Memo to Environmentalists: It's Time to Seriously Address the Number One Cause of Global Warming

In the August 27 New Yorker, there is a cartoon showing two men on a private plane. Off to the side is a recycling bin; as one man tosses a piece of paper into the bin, he explains, "I try to do my part." This cartoon made me think of environmentalists who urge people to drive less, switch to hybrid cars, use energy-efficient light bulbs, and make other similar changes, while they ignore the global warming, waste, and pollution that is produced by funneling crops through chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals.

Last week, The New York Times ran an article about the animal protection community's efforts to convince the environmental community to break its silence on the critical fact that almost 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are the product of our national addiction to chicken nuggets and other animal products. That's more than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined, according to the 2006 U.N. report, "Livestock's Long Shadow."

And the environmental problems with eating animals transcend global warming: The U.N. report concluded that the meat industry is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." The U.N., in its 408-page indictment of the meat industry, specifically addressed the contribution of eating meat to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."

Since the best thing you as an individual can do for the environment is to adopt a vegetarian diet, wouldn't you think that the environmental community would be addressing the issue in a significant way? Sadly, Al Gore doesn't discuss the issue at all. According to Mr. Gore's deputy press secretary, however, the suggestion to "modify your diet to include less meat" appears on Page 317 of An Inconvenient Truth (though it's not in the movie at all). And the Sierra Club, when listing "10 things you can do to help curb global warming," ignores this number one issue completely.

There are signs of change, fortunately. Although Environmental Defense neglects the issue in its main global warming brochure, it does address it on its global warming Web page, noting that "If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains, for example, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads... Having one meat-free day per week would be the same as taking 8 million cars off American roads." So imagine the impact of adopting a fully vegetarian diet!

Greenpeace has done just that. The group both walks the walk and talks the talk, serving only vegetarian food at all the organization's events. And they call attention to the connection between meat and environmental degradation on their Web site, noting that a vegetarian diet means "saving vital chunks of rainforest, consuming less raw materials, saving water and generating less pollution." Greenpeace has also targeted KFC for the destruction of the rainforests because the Amazon is being razed to grow feed for KFC's chickens.

Don't get me wrong: I have a deep respect and admiration for Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Carl Pope, and all the others who selflessly trying to make the world a better place. I know that they genuinely care about ending global warming and all environmental issues.

But evidence shows that eating animals is the number one individual cause of global warming and that it's in the top three causes of every significant environmental problem, from the smallest to the largest. So it's past time for the environmental movement to tell people the truth--that adopting a vegetarian diet is the most important action any of us can take, both to decrease our support for global warming and also to address our support for all the rest of the "most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global" (to quote the United Nations).

Get started right away with recipes, menu plans, cookbook recommendations and more at www.VegCooking.com.

Follow Bruce Friedrich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brucegfriedrich

Comments

[Boxorox]

BALONEY!
I don't buy it. I won't give up my cheeseburger. I'm not turning veggie in the false hope of helping the world.
In fact, this nonsense spurs me to eat even more meat. My incisors tell me to keep up the good work eating animals too.
This is yet another example of the supposed DO-GOODERS trying to force their morality on the rest of us, using shame and guilt and false public responsibility to control the masses.
This dog will not comply. Now I have even more reason to seek out the beef.

[ihavenobias]

This response highlights the point I was trying to make when suggesting the tactic *should* be to encourage people to try replacing some of their meat based meals with vegetarian options.

Instead there is what most people would consider to be the (unreasonable) demand of telling people to stop eating meat, period.

Immediately, images of an incredibly unpopular (in the eyes of many) fringe group like PETA comes to mind and people get angry, defensive and even more pro-meat.

I think the reason *some* people insist on the "no meat at all" approach is because their ultimate goal is more animal related than environmental (note I said *some* people, not all), so they can't bring themselves to suggest a more moderate, (but probably ultimately more effective) approach.

[BruceGFriedrich]

This concept resonates with me, but since eating meat is not at all necessary, does it make the most sense? We don't tell people to drive their Hummer less; we tell them not to get a Hummer... Hmmm. I am just not sure that soft pedaling is such a good idea, however much it's true that less meat is better than more!

[BruceGFriedrich]

How did Karl Rove get onto HuffPo?

[Boadicea]

Animal food is a problem, I agree, but it's not the worst problem.

When are we going to start discussing the ridiculously huge number of square feet of housing that people feel they need in order to live comfortably?

The biggest contributor to global warming, according to every credible site I've read, is carbon dioxide from power plants.

Sure, we should all put in the light bulbs, etc - but why should the Joe Blow family living in 800 sq. ft. per person and using their reasonable amount of power feel guilty, when the Ed Schmed family is heating and cooling, say, 14,000 sq. ft. per person?

Time to talk turkey, sure, but even more, it's time to talk square footage!

[BruceGFriedrich]

Fair point. Of course, this goes back to: We can do both--eat a vegetarian diet AND not live opulently.

