Save the Animals, Save the Planet: Blog Action Day '09, Climate Change

by Stephanie Ernst

categories: Environment and Global Warming, Vegan

Published October 15, 2009 @ 08:02AM PT

'Tis Blog Action Day. And we're talking about climate change, an easy topic for an animal rights blog, given the intersection between what we're doing to tens of billions of animals on this planet and what's happening to the planet as a result: Even mainstream scientists agree that our insistence on unnecessarily exploiting and killing animals en masse for food is one of the most significant contributors to climate change. The most impactful change each of us can, and should, personally make to stop climate change is something that we can do immediately and easily (and that we have other excellent reasons to undertake as well). It makes little sense to petition our governments for new policies and technologies and complain that inherently slow processes are indeed moving slowly if we personally are refusing to make the truly important and significant changes we could be making now, without waiting for governments, industries, and nonprofits to get it together on the other fronts. We won't be able to justify our inaction in the decades to come. "But I like meat" and "I can't live without cheese" won't be valid excuses.

All Animal Agriculture: A Greenhouse Gas and Environmental Disaster

As many of you know by now, animal agriculture accounts for nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world's cars, planes, and other transportation combined, and the numbers only get more disturbing when you break them down into specific greenhouse gases: animal agriculture contributes 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions (a gas with a global warming potential [GWP] 296 times that of CO₂) and 37 percent of methane (GWP 23 times that of CO₂).

Consider those frightening numbers in concert with the massive clearing of vital forests (70 percent of the disastrous deforestation in the Amazon is a result of cattle ranching, and growing crops for animal feed results in still additional deforestation) and the takeover of public lands for ranching and the extermination of American wildlife at the request of ranchers and the outrageous use and pollution of water by all animal ag, plus far more than we can possibly fit into one short list, and we have a clear conclusion: animal agriculture is a damn disaster for climate change, for the environment in general, for our planet.

And as has clearly been laid out, not by animal advocates but by science, just going "local" or "organic" or "free-range" isn't an option if we're serious about stopping or even slowing climate change (see, for example, "Researchers: Even 'Organically Raised' Cows Are a 'Climate Bomb'" [best viewed in browser other than IE because of long comment thread], "Climate Change Reality Checks for Locavores and Omnivores," and "Free-Range Pasture Systems Not a Viable Solution").

As Lisa Franzetta of the Animal Legal Defense Fund wrote last year, "We just do NOT want to talk about the fact that the personal choice to eat animals, multiplied by several billion, is one of the single biggest factors contributing to impending environmental devastation." But we can't afford not to talk about it.

The Solution of a Plant-Based Diet, for Climate Change and World Hunger

A vegan diet decreases a person's greenhouse gas contributions and overall environmental impact remarkably more than switching to a hybrid vehicle or becoming more energy-efficient at home or any of the other personal changes recommended by environmental groups and activists. And moving to a plant-based diet is a change that people can make personally and that is relatively easy to make immediately. We don't have time to just sit around and wait for the slow development of clean renewable energy, for example. And even once it's here, that alone won't be enough. We are steadily learning more about how dire the climate change situation is, and we know that we must pull out all the stops and make enormous changes now. So when we also know how significantly animal ag is contributing to global warming and environmental destruction in general, it is, frankly, irresponsible and selfish that we're not advocating a widespread transition to vegan diet.

Or a generation from now, do we want to tell our children and grandchildren that we didn't do all we could to avert the global disasters they grew up witnessing because, damn it, we like the taste of flesh and cow's milk? How about when, because of climate change, there are even more starving people around the world than there are now? How do we justify to them and to our children witnessing the suffering and devastation that we kept eating animal flesh and milk and eggs while knowing not only that our diets were killing the planet but also that our diets were contributing to world hunger -- that we decided it was more important for us to have animal-based diets than for all people to have enough food on plant-based diets? ("Plant-Based Hunger Solutions: Feeding More With Less," part 1 and part 2)

The results of climate change are not -- and will not be -- just minor inconveniences. We're talking about life-changing, world-changing disasters. And if we're serious about averting them, we have no excuse -- none -- not to make the real needed changes we can so easily make. The right and needed choice for our planet is the right choice on so many other levels. It is the choice that shows compassion for our fellow animals in general and our fellow humans in specific; it is the choice that benefits our health; and it is the choice that shows we are serious about literally saving our planet. Please, for the love of yourself and your planet, not to mention the animals, go vegan.

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See some of this blog's previous posts related to climate change below, along with a compelling graphic. See also this jarring video.

Researchers: Even "Organically Raised" Cows Are a "Climate Bomb"

Climate Change Reality Checks for Locavores and Omnivores

Earth Day, Food Choices, and Heads in the Sand

Meat, Dairy, and Climate Change

ALDF: Fix Global Warming the Easy, Low-Tech Way

Planet in Peril--and Denial?

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Protest photo by Flickr user Takver
"Go Vegan" image from Animal Aid (UK)
Graph from the nonprofit Foodwatch, via Der Spiegel