[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," we'll look at food, its energy inputs and emissions outputs.

- The total amount of energy used by the food sector is about 10% to 12% of the total primary energy use on a global scale.

So when the energy prices goes high, fertilizer goes higher, food prices are going too higher.

Also, the transportation cost is going to go higher.

- Yes.

- And it has a huge impact on the supply of food.

[Scott] Absolutely.

- The cost of food.

- You're talking about a significant growth in the amount of food that needs to be produced while at the same time we're trying to reduce emissions because we know that climate change is such a big problem.

We're in a multi-decade drought now that's having people rethink whether California is the place to grow fruits and vegetables because of access to water.

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," the energy and climate footprint of our food.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Everything in our modern lives has energy inputs and emissions outputs, and that's certainly the case for our food.

It's not just all the energy that powers the equipment required to grow, transport, and process our food and the energy inputs for fertilizer required by our modern food systems, but also the emissions from land and livestock, and particularly from food loss and food waste.

We'll talk about all this and potential solutions with Dr. Atul Jain.

He's a climate scientist and professor studying the intersection of climate and agriculture.

The author of several IPCC assessments and more than 250 scientific articles.

Ryan Hobart is the managing director for climate and the environment at the United Nations Foundation, coming from the energy division of the U.N.

Environment program.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll talk about food, its energy and climate footprint.

Let's just kind of talk about what the energy that goes into food.

What's the whole chain look like when you're putting energy into making food?

- Well, that's exactly the right word is chain.

It's when you're producing the food on the land, the farming equipment that it takes to make the food, the fertilizers and pesticides that go into it.

You then have to transport the products to, often, a processing plant.

The processing plant itself uses energy.

You're gonna transport it again to a distributor... - And every transport then uses energy-- - Every transport uses energy.

And then at the point of sale, the people buy the food and then they transport it, they put in their refrigerator which uses energy.

You might heat the food in your oven or microwave at the end, so really throughout and then there's cooling also that needs to happen at different stages, so to make sure that the food stays fresh.

So, there's sort of energy is just like modern life, it's kind of all over the place.

- And if I look at this thing behind me, even the irrigation.

- Yeah, you gotta pump the water.

- Pump the water.

So the total amount of energy used by the food sector is about 10% to 12% of the total primary energy use on a global scale.

- Wow.

Yeah, incredible amount of energy going into our food.

I wonder if what the net energy equation of that is.

[everyone laughs] How much in and how much out?

- Yeah, very little of that primary energy translates into calories that are put in human bodies.

- So a lot of energy goes into the whole food process and all of those different things have emissions.

Just in a big sense, how much of our emissions come from food systems, you know?

- So about 35% of the total greenhouse gas emissions come from the food sector.

- Emitting what, 30 or 40 billion tons of CO2 every year in the world?

- Fifty billion tons of CO2 equivalent amount which combines all the greenhouse gases.

- Okay, so a third of that is from the whole food system.

- The whole food system.

- Incredible.

What happens to cause those emissions?

- So there are four major sectors of food production, which contributes to the total greenhouse gas emissions.

First one is the land cover and land use change.

So, that sector contributes approximately 29% of the total food production emissions.

- Preparing the land.

- Preparing the land.

So the second major sector is the farm sector, for example, tilling the land, then planting the crops, irrigating the crops.

Then the third important sector is, you know, the livestock emissions.

- Okay.

- Enteric fermentation.

And also the management of the manure that contributes approximately about 22-21% of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

And the last one is actually beyond farm gate, which is approximately 11%.

- Okay, okay.

- Just to emphasize one point about livestock, something like 60-plus percent of all mammal biomass on Earth is actually livestock.

Thirty-five, something like that, is humans and two percent is wild mammals.

- So these guys-- - So these guys are taking up, yeah, there are billions of these animals that are wholly dedicated to feeding us.

- Beef actually contributes about 69 kg of greenhouse gases.

- Kilograms?

- Per kg of beef.

- Okay.

If I eat a pound of beef, I'm putting out 69 pounds of CO2.

- Yes, you're right.

- Okay.

- They contribute approximately 25% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector.

At the same time, if you think about the plant-based food like wheat, it's only about two kg of actually greenhouse gas per kg.

- Right, I got you, okay.

- And so from that perspective, it is a huge amount.

It's a, you know, an order, more than an order of magnitude greater impact if you're doing beef compared to most vegetables.

And there's really two reasons for that, I mean, one is we eat the animal and the animal eats the grain that we feed them and we have to grow the grain.

So we're sort of one step removed rather than just eating the grain.

The second part is enteric fermentation, which was mentioned, which is essentially cow burps, which are essentially raw methane coming straight from the animal.

