[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Eating As If the Climate Mattered

Mon Jan 28 16:10:31 MST 2008

by Bruce Friedrich

AlterNet (January 23 2008)

Last week in our nation's capital, the National Council for Science and
the Environment (NCSE) held a climate change conference focused on
solutions to the problem of human-induced climate change. And in Paris
the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which
is sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, held a press conference
to discuss to discuss "the importance of lifestyle choices" in combating
global warming.

Notably, all food at the NCSE conference was vegan, and there were
table-top brochures with quotes from the UN report on the meat industry,
discussed more below. And the IPCC head, Dr Rajendra Pachauri declared,
as the AFP sums it up, "Don't eat meat, ride a bike, and be a frugal
shopper".

The New York Times, also, seems to be jumping on the anti-consumption
bandwagon. First they ran an editorial on New Year's Day stating that
global warming is "the overriding environmental issue of these times"
and that Americans are "going to have to change [our] lifestyles ..."
The next day, they ran a superb opinion piece by Professor Jared Diamond
about the fact that those of us in the developed world consume 32 times
as many resources as people in the developing world and eleven times as
much as China.

Diamond ends optimistically, stating that "whether we get there
willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because
our present rates are unsustainable".

It is reasonable for all of us to review our lives and to ask where we
can cut down on our consumption - because it's necessary, and because
living according to our values is what people of integrity do.

Last November, United Nations environmental researchers released a
report that everyone who cares about the environment should review.
Called "Livestock's Long Shadow", this 408-page thoroughly researched
scientific report indicts the consumption of chickens, pigs, and other
meats, concluding that the meat industry is "one of the ... most
significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at
every scale from local to global" and that eating meat contributes to
"problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water
shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity".

The environmental problems of meat fill books, but the intuitive
argument can be put more succinctly into two points:

* A 135-pound woman will burn off at least 1,200 calories a day even if
she never gets out of bed. She uses most of what she consumes simply to
power her body. Similarly, it requires exponentially more resources to
eat chickens, pigs, and other animals, because most of what we feed to
them is required to keep them alive, and much of the rest is turned into
bones and other bits we don't eat; only a fraction of those crops is
turned into meat. So you have to grow all the crops required to raise
the animals to eat the animals, which is vastly wasteful relative to
eating the crops directly.

* It also requires many extra stages of polluting and energy-intensive
production to get chicken, pork, and other meats to the table, including
feed mills, factory farms, and slaughterhouses, all of which are not
used in the production of vegetarian foods. And then there are the
additional stages of gas-guzzling, pollution-spewing transportation of
moving crops, feed, animals, and meat-relative to simply growing the
crops and processing them into vegetarian foods.

So when the UN added it all up, what they found is that eating chickens,
pigs, and other animals contributes to "problems of land degradation,
climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution,
and loss of biodiversity", and that meat-eating is "one of the ... most
significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at
every scale from local to global".

And on the issue of global warming, the issue the New York Times deems
critical enough to demand that we "change [our] lifestyles" and for
which Al Gore and the IPCC received the Nobel peace prize, the United
Nations' scientists conclude that eating animals causes forty percent
more global warming than all planes, cars, trucks, and other forms of
transport combined, which is why the Live Earth Global Warming Survival
Handbook (Rodale, 2007) says that "refusing meat" is "the single most
effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint" [emphasis in
original].

There is a lot of important attention paid to population, and that's a
critical issue too, but if we're consuming eleven times as much as
people in China and 32 times as much as people in the third world, then
it's not just about population; it's also about consumption.

NCSE, IPPC, and the UN deserve accolades for calling on people to stop
supporting the inefficient, fossil fuel intensive, and polluting meat
industry. The head of the IPCC, who received the Nobel Prize with Mr
Gore and who held last week's press conference in Paris, puts his money
where his mouth is: He's a vegetarian.

The NCSE's all-vegan 3,000-person conference last week also sends
positive signal that other environmentalists would be wise to listen to.
Thus far, among the large environmental organizations only Greenpeace
ensures that all official functions are vegetarian. Other environmental
groups should follow suit.

It's empowering really, when you think about it: By choosing vegetarian
foods, we're making compassionate choices that are good for our bodies,
and we're living our environmental values at every meal.

Find out more at www.GoVeg.com/eco, and find recipe tips, meal plans,
and more at www.VegCooking.com.

_____

Bruce Friedrich is vice president for campaigns at PETA. He has been a
progressive activist for more than twenty years.

http://www.alternet.org/story/74605/

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