To save the planet, eat a whale!

Surprisingly mild temperatures, very little snow, Helsinki’s harbor free of ice… Every time I called my contacts in Denmark, Sweden or Finland during the last few months, they shared new observations confirming that for the second year in a row, Scandinavia was getting through dark months so mild that they could hardly qualify as winter. Warm temperatures made people increasingly uneasy as the winter was drawing near to its end, as it seemed to picture the future of a very different Scandinavia.

Norway, a climate change pioneer

In such a situation, no wonder that Norway, the most Nordic country of Europe, is particularly involved in the battle against climate change. The country made the headlines with the opening of the Svalbard Seed Vault, which offers the opportunity to store seeds from everywhere in the world in a frozen environment. But Norway also received media coverage on a more confidential scale with a recent study published by the High North Alliance, a Scandinavian organization based in the Lofoten, which promotes whale hunting.

An –almost- carbon neutral whale?


Granted, the link between whale hunting and climate change may not seem obvious at first sight. But for really worried citizens, nothing is impossible. That’s why the High North Alliance has just demonstrated that for the same weight, one emits 8 times more CO2 equivalents by eating a beefsteak than by eating minke whale meat (the study doesn’t give figures for blue whale meat). For comparison sake, one might be interested in learning that the consumption of chicken (4.6 kg of CO2 equivalents per kg of meat) generates more than 2 times more greenhouse gases emissions than the consumption of minke whale meat (1.9 kg of CO2 equivalents per kg of meat).

This result might seem surprising, but it’s actually quite simple to explain: 1) on the contrary to beef and chicken, a whale does fortunately not need to be fed with agricultural products such as cereals or soybean. This spares a great deal of greenhouse gases, which would have otherwise been emitted by tractors, fertilizers or the heating of building and 2) on the contrary to beef, a whale doesn’t emit methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas. Should we then conclude from this demonstration that the future lies in whale stew?

The whale’s limitations

This might be a bit premature. Despite the pedagogical advantage of this study, which shows how the food we consume is linked to greenhouse gases emissions, it seems to me that it has curiously neglected to take into account two points that should yet have driven the attention of its authors. The first one is that minke whale stocks –or any other whale stocks for that matter – can hardly be considered sufficient to keep pace with growing meat demand from the world. Besides, it comes as a surprise to find out that the study does not even mention the fact that the consumption of 1 kg of cereals produced in the UK generates in average almost 14 times less emissions of CO2 equivalent than the consumption of 1 kg of whale meat…

Picture: a minke whale