Photo: Climate WatchThere’s not a single person who’s done more to fight climate change than Bill McKibben. Through thoughtful books, ubiquitous magazine contributions, and, most notably, the founding of 350.org (an international non-profit dedicated to fighting global warming), McKibben has committed his life to saving the planet. For all the passion fueling his efforts, though, there’s something weirdly amiss in his approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions: neither he nor 350.org will actively promote a vegan diet.
Given the nature of our current discourse on climate change, this omission might not seem a problem. Vegans are still considered as sort of “out there,” a fringe group of animal rights activists with pasty skin and protein issues. However, as a recent report from the World Preservation Foundation confirms, ignoring veganism in the fight against climate change is sort of like ignoring fast food in the fight against obesity. Forget ending dirty coal or natural gas pipelines. As the WPF report shows, veganism offers the single most effective path to reducing global climate change.
The evidence is powerful. Eating a vegan diet, according to the study, is seven times more effective at reducing emissions than eating a local meat-based diet. A global vegan diet (of conventional crops) would reduce dietary emissions by 87 percent, compared to a token 8 percent for “sustainable meat and dairy.” In light of the fact that the overall environmental impact of livestock is greater than that of burning coal, natural gas, and crude oil, this 87 percent cut (94 percent if the plants were grown organically) would come pretty close to putting 350.org out of business, which I’m sure would make McKibben a happy man.
There’s much more to consider. Many consumers think they can substitute chicken for beef and make a meaningful difference in their dietary footprint. Not so. According to a 2010 study cited in the WPF report, such a substitution would achieve a “net reduction in environmental impact” of 5 to 13 percent. When it comes to lowering the costs of mitigating climate change, the study shows that a diet devoid of ruminants would reduce the costs of fighting climate change by 50 percent; a vegan diet would do so by over 80 percent. Overall, the point seems pretty strong: global veganism could do more than any other single action to reduce GHG emissions.
So why is it that 350.org tells me (in an e-mail) that, while it’s “pretty clear” that eating less meat is a good idea, “we don’t really take official stances on issues like veganism”? Well why the heck not?! Why would an environmental organization committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions not officially oppose the largest cause of greenhouse gas emissions–the production of meat and meat-based products? It’s baffling. And while I don’t have a definite answer, I do have a few thoughts on the matter.
Part of the problem is that environmentalists, including McKibben himself, are generally agnostic about meat. A recent article McKibben wrote for Orion Magazine reveals an otherwise principled environmentalist going a bit loopy in the face of the meat question. The tone is uncharacteristically cute, even folksy, and it’s entirely out of sync with the gravity of the environmental issues at stake. Moreover, his claim that “I Do Not Have a Cow in this Fight” is a rather astounding assessment coming from a person who is so dedicated to reducing global warming that he supposedly keeps his thermostat in the 50s all winter and eschews destination vacations for fear of running up his personal carbon debt. I’d think the man has every cow in the world in this fight.
Photo: tarsandsactionSo to the real question: how do we explain this agnosticism? The fact that McKibben recently traveled to the White House to oppose the construction of a natural gas pipeline (and got arrested in the process), provides a hint of an answer. I imagine that getting slammed in the clinker after protesting a massive pipeline project is a lot better for 350.org’s profile than staying at home, munching kale, and advising others to explore veganism. In this respect, the comparative beneficial impact of global veganism versus eliminating natural gas from Canadian tar sands matters none. What matters is grabbing a headline or two.
Hence the “problem” with veganism and environmentalism. Ever since Silent Spring (Rachel Carson’s expose of dangerous insecticides) modern environmentalism has depended on high-profile media moments to shore up the activist base. Veganism, however, hardly lends itself to this role. Although quietly empowering in its own way, going vegan is an act poorly suited to sensational publicity. Pipelines and other brute technological intrusions, by contrast, are not only crudely visible, but they provide us (the media) with clear victims, perpetrators, and a dark narrative of decline. I think this distinction explains much of McKibben’s–not to mention the environmental movement’s– wobbly stance on meat.
