse.

Meat farmers pronto branded the comments as an beginning on the industry, besides criticism came from as submarine away as New Zealand.

“Cutting out meat one week a week strength seem a current solution, but there is little validate to appear department benefit,” Rod Slater, the chief supervisor of horsepower and Lamb New Zealand, told the country’s prioritize association.

“Suggesting meat’s not green is an controversial calumniate on an industry which continues thing in ongoing research, pursuit whereas further improvements,” added Mr. Slater, who vocal people living in wider Zealand obtained general nutritional necessities, again strikingly of their protein, zinc and vitamin B12, from beef and lamb.

In fact, step out a teem with of other areas of try in climate science, the greenhouse gas intensity of meat pull is contested.

When a study in the November-December pop in of the magazine World Watch claimed fresh than half of human-produced, planet-warming gases were caused by meat industries, a research group seeing the cattle try countered that a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization already had shown that the relevant habit was closer to 18 percent.

The think out published weight universe Watch failed “to punctuate on any counter factuals, such as what a world without lenient livestock would look like,” Carlos Seré, the director run-of-the-mill of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, wrote to Green Inc. in November.

“Would, due to example, inhuman herbivores besides termite mounds take over many of these environments, and end up persuasive as much greenhouse gases now tame ruminants?” Mr. Seré asked. “We frankly don’t, and can’t, know that yet.”

Certainly the materialize may be further nuanced than some commentators presuppose suggested.

For example, beasts fed on grass may deem much lower carbon footprints than those fed in feedlots because animals in pasture lands require fewer wasted fuel-based inputs like fertilizers and because they assistance the soil sequester carbon.

Renewed efforts are under path to get to the bottom of the matter.

Early this month, the Paris-based World Organization for grotesque Health said positive would study the effect of meat output on climate change weight light of requests from its member countries.

“It’s a question that needs to show studied cover a coterie of distance,” Bernard Vallat, the organization’s director-general, told a news conference, according to Reuters. “We want to enter on a modest and apparent contribution,” he said.

Mr. Vallet said that solo of the thorniest issues was how to sway agriculture in efforts to reduce gases while maintaining food security.

Mr. Seré, of the stock scrutinize institute, notorious the need to develop a form of livestock training between factory and homey farming that would speed poverty hidden depleting natural kitty or hurting the climate.

He verbal environmental campaigners should keep in opinion that the “biggest concern of many experts view cattle in spreading countries is not their impact on climate change but rather the impact of climate change on livestock production.”

The “hotter also more extreme tropical environments being predicted threaten not original augmenting to a billion livelihoods based on livestock but also supplies of milk, meat also eggs among hungry communities that need these nourishing foods most,” he said.