[aigeanta]

My husband and I are trying to eat one vegetarian meal a week. There's a good thread on DailyKos about eating healthy when you're poor, and a nice person recommended a bunch of vegetarian cookbooks, if you're interested: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2007/9/5/115929/1343/39#c39

[ChicaOfLight78]

Incorporating more fruits, grains, legumes and vegetables into our diets and less meat will also be healthy for us. Unfortuneatly though, for some people giving up meat is like going without sex--it just won't happen. Nevertheless, it probably still is worth encouraging for those among the population that might consider it charitable enough to give it a shot.

Unfortuneatly global warming also happens naturally, as chemical reactivitiy on the planet favors the production of green house gases versus over the production of non-green house gases and that's the kicker. The real question is what can we do to keep global warming from accelerating?

[CriminallySane]

"The real question is what can we do to keep global warming from accelerating?"

In the short term, not much. Mid-term, we need to make our current energy systems supply the "juice" to build the new ones, with wind, solar, current, tidal, geothermal, and maybe some (very carefully run and regulated) nuclear. Conversion and adaptation - which will be required, as things are going to change, soon and in ways we probably don't really want - need to become priorities at the national policy level. To not do this will essentially be pulling the plug. Individual actions are much, much less important, as we only need to look at relative scale to understand.

Longer term, the best favor we can do to anyone around in the future is have fewer kids. A lot fewer, and in every corner of the globe. We're already seeing multiple localized breakdowns, count on them to get worse quickly if we do nothing in this regard.

Well, that, or develop a taste for Soylent Green...

[klmebane]

getting people to give up one meal, or one day a week to just eating fruits, veggies, grains, and the like shouldn't be as difficult as getting them to completely give up meat. as a meat eater all my life i know that there are days i got without meat, for monetary reasons, or just cuz i don't feel like cookin it... i'm considering modifying my diet to only seafood and the rest veg. i love my seafood, i can't give up shrimp and fish. i love my japanese sushi bars.

[CriminallySane]

I eat meat, although less than many people. I also love fresh fruits and vegetables, and have meatless meals multiple times weekly.

I do try to keep seasonal, although being purely seasonal in the Upper Midwest could lead to malnutrition in winter months. That's what refrigeration and freezers are for.

I also walk regularly for both enjoyment and exercise (the simplest, cheapest, most accessible form of exercise ever), my weight is stable and proportionate to my height, and I'm pretty damned regular - a very good indicator of basic health.

The basic problem here is that there are just too many people in the world. And at the current rate of increase, we're headed for a Malthusian wall - not in terms of starvation, although that could be an issue, rather in terms of other resources (water, anyone?) and climate change.

[Hattie]

The year I was born, the population of California was around 3,000,000.
How times have changed.

[avicenna]

... and not only is global swarming by the exponential growth of the human population adding to the global warming problem - the fatter you are the more CO2 is released from your biomass. However, it comes down to our reliance of fossil fuels that fascilitates both our growing girth (on both the micro and macro scale) - but also the way we obtain our food to sustain the unsustainable.

[CriminallySane]

Human population is the one aspect of climate change only beginning to be discussed seriously. Between an estimated 50% growth by 2050 (from the current 6+ billion to 9+ billion), the loss of polar ice caps in summer even before then, and a near-collapse of ocean food fish stocks anticipated in the same time frame, it won't matter what people are eating nearly so much as it will matter that they are eating anything at all, or have any drinkable water.

Not gonna be pretty...

[loslobo]

Soylent green anyone?

[outnow]

Rush Limbaugh has held back the issue of controlling global warming for almost 15 years to give cover to greedy capitalists who think they can "take it with them." He ate a bunch of pills, mouthed off on AM radio, and made hundreds of millions of dollars per year! Now that is the best advertisement for capitalism that I have ever seen. Capitalism trumps the environment and even human survival.

[snaggster]

They had to convince the public that there is a problem (while facing a propaganda campaign) before they could talk about answers. I'm not sure that people are yet at a point where they believe it enough to give up their Big Macs. The meat industry will surely mount a vigorous disinformation campaign. It'll be a struggle for sure.

[loslobo]

Ya think over population might be a little more significant? Greenpease gonna turn them all into vegans?

[loslobo]

ya i know GREENPEACE

[VasuMurti]

Overpopulation is a myth. On a vegan diet, the world could easily support a population several times its present size.

If Americans reduced their meat consumption by 10 percent, it would release enough grain and soybeans to feed over 60 million people.

In Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats!

According to author John Robbins:

Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used.

In 1965, Syria was a barley exporter. Since then, livestock have consumed the country's grain. Despite a tenfold increase in land area for producing barley, Syria must now import the cereal.

Half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement than the entire human population; creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage.

Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers, the leading industrial polluters, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States.

The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number killed in pounds.

Like Bruce Friedrich, Paul McCartney also says:

"If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."

