Global warming goes way beyond “an inconvenient truth”. We are overheating our planet to alarming levels with potentially catastrophic consequences. 2006 was the hottest year on record in the U.S. and the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1994. Think of an overheated car, an overcooked dinner, or being sick with a fever. Now imagine that on a planetary scale.
Global warming is perhaps the biggest social, political economic, and environmental problem facing our planet and its inhabitants. People are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about global warming, despite ExxonMobil misinformation and Bush Administration obfuscation, due to frequent reports regarding record heat, wildfires, an increase in the number and severity of storms, droughts, the melting of glaciers, permafrost, and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, flooding, acidification of the oceans, changes in wind direction, endangered species and accelerated species extinction, spreading diseases, shrinking lakes, submerged islands, and environmental refugees. We may be standing at a precipice.
At the close of 2006, there were reports of at least three major events that dramatized the present threat of global warming: (1) the Indian island of Lohachara had to be evacuated before being submerged, creating over 10,000 refugees; (2) the massive Ayles Ice Shelf broke off from the Canadian Arctic; and (3) the Bush Administration, which has been resistant to addressing global warming, and generally hostile toward the environment, agreed that polar bears are “threatened”, as many polar bears are drowning and starving to death, mainly due to melting ice caused by global warming, and moved to protect them under the Endangered Species Act. Global warming is also threatening penguins, seals, frogs, butterflies, African elephants, and many other animals.
All this comes on top of other recent catastrophes: the collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica and Greenland; unprecedented weather events around the world, such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; killer heat waves, causing among other things, a bust of the ski season in Europe and the deaths of 35,000-50,000 people in Europe in the summer of 2003; the disappearing of glaciers from Glacier National Park in Montana and elsewhere (about 80% of the world’s glaciers are shrinking); and other ominous signs of disaster.
“Such a path is not merely unsustainable”, according to Harvard Professor John P. Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “it is a prescription for disaster.”
There is no doubt that humanity is threatened as perhaps never before and major changes have to occur to put our imperiled planet on a sustainable path — and soon. Even though a small number of individuals argue against global warming, there is a scientific and environmental consensus — among all major scientific and environmental organizations, journals, and magazines, and all peer-reviewed scholarly articles — that global warming is real, serious, worsening, and caused or exacerbated by human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007, which was researched and written by about 2,500 climate scientists over six years and vetted by over 130 governments.
The Report carefully delineates clear trends and catastrophic consequences associated with climate change, warning of the possibility of severe and irreversible change, unless we make concerted efforts to counter global warming. The IPCC makes it plain that the current and projected climate change is not simply “natural variation”, but “very likely” (meaning at least 90%) the result of human activity. Even Time magazine (and the Brookings Institution, among many others) has declared the “case closed” on the problem of global warming, with only the solutions to still debate.
Several leading experts, including climatologist James Hansen of NASA and physicist Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most famous living scientist, as well as Al Gore and others, warn that global climate change may reach a ‘tipping point’ and spiral out of control, with disastrous consequences, if current conditions continue. A recent 700-page British government report, authored by a former chief economist for the World Bank, projects losses of up to 20% of world gross domestic product by 2050 unless 1% of current world domestic product is devoted to combating global climate change. Other economic studies have projected even worse scenarios. Whether for personal or public health, for a personal crisis or a planetary one, prevention is far cheaper and easier than trying to catch up and clean up after the catastrophe.
It therefore should not be surprising that the Pentagon states that global warming is a larger threat than even terrorism.
“Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source”, suggests a Pentagon memo on global warming. “Envision Pakistan, India and China — all armed with nuclear weapons — skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river and arable land.”
The new Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has said that climate change needs to be taken as seriously as war and, further, that “changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict”. Fighting global warming may be one way to prevent future wars, simultaneously increasing energy security and physical security.
Progressives have additional cause for concern. The people most affected by global warming are the socially disadvantaged — especially the poor, people of color including the indigenous, women, children, the elderly, people with disabilities, subsistence farmers, and those dependent on a single crop for their livelihood or a few species for their nutritional needs — since they are often in the weakest position to guard against environmental damages and will likely suffer the most harm.
“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” said IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri.
Further, increased suffering and increasing numbers of environmental refugees, along with greater anxiety over declining access to food, water, land, and housing, the material essentials of life, often lead to unstable conditions that give rise to anger, ethnic violence, fascism, and war, which all-too-often have been targeted at minority communities and vulnerable people. In addition to causing more famine and disease, the fallout from climate change may also lead to more terrorism and violence, by impoverishing and radicalizing people, and making them more desperate, according to some experts. Those who needlessly degrade and destroy the environment to satisfy their own selfish pleasures are like the pre-revolutionary Queen Marie-Antoinette, declaring “Let them eat carbon dioxide”!