- And then it's not just cows, we have chickens and fish and sheep and goats and... - Yeah, if you're looking at chicken for example, much less energy intensive, but still on par with cheese a little bit less than, for example, pork, I think, but way, way less than beef which is, you know, lamb I think is maybe the other one that's up there with beef.

And partly for fish, it really depends.

Are they wild caught?

Are they farmed?

Farming fish can actually be quite energy and emission intensive.

The problem with wild caught fish is that we're overfishing a lot of fisheries and so, there are other kinds of trade-offs.

- Yeah.

And then how about the food waste?

How much emissions come from the waste food waste-- - Okay, so about one fourth of the total emissions come from the food waste in fact, actually it's a huge amount.

- A quarter of the emissions.

- Quarter of emissions.

- In that system is waste.

- Yeah, yes.

- So that means that of total greenhouse gases across the board, you're talking about eight to ten percent are related to food loss and food waste.

You know, when you're talking about food waste, it's really for two reasons.

One is all the inputs that we were talking about earlier are being wasted.

They're not being used to feed people.

And then food, when it goes to a landfill, emits methane and unless you capture that methane somehow, or you turn it into compost, those emissions are really significant in the food system.

So we talk about food loss and waste.

So developed countries have a lot of food waste because we know how to store food.

The problem is we don't use it when it's, you know, when it's edible.

- Yeah.

- So we waste it.

- Use by.

- The loss piece is mostly a developing country problem where you have crops that sit on the field because they can't be harvested or they're harvested and they can't be properly stored.

There isn't refrigeration, things like that.

So those two things go together, but they tend to be different kinds of problems in different geographies.

- And then how much do we emit from clearing the land for ag?

- About 30% of the total greenhouse gas emission from the food sector actually is because of the cutting the parts.

- That's a big number.

- It's a huge number.

Land has to be prepared for agriculture purpose.

So they dig the land, you know, all the carbon stored in the soil goes up in the atmosphere, right.

- Right.

- In order to prepare the land, they also burn this biomass that also contribute to the greenhouse gases.

- We've talked about livestock, we've talked about food waste, we've talked about clearing the land and things like that.

Are there other big areas it?

- Distribution, transportation and the processing.

In fact, if you combine these three, the activities, they contribute significant amount of greenhouse gas emission.

In fact, in terms of the energy consumption, almost 50% of the total energy consumed for the food production goes in these three activities.

- Because that's all running on equipment and the equipment runs on diesel.

- Diesel and also, you know, the refrigerators and the cooling systems are used for the transportation purpose to actually store the food as well as to actually save the food, you know.

- Okay.

So to the extent we could electrify some of the equipment and then charge the batteries in that with low emitting or no emitting sources, you gotta have both, then we could lower some of that.

- Yes.

We talked about producing the fertilizer, using its farm machineries, transportation sector.

In fact, actually we should think about more efficient, you know, the vehicles which transport the food.

So there are many, many actions we can take in order to control the greenhouse emissions.

- What share of agriculture is used to make biofuels?

- So since the '80s, so if we're looking just at corn, corn acreage has gone up by 50%.

- Okay.

- From about 60 million acres to something like 90 million.

At the same time, about half of all corn is diverted to produce energy for vehicles - In the U.S.?

- In the U.S. - Half of all corn.

- Yeah.

- Does it make sense?

- That's a great question.

- Yeah.

- According to my study, U.S. is the largest producer of ethanol.

In fact, currently they're producing approximately 15 billion gallons-- - Fifteen billion gallons per?

- Per year.

- Per year.

- Per year.

Globally, about three to four percent of the total land is used for the production of ethanol.

But this number actually vary depending on the countries and the region.

- I think it's good to distinguish between the U.S. and other countries 'cause it's true and it's really, in the U.S. it's really been a political issue.

I think a lot of us in the '90s and early 2000s thought that that might be a stepping stone towards getting farmers involved into production of renewable energy.

And in some ways it was, but now we're at a point where we know that we're not really saving that many emissions.

And you also have to account for, in some places, maybe their pressures on forests or other ecosystems to expand that production.

And is that really a good use?

Should we be felling forests in order to produce liquid fuels?

That's even more challenging, I think.

- And then there's the impact of energy and emissions on the food system.

So like if energy prices go up, what happens?

- So when the energy prices goes high, you can think of what we have talked about.

Fertilizer goes higher.

- Right.

- Food prices are going to high, right.

Also, the transportation cost is going to go higher.

So think of example of invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

You know, the commodity price right away jump, you know, and it had a huge impact on the supply of food.

- Absolutely.

