Chris Hedges has gone vegan as a response to climate change, saying that "becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species." In his column explaining his decision (Saving the Planet, One Meal at a Time) he lays out a treasure trove of statistics. Here are just a few (I've left out the sources, but they are easily found in his footnotes):
• A person who is vegan will save 1,100 gallons of water, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, 30 square feet of forested land, 45 pounds of grain and one sentient animal’s life every day.
• Crops grown for livestock feed consume 56 percent of the water used in the United States.
• In the United States 70 percent of the grain we grow goes to feed livestock raised for consumption.
• Land devoted exclusively to raising livestock now represents 45 percent of the earth’s land mass.
If you have yet to be convinced, please read the full article!
Monday, November 10, 2014
Monday, September 22, 2014
the climate march and "green energy" wishful thinking
Well, it's been way too long since I've posted here, for a few reasons… For one, I've been pretty preoccupied advocating for, then starting, a new high school dance program (another story for another blog); for another, I've been meaning to take up and expand on that third precept (not buying any new stuff you don't absolutely need) but felt I needed to do a lot more research first to be able to put my thoughts in any authoritative order — and got stuck with that same time crunch (but I have been reading some Herman Daly and will post some tidbits soon).
But — it would feel negligent not to take some notice of the big, highly-touted climate demonstrations over the weekend… Unfortunately, my main impression is disappointment over the rhetoric I've heard leading up to the rally. Every time I hear some activist interviewed, I invariably hear plenty of happy talk about how "we already have the technology" to run the economy "sustainably"… It seems that no one, from Bill McKibben on down, is ready to be the grownup and tell us the real truth — that we can't hope to save a habitable planet without radically changing the way we live. We are so obsessed with finding a magic techno-fix for the climate crisis — one that will let us continue to self-identify as "consumers" — that even our environmental leaders can't bring themselves to talk about just plain using less (a lot less). Yes, renewables are important — but only when coupled with a serious program of energy austerity; otherwise, all those renewables only make it possible for everything to keep growing even more.
I keep hearing mention of Germany as an example of scaling up solar power — how on some days, Germany gets as much as 75% of its electricity from solar! What is not mentioned so much is that Germany's GHG emissions have kept right on increasing over the past few years, even while it was adding all that solar capacity. Others have pointed to Spain as a leader in wind power — while glossing over the fact that Spain's GHG emissions keep rising as well, right along with all those wind turbines. Not long ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article about the giant Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave desert: not only does the facility incinerate every bird, butterfly, or other flying creature who strays into the path of its beams; but a UC Riverside study found that the emissions savings from the plant are minimal at best, and may even be negative because of the lost carbon sinks in the pristine desert habitat that was destroyed to make room for all those mirrors. Yet we keep building (and subsidizing) these monstrosities because we just can't face the fact that we cannot keep growing indefinitely on a finite planet. A "green" energy source that will allow us to keep using all the energy we want (rather than what we actually need) without harming the environment is as fictional as a free lunch or a perpetual motion machine.
The one activist I have recently heard mention the necessity of austerity is Naomi Klein: in her recent book, she writes about how much time (and, just by the way, how much GHG emissions) it would take to scale up to replace our fossil fuel-based economy with one based on renewables. And she says that the only thing that "doesn't require a technological and infrastructure revolution is to consume less, right away." Yet so many seem so reluctant to think about that part of the equation… Making the fossil fuel companies the only villain in this lets us all off the hook.
But — it would feel negligent not to take some notice of the big, highly-touted climate demonstrations over the weekend… Unfortunately, my main impression is disappointment over the rhetoric I've heard leading up to the rally. Every time I hear some activist interviewed, I invariably hear plenty of happy talk about how "we already have the technology" to run the economy "sustainably"… It seems that no one, from Bill McKibben on down, is ready to be the grownup and tell us the real truth — that we can't hope to save a habitable planet without radically changing the way we live. We are so obsessed with finding a