A collateral benefit of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels to fight global warming is that it will reduce air and water pollution. Such modern crises kill many more people each year than terrorism, causing havoc in the present and creating a distressful environmental debt for our descendants, instead of bequeathing a healthy future. Energy independence and self-sufficiency, especially in the form of decentralized renewable fuel sources, is an important step toward a more sustainable world.
Yes, we need our governments, corporations, schools, religious institutions, and other organizations to get actively involved in fighting global warming. Yes, the U.S. — the largest contributor to global warming — needs to join 169 others and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Yes, we need more fuel-efficient cars, appliances, electronics, batteries, and light bulbs, and, yes, our society needs to switch away from fossil fuels and toward renewable ones, such as solar, wind, tidal, biomass, hydrogen, and others. But while we are struggling for these important and positive large-scale social changes, we also need to say “yes!” to personal changes.
A major study showing how personal change can affect global warming is in the November 2006 390-page report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” It states that animal-based agriculture causes approximately 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, which lead to global warming, an amount greater than that caused by all forms of transportation on the planet combined.
Cars are still problematic, of course, but cows and other animals raised for human consumption are contributing more to global warming, thereby causing more damage to our existence. Therefore, what we eat is actually more important than what we drive and the most important personal change we could make for the environment, as well as for our health and the lives of animals, is to switch to vegetarianism.
“If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat”, Paul McCartney has said. “That’s the single most important thing you could do.”
The world is feeding over 50 billion farmed animals, while millions of people, disproportionately children, starve to death each year. Over 70% of the major grains produced in the U.S. (and about one-third produced worldwide) is inefficiently and immorally diverted to feed farmed animals, to satisfy appetites for money and meat, as it takes up to sixteen pounds of grain to produce a single pound of feedlot beef for human consumption.
The FAO study reports that the livestock industry, in total, uses and abuses roughly 30% of the planet’s surface, thereby “entering into direct competition [with other activities] for scarce land, water and other natural resources.” Further, overuse of the land by livestock, leading to overuse of fuel and water, also degrades the land and pollutes the water around it, contributing to additional environmental and health problems.
An animal-based diet also uses energy very inefficiently. It requires 78 calories of fossil fuel for each calorie of protein obtained from feedlot-produced beef, but only 2 calories of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of protein from soybeans. Grains and beans require only 2-5% as much fossil fuel as beef. The energy needed to produce a pound of grain-fed beef is equivalent to one gallon of gasoline. Reducing energy consumption is not only a better choice in terms of fighting climate change, it is also a better choice in terms of being less dependent on foreign oil and the vagaries of both markets and dictators. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, a vegetarian, “we must be the change we wish to see in this world”.
Additionally, the editors of World Watch (July/August 2004) concluded:
The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.” Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.
While growing concern about global warming is welcome, the many connections between the increasingly globalized Standard American Diet (SAD) and global warming have generally been overlooked or marginalized.
The production of meat contributes significantly to the emission of the three major gases associated with global warming: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), as well as other eco-destructive gases such as ammonia, which contributes to acid rain.
Indeed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, Unit on Climate Change, “There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock.” The 2004 World Watch publication State of the World is more specific regarding the link between animals raised for meat and global warming: “Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16% of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”
Likewise, with the July 2005 issue of Physics World: “The animals we eat emit 21% of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity.” Eating meat and other animal products directly contributes to the environmentally-irresponsible industry and its devastating impact on the environment, including the dire threat of global warming.
While carbon dioxide is the most plentiful greenhouse gas, methane is 23 times more powerful, and nitrous oxide is a whopping 296 times more potent, than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming potential. With the livestock industry emitting such a huge amount of methane and given that methane degrades relatively quickly in the atmosphere (in approximately 12 years as compared to hundreds or even thousands for carbon dioxide), a sharp decrease in animal consumption, and therefore subsequent livestock production, would provide the necessary near-term alleviation from global warming potentially “spinning out of control”.
Further, changing from the Standard American Diet to a vegetarian or, better yet, vegan diet, according to geophysicists at the University of Chicago, does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling Hummer to a Camry or from a Camry to a Prius.
It has been said that “eating meat is like driving a huge SUV… a vegetarian diet is like driving a [hybrid], and… a vegan diet is like riding a bicycle.” Shifting away from SUVs, SUV lifestyles, and SUV-style diets, to energy-efficient, life-affirming alternatives, is essential to fighting global warming. Planetary sustainability and the well-being of humanity are greatly dependent on a shift toward plant-based diets. One easy and effective way to fight global warming every day is with our forks, knives, and chopsticks! We have the opportunity and the responsibility to act against global warming. Therefore, we need to take action. If we don’t, the “procrastination penalty” will be painful. “How wonderful it is”, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
It is increasingly clear that eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is imperative to help reduce global warming and other grave environmental threats, in addition to benefitting one’s physical and spiritual health. Mark Twain once quipped that “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”
Now we can. Now’s the time.