- The cost of food.

- Yeah, I think there's actually a really big distinction to be made between our prices going up a little bit.

And we know what that is now because we're facing inflation.

But I think that's marginal compared to a disruption either because of war geopolitics in something like the fertilizer market.

I mean, people produced a lot less food in Africa last year because of a lack of access to fertilizer and a huge jump in prices.

- There's a huge environmental and social justice thing here.

- Absolutely.

- Prices go up globally for something, the people, it's progressive.

The people who are least able to, it really impacts them.

- Absolutely.

So you add that to the fact that climate change is already hitting, for example, the Horn of Africa in a way that's really severe and you're talking, yeah, about near famine conditions.

- Where else does it, are we seeing that kind of climate impacts on food?

- I mean, we're in a, you know, multi-decade drought now that's having people rethink whether they should raise livestock out west.

Whether California is the place to grow fruits and vegetables because of access to water.

I mean, all of these things are impacting the food system in myriad different ways.

And at the same time, we were talking about population growing from eight, it'll be, you know, we think 10 billion by mid-century and those people will be eating more meat, for example.

So you're talking about really a significant growth in the amount of food that needs to be produced.

While at the same time, we're trying to reduce emissions because we know that climate change is such a big problem.

- So your points are well taken, but it's quite, you know, diverse in terms of the effects.

Obviously, you have mentioned about the droughts in the U.S. and droughts in Europe.

But some of the factors, in fact, also help, in fact, to, you know, to enhance the productivity, for example, higher CO2 concentrations.

Studies suggest that under the high emission scenarios, the production of corn could go about 20%, 25% lower, but at the same time, wheat prediction could go higher about 70%.

- Yeah, I think on the whole I think you, the science is pretty clear that it's not a good thing.

Another interesting finding is that food under climate change becomes less nutritious.

So maybe you grow a little bit more of something because of enhanced CO2, but then the nutrition of that plant is lowered.

For example, the vitamins in a kernel of corn will be 20, 30% less than they were because of heat stress, things like that.

- Interesting, yeah, I didn't even think about that.

Let's talk about solutions.

We've talked about a lot of issues.

Let's just start with the waste.

How can we reduce food waste, Atul?

- So there are many ways, in fact, actually on an individual basis, I would say that we should plan in advance when we go for shopping.

We should not overbuy the stuff.

The most important one, in my opinion, is not actually throwing the food in the garbage.

Because once we throw the food in the garbage, it ended up in the landfills and the landfills actually produce a lot of methane.

- So if I put the food in my garbage and the garbage collects it and puts it in a dump, that's gonna be emissions you're saying and if I put it into a compost, what happens?

- The food waste actually get decomposed through the microbial activities.

These are the biological processes and convert that waste into the high nutrient-rich soil.

- So it goes in the soil instead of the atmosphere.

- That's right.

- Yeah and which is-- - Which is great because you can then reuse it in the farm system, either on your garden or you have municipal composting systems now in a lot of cities.

- Yeah.

- And then, but, and then green methane or whatever it is, is when they're capturing the methane from these-- - Yeah, you can either cap the landfill and capture the gases that are being emitted from them.

Or a lot of, especially if you have livestock in a farming system, so for like a dairy or something, you can capture the waste from the cow and then use that as a fuel for farming activities.

- Interesting.

How about energy inputs?

How do we reduce those?

- I would think more about climate-smart agriculture practices.

Like regenerative agriculture practices.

For example, no tilling the land.

Obviously no tillage is going to not only reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, but less use of the machineries.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Another factor which plays important role in terms of the emissions are the crop residues.

- What should be done with those crop residues?

- So one way to control these, the crop residue burning is to bring back the waste to the farmland where it can be used as a fertilizer.

And perhaps we can have a more carbon sequestration and more nutrient and more high nutrient soil in fact, actually.

- Okay, good.

- Energy is also important, right?

We should think about renewables, you know, they could play a very important role to control the greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector, you know.

- Well, the nice thing about that is that it's additional income potentially to farmers.

It's a diversification of the kinds of income they can receive.

And if you have a wind farm on your bee farm, you can, you know, those things are not mutually exclusive.

And you can either use that as energy directly in your operations, or you can sell it back to the grid and make some money on that.

- How about lowering emissions from the whole system?

- Well, I mean we, some of the big ones are how do we reduce, you know, a big emitter like beef, you know, consume less beef, find alternatives, you know, there are whole industries being built around that.

The food loss and waste piece is a huge piece of it and needs to be tackled.

And then the fertilizers, you know, this has to do with policy as well because in a lot of countries, in order to promote agricultural production, you simply subsidize fertilizers.