[Newfycrat]

You do not have to feed animals grain. Sheep and cows are healthier if they eat a grass fed diet.
In addition, we are incredibly wasteful with our food. If restaurants, supermarkets and farms all sent their old food to chicken farms, there would be a much better cycle. I was told that Disney World recycles its food into chicken pellets and they are consistently nutritionally good.
This gets back to "it takes a village" kind of mentality. Smaller producers using resources wisely. Don't forget too that all that animal waste is nature's best fertilizer. It is just in how you manage it. We have already shown how bad it is for our environment for over growing crops using man made fertilizers.
You vegetarians can keep all your phylates filled grain, which stops your body from absorbing minerals especially calcium and iron. (A new study says overweight kids are iron deficient, wonder why?) You can keep all your phyto-estrogen filled soy, which I never let my nephews eat. A 100% vegetarian diet is one of the worst for my body. It brings on hypoglycemic attacks, keeps me always hungry and unsatisfied and makes me overweight. Just 3oz. of meat will keep my hunger away for 6 hours because meat sets off a chemical reaction that tells your brain right away that you no longer need food - while grains rely on insulin to do that, which takes up to 45 minutes.
Plowing down all our land, filling it full of pesticides and fertilzers, ruining the natural environment for birds, prey and predators is NOT the best thing for our planet!

[Guitarsandmore]

Most green house gasses are caused by CARS and so the beginning of your argument is false. Overpopulation is not a myth. More people alive will put more cars on the road spewing noxious gases into the atmosphere causing inversion layers and global warming.

If the entire world was vegan they would still be driving cars and burning coal for electricity.

[TwinsFanatic]

This is a great piece; I read "Diet for a Small Planet" 20 years ago, and that did it for me. The argument is so simple: Growing crops to feed to animals is not efficient.

As noted by the author, it takes many times the resources to feed animals to eat them than it would to use that land to grow crops for human consumption. As someone who cares about resource use and global hunger, this seemed (and seems) absurd to me.

I know from experience that many progressives are challenged by this notion; they prefer to attack George Bush and fight against global problems at the macro level, so that they needn't do much in their own lives (other than the easy stuff--changing light bulbs and the like).

But you really can't get around it: Eating meat is, as this author notes, a waste of resources and vastly polluting, including CO2 polluting.

[yellowdogSC]

TF,

Much truth in what you say,

BUT,

It was Daddy Bush, NOT progressives, who said that America will NEVER sacrifice its quality of life for ANYONE.

And that was years before this little bombshell from Reality hit.

And it should be REALLY easy. America's 6% of the total population sucking down 30% of Earth's resources. Really, how hard can it be to cut back? According to Sr. Bush, IMPOSSIBLE!

There's ONE nail in the coffin. (We have a LOT of nerve wondering why the rest of the world HATES us!)

[standupnow]

What is the impact of human population growth on global climate change?

[yellowdogSC]

sun,

How to know?

We've never had 6 BILLION + greedy bastards consuming, wasting resources on Earth before to compare to.

And once the die-off starts, we'll never again....

That’s the GOOD news.
That’s the BAD news.

[ihavenobias]

Apparently we are already using up *half* of the earth's productive capacity with our current 6 billion.

PS--- Here is a link to some very interesting reading on overpopulation and global warming, etc:

sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/315/5812/573

[Quaoar]

Both you and Sierra Club ignored the number one cause of most of our environmental problems, which is overpopulation. Admittedly it's a hard one to tackle due to existing socio-religious elements of our culture, but eating vegan, not driving SUVs, and recycling won't matter if there are too many humans on the planet.

[outnow]

Overpopulation is right! Buffalo farts, too. But the Church wants us all to die to get us to heaven sooner so we are going to make babies that will not live a normal lifespan. Shout it from the rooftops and force candidates to face the fact that when the population doubles we are in for mass starvation, lack of sanitized water, and more climate change.

Please note that your cash will be useless.

[Hattie]

There already are too many humans on the planet.

[ihavenobias]

I think a more realistic approach is to suggest that people try more vegetarian dishes rather than telling them to jump into a vegetarian diet.

Most people would find shunning meat altogether to be extreme and dismiss it immediately and entirely. In fact, I can picture them raising a drumstick in the air out of spite.

(In case you're wondering, I'm not a vegetarian, but I also don't eat meat consistently out of personal preference)

[TwinsFanatic]

Maybe so; that would explain "Meatless Mondays," from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

And it also would explain the Environmental Defense quote in this piece.

But shouldn't environmentalists be challenged to do more? If this is the global crisis, the "inconvenient truth," the "11th hour," shouldn't we all do as much as we can?

So Environmental Defense says that "if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetables and grains, for example, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads... Having one meat-free day per week would be the same as taking 8 million cars off American roads."

It seems to me that the obvious conclusion for real environmentalists is clear: I should make all my meals chicken-free. I should make all my meals vegetarian!

But of course, a vegetarian meal once a week is better than never eating vegetarian food. I just think that if this is a "global climate crisis," then asking people to change their diets is reasonable.

[Mormondude]

Thanks for the blog! I just started Atkins, and once the word gets out and all the environmentalists start refraining from eating meat and meat products, the prices should come down for me. It's a win-win! You get a healthier planet and I get cheaper meat.

Thanks again! Keep up the good work.