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Another reason for the prevailing agnosticism on meat has to do with the comparative aesthetics of pipelines and pastures. When meat-eating environmentalists are hit with the livestock conundrum, they almost always respond by arguing that we must replace feedlot farming with rotational grazing. Just turn farm animals out to pasture, they say. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what McKibben argues in the Orion piece, claiming that “shifting from feedlot farming to rotational grazing is one of the few changes we could make that’s on the same scale as the problem of global warming.”
This all sounds well and good. But if the statistics in the WPF report are to be trusted, the environmental impacts of this alternative would be minimal. So why the drum beat of support for rotational grazing? I would suggest that the underlying appeal in the pasture solution is something not so much calculated as irrational: pastured animals mimic, however imperfectly, symbiotic patterns that existed before humans arrived to muck things up. In this sense, rotational grazing supports one of the more appealing (if damaging) myths at the core of contemporary environmentalism: the notion that nature is more natural in the absence of human beings. Put differently, rotational grazing speaks powerfully to the aesthetics of environmentalism while confirming a bias against the built environment; a pipeline, not so much.
A final reason that McKibben, 350.org, and mainstream environmentalism remain agnostic about meat centers on the idea of personal agency. For most people, meat is essentially something we cook and eat. Naturally, it’s much more than that. But for most consumers, meat is first and foremost a personal decision about what we put into our body. By contrast, what comes to mind when you envision an old coal-fired power plant? Many will conjure up sooty images of a degraded environment. In this respect, the coal-fired power plant symbolizes not a personal choice, or a direct source of pleasure, but an oppressive intrusion into our lives, leaving us feeling violated and powerless. Environmentalists, I would thus venture, go after coal rather than cows, not because coal is necessarily more harmful to the environment (it appears not to be), but because cows mean meat, and meat, however wrongly, means freedom to pursue happiness.
I don’t mean to downplay the impact of these factors. The visibility of pipelines, the romantic appeal of pastures, and the deep-seated belief that we can eat whatever we damn well shove into our mouths are no mean hurdles to overcome. But given that the documented power of veganism to directly confront global warming, and given the fact that emissions have only intensified alongside all efforts to lower them, I’d suggest McKibben, 350.org, and the environmental movement as a whole trade up their carnivorous agnosticism for a fire-and brimstone dose of vegan fundamentalism.
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@Rex McClure, if you have to pry your steaks off your grill, you’re not grilling them right
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It sounds more poetic than:
“You can have my porterhouse steak when it has grilled just past medium-rare and rested for five minutes.”
Is it lunchtime yet?
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I am very skeptical of this. I managed to find a somewhat related analysis of a claim by E. O. Wilson that the world is facing a food shortage, and the way to solve it was to switch to vegetarianism, as that would, by itself, increase food production capability enough to feed 30+% more people.
That claim was taken apart pretty easily here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/11/animal-vegetable-or-e-o-wilson/
In the end this post and the E.O. Wilson post are about inputs and outputs; energy in to the food system and energy out.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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I read that link.
I found it to be a bit of a straw man argument. He made plenty of good points, but he disproved a system that nobody is really advocating.
I’m skeptical of the WPF findings as well, because its such a complex system.
I can guarantee two things:
The current system is flawed and can be improved in many ways.
The purely vegan system talked about in your link would never come to fruition and is not the answer.
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As a libertarian, I am just happy that the far left has continued to allow me to pass gas in peace. I would have expected by 2012 to have to wear some pseudo-colostomy bag thing to recycle my essence into fuel for George Clooney’s Prius or something.
As to the cow/vegan thing….I have often wondered why this has not been tackled as a major bio-engineering/genetics/breeding Task Force Alpha project. If we can breed Labradoodles we should be able to breed a cow that doesn’t fart 1000 litres a day. Or maybe its the feed. Whatever. It’s impolite.
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Wasn’t one of the parts of Super Freakonomics exactly this? About a guy who was looking at bacteria in kangaroos that could be injected into cows to drastically reduce their methane production? I remember reading about that somewhere…
There’s a big difference between cows and Labradoodles. People don’t generally eat dogs, so genetically altering them isn’t much of a big deal (and I am aware that animal husbandry is genetic modification).