And so people are given a bag of fertilizer and so they're gonna use the bag, right.

Instead of thinking about, "Okay, how do I precision apply this fertilizer so that it's optimal for the plant, but it's not having the negative impacts on wildlife, on waterways, et cetera."

- Yeah.

But livestock, it sounds like is a, is certainly one of the bigger targets for lowering emissions.

Should we all become vegetarians?

I mean, is this where we're headed or?

- Based on our study, I would argue that switching or shifting diets from the animal-based to the plant-based is the ideal solution to solve the climate change issues, you know.

- From the agricultural sector.

- From the agricultural sector.

But I've also some issues in shifting diet, in fact actually, because health is a part of this equation, you know, so I would strongly recommend that we should not actually impose these kind of policies on someone.

- Right.

- These issues should come from the individual's choice if they desire after accounting for all the healthy related issues if there are some, that will be my-- - I appreciate you saying that.

[Atul] That'll be my recommendation.

- I appreciate you saying that.

- But again, I think public policy can orient people's choices right.

You know, there's a huge farm bill coming up and that's going to determine a lot of what people plant.

And so the U.S. government in our country has a huge role to play... - Through incentives and-- - Through incentives, through subsidies, through insurance schemes.

- Yeah.

At the end of the day, this partly is just, it's kind of a human education.

- Education and climate literacy are the central agents to solve this problem.

- So what about insects?

[everyone laughs] So are we gonna be able to farm insects or where are we headed with that?

- Okay, so I understand that insects are less emission-intensive, you know, but they're rich in proteins, right?

Unfortunately, they are not currently being produced at a mass scale level, industrial level.

So it is very difficult to say what are the pros and cons of actually, you know, production, as well as the consumption of these, you know, the insects.

- I mean, this is one of the points we haven't really made explicitly, which is that food is implicitly cultural, right.

And people care about how they cook their food, what their food is, what's in it, who prepared it, how it's prepared.

And so it's not something that we couldn't overcome, but it would take a lot of, you know, it would take some work.

- I've done it.

If you have enough chocolate or hot sauce.

- Same, yeah, exactly.

Well, and you can make it into flour and it can become, you know, it can be processed into all kinds of different things where you don't even recognize it as, you know, as a, you know, a fly.

- Let's go kind of sum things up here.

I mean, what are the, just high level, what are the big action items to manage the energy inputs and the emission outputs from our food systems.

- Research and innovation.

And also developing some advanced technologies are the key to drive any kind of management practices.

And the second most important, in my opinion point is about education.

We need to educate about science of climate change, how it is impacting to the younger generation.

Then only they will take the action.

- Ryan.

- Yeah, I think innovation is actually a really good point that we haven't raised yet.

I mean, some literature shows that there's a 10 to one return on investment in innovation.

And innovation isn't just what we think of as kind of a ag tech, but it's also how do, for small-holder farmers as Atul was saying, how do they get better seeds that are resistant to drought?

How do you get, how do you microdose fertilizers so that you're not over applying?

How do you do, you know, how do you use early warning systems to know when a drought is coming or when an extreme, any kind of extreme weather is coming.

And we have a lot of that here, but in other parts of the world, they don't have that readily available.

And then trying to educate people.

I mean, if people don't know the benefits of composting either for their garden or for climate change, or for avoiding excessive waste, they won't do it.

They have to be motivated.

And so I think the last thing I would say again is public policy, because you're gonna have to put a price on some of those things to incentivize some of those changes, whether it's with farmers or with consumers.

And so figuring out, not being heavy handed about it, but we need to harmonize these things and try to do them in such a way that our agricultural systems become more sustainable.

We're having healthier diets, and we're reducing the impact of climate change by reducing emissions.

- Yeah, I think there'll be a lot of people surprised on this energy and climate show, we're talking about food, but now they'll know why.

So, uh, Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Thanks, that was terrific.

Really enjoyed our visit.

- Thanks for having us.

- Thank you, yeah.

Modern Energy has transformed food systems providing more calories to more people than ever before with enormous benefits to human health and well-being.

As with everything, those benefits come at a cost; enormous energy inputs and emissions outputs.

Producing and applying fertilizer takes huge volumes of natural gas, which is wasted if we over-apply.

Production, transport and distribution of food consumes half the systems energy, food loss in poor countries, and food waste in rich ones where half of all food gets thrown away creates 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

To help solve these issues, innovation could create less energy and emissions-intensive crops.

Modifying our diet away from the most intensive products like beef could also help.

Buying less, throwing less away, and composting when we do could make the biggest difference.

Better education and policy can remind us that food is a precious resource to be valued.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.