We don’t have to wait for governments to act. As individuals we can choose to give up or eat less meat, dairy and fish – every meal counts.
Cows along the side of a road running through the Brazilian
Amazon. Image credit
CIFOR, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
The world is burning and so are countless innocent lives… literally. The
environmental catastrophes predicted due to climate change are happening
now. For instance, the wildfires in Greece and France and the flooding in
Germany and Turkey. Yet the vast majority of people on the planet are
carrying on with lifestyles that are causing environmental breakdown and
tremendous suffering. What’s going to make us change?
Scientists agree that human activities are the cause of the environmental
crisis that we are facing. Unfortunately, one of the main causes of climate
change and environmental destruction is underestimated by almost everyone,
that is animal agriculture (AA).
We need to properly acknowledge the part that animal agriculture plays in
the environmental crisis.
In a recent article in the
Journal of Ecological Society, Dr. Silesh Rao
details the real environmental impact of AA, which he calculates to be the
cause of up to 87% of greenhouse gas emissions. This figure is much higher
than estimated by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO), but takes into account the cumulative effect of the clearing of land
for AA over the centuries, and the reduced ability of land destroyed for AA
to control climate warming. Ignoring factors such as these in their
calculations means that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
and others are underestimating the impact of AA.
Another miscalculation relates to methane. Animal agriculture produces
carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon. Methane is up to 80
times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2, and nitrous oxide is up to 300
times more potent. Nitrous oxide also degrades the ozone layer. Yet these
gases have a much shorter lifespan than CO2, so reducing them would bring a
faster and more significant impact on global warming than by focusing on CO2
alone. Methane degrades into the less harmful CO2 after about 10-12 years,
but the IPCC uses a timeframe of 100 years in its calculations. The IPCC has
therefore badly underestimated the impact of methane and the global warming
damage it causes each year compared to CO2.
It doesn’t help that the FAO, the source of the IPCC’s data, has formed an
official partnership with the meat and dairy industry called the Livestock
Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership.
Nevertheless, the latest IPCC report released on August 9th, 2021 does show
that scientists view reducing methane emissions as a necessary path of
action. This has often been missed out of summaries of the report.
Additionally, a leak from the next IPCC report, due out in March 2022, says
more about animal agriculture, and states that plant-based diets can reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by up to 50%.
However, greenhouse gas emissions are only one of the negative impacts of
animal agriculture. AA is also a main cause of deforestation,
desertification, habitat destruction, wildlife extinction, and ocean dead
zones… all of which act upon each other and on the climate in a vicious
cycle, contributing to the problem of global warming. These should all be
taken into account when calculating greenhouse gas emissions.
I strongly feel that the scientific community, government institutions,
businesses and news media must change their priorities, because
concentrating solely on eliminating fossil fuel usage while ignoring animal
agriculture will not be enough to halt global warming.
I myself am mainly addressing the Catholic Church and her institutions and
organisations, in the hope that she will lead the world in the right
direction. I have been campaigning for the Church to raise the status of the
environment and of animals for decades, and getting absolutely nowhere until
the Laudato Si Encyclical arrived. But animal agriculture and animal
suffering are still low on her agenda. The Catholic Church and Catholic
initiatives like Cafod and to a certain extent the Laudato Si Movement
(previously Global Catholic Climate Movement) tend to ignore animal
agriculture. Regarding divestment, they concentrate on calling for
divestment from fossil fuels, but divestment from animal agriculture is
essential, at least as important as divestment from fossil fuels. In fact,
listening to the Encyclical Laudato Si’s message about an integrated
approach, we should be calling for divestment from all unethical
investments: those which are environmentally damaging, cruel (exploiting
animals), harmful (tobacco, alcohol), enslaving of humans, financing the
arms trade and so on.
We don’t have to wait for governments to act. As individuals we can choose
to give up or eat less meat, dairy and fish – every meal counts. It is now
easier to find non-meat options because supermarkets have recently increased
their range of plant-based options, and have even started placing them next
to the meat to make it easier for the consumer in their moment of choice.
When we go to the supermarket, we can either choose to increase climate
change, or choose to be part of the solution.
We are reaching tipping points where the effects of climate change become
irreversible. To heal the planet, we have to end animal agriculture,
including meat, dairy and fish farming and trawling. We have to transition
to organic, arable farming, incorporating permaculture and wherever possible
forest gardening. We can make a significant decrease in global warming if we
immediately transition away from AA, starting the process of methane
reduction and knock-on effects of reducing land, water and air pollution,
habitat destruction, deforestation, desertification, loss of biodiversity
and ocean death. That’s the good news in a miserably sad state of affairs.
Virginia Bell also writes for Catholic Action for Animals