How to Give 51% More Hope to Hopenhagen

The comic strip (from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) above illustrates classic ignorance about vegetarianism and rationalisation for meat-eating. While we know that it’s near impossible to have an absolute guilt-free meals, the best thing is to minimise killing for food. If you think that it’s murder when many small animals and insects are killed when a tractor runs on a soybean field, what about countless animals in slaughterhouses. Are they not worthy of anyone’s compassion?

The irony is most soybeans are farmed for livestock bred to be slaughtered for meat-eaters’ plates. Very small percentage is actually processed for direct human consumption. While vegetarianism means minimising killing, meat-eating is definitely maximising it. Before accusing vegetarians as murderers, what have meat-eaters done to reduce killing? Before a better diet is found, vegetarianism or better still, veganism, are the best diet solutions.

From the news article below, ‘a major new assessment published this month in World Watch magazine concluded that the livestock sector contributes an astonishing figure of at least 51 percent [of all greenhouse gas emissions, instead of 18%, as previously reported].’ This clearly means that if you are an adamant meat-eater, your are not on the side of saving the Earth. Please eat less meat. Better still, don’t eat any.

Less Meat Less Climate Change
10 December, 2009
By Richard Schwartz, Director Veg Climate Alliance
http://cop15post.com/2009/12/10/news/less-meat-less-climate-change/

An exaggeration? Think again. As director of Veg Climate Alliance I am convinced that the real ‘inconvenient truth’ is that there is no way to avoid climate catastrophe without a major shift to plant-based diets.

The 2006 United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization report the “Livestock’s Long Shadow” determined that livestock production is globally responsible for more green house gasses (in CO2 equivalents) than all the world’s transport combined, or 18 versus 13.5 per cent. More recently, a major new assessment published this month in World Watch magazine concluded that the livestock sector contributes an astonishing figure of at least 51 percent.

Worse still, the UN reports foresee that the world’s population of farmed animals will even double in 50 years if current trends continue. This would largely roll back any emission reductions from all other sectors – making it very unlikely for us to avoid the impending climate disaster.

So a major shift toward plant-based diets is imperative if we are to have even a chance of preventing catastrophe. Indeed top climate leaders Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. James Hansen of NASA and Lord Nicholas Stern are also urging people to significantly cut their consumption of meat. And there is good news. Besides reducing global warming threats, a shift from animal products would have globally significant social and environmental benefits instead. There would be a major relief from chronic disease epidemics such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, with a related decrease in medical expenditures, freeing up public funds to meet environmental and other societal challenges.

Less livestock would hinder future zoological diseases and infections such as H1N1, MRSA, Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and E. coli. It would also significantly relieve global chronic hunger that now afflicts more than a billion people, because more than 40 percent of the world’s grain is fed to farmed animals.

Such a move would drastically reduce the severe mistreatment cruelty and unnecessary killing of billions of farmed animals. It would diminish many environmental threats, such as wholesale deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, ocean and fresh water pollution and other habitat poisoning, as well as the rapid extinction of species – all related to the raising of more than 60 billion animals annually worldwide.

In safeguarding future resources, such as water, land, and energy otherwise overused in meat production we would promote peaceful prosperity in avoiding the social effects that will follow climate change at its heals: hungry, thirsty, homeless people fleeing droughts, wildfires, storms, floods and disease, greatly increasing the potential for instability, violence, terrorism and war.

In the context of these greater global effects, it is in my view, clear that we are at a perilous turning point. Either we continue to eat as we do, contributing to the mounting problems and approaching calamity. Or we shift to nutritious plant-based diets and increase our prospects for a more peaceful, healthy and sustainable future – for all of us. You can help determine the fate of future generations. If you have not already done so, you can sharply reduce your consumption of animal products and convince others to change too.