People freak out about GM grains, can you imagine the furor if you tried to get them to eat GM cows?
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It isn’t the farts. It’s the farming.
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Another reason might be that environmentalists are trying to fight the perception that environmentalism is an attack on the modern lifestyle. Sure, all these problems could be solved if everyone went vegan, and stopped driving cars and stopped using electricity, but when you go around trying to shame people into giving up their comfortable lifestyle to live in yurts and eat tree bark (their perception, not mine) they tune you out. The point is that shame doesn’t work, and threats don’t work, they just cause pushback. McKibben probably doesn’t promote veganism because it won’t work, it will just turn more people off the movement.
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I agree that the best efforts of environmentalists are spent addressing challenges that would not require wholesale lifestyle change. Which is more likely – that everyone stops eating meat or that we replace a significant amount of our coal plants with cleaner alternatives?
While vegan diets are the ideal, if people would just consciously reduce their meat consumption by 50 percent, it would make a significant impact.
The debate should not be framed in terms of all-or-nothing extremes.
There’s no description of the WPF methodology. If I had more time maybe I’d go googling for it…
But, when I’ve seen this kind of thing in the past what they’re usually doing is comparing the efficiency of feeding corn and soybeans to cattle and then eating the cattle to just eating the corn and soybeans. This leaves out a lot of the complexity in the system.
One facet is that pastured cattle mostly eat grass and people can’t eat grass directly. Another way of looking at it is that for every pound of grass raised beef there’s a pound plus of grain and beans somebody isn’t eating somewhere. This applies to pretty much all livestock. Pen them up and feed them people food, and yes, it’s less efficient. Contain them loosely and feed them things people can’t eat and the equation changes dramatically.
There are other factors too, such as transport and waste disposal, energy consumption, pasture vs. row crop vs. alternative techniques, processing, and the effects of subsidies, but they all pretty much follow the same kind of pattern.
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I know I’ve seen those cows do just fine sustaining themselves on eating a delicious field of snow all winter…wait, no I haven’t.
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There’s a magical thing called “hay”… people have been storing that for winter feed for a looooong time.
Seriously, though—some parts of this country are just plain lousy for growing grains and soybeans … and just right for growing grass (or hay).
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I don’t have the time right now to go digging through the citations, (the paper McWilliams links to gets its findings from all sorts of places) but I’d bet that when they compare grass-fed pasture beef to feed-lot beef, they don’t account for the Economic effects. (Which one would expect to be the focus of this blog) Grass-fed pasture-raised beef is much more expensive as more land and more time is required, therefore people will consume less of it, substituting other things, thus lowering emmissions.
Or, we could intelligently manage pastureland for maximum ecological diversity, instead of aggressively promoting monoculture for vegan purposes. Check out this video: http://vimeo.com/8239427, on healing the environment through the wise use of grazing.
Also, please quit trolling the economics blog with vegan junk.
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What you seem to be saying is that a carbon tax that includes meat is still the most efficient way of internalizing the GHG externalities.
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Try passing that by the beef industry lobbyists.
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no environmentalist wants to take a stand that is generally unpopular.
it’s much easier to get people to agree with you by blaming faceless corporations than by blaming the general populace. after all it is the general populace that you’re trying to get onside.
blaming meat is blaming meat eaters. most people (in the US) are meat eaters. it’s a big lifestyle change to cease to be a meat eater. meat is the highlight of the meal for most meat eaters.
people don’t like being less happy to help something that they don’t/can’t see.
no single person becoming vegan makes a noticeable difference. it’s in no person’s best interest to personally give up meat for environmental reasons.
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For the record, I meant to thumbs-up you but pasture-raised leaf lard I’m currently rendering made my fingers all greasy.
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My opinion too.
Moreover, getting people to be conscious about carbon emissions (by the way, would not it be nice if it were the only environmental issue ?) through the reduction of coal (and other fossil and non-renewable resources) burning could even lead to the issue of meat consumption and its consequences.
When all other causes of environmental destruction will be taken care of, maybe the meat-eaters (including me) will be wise enough that nothing more can be done without them making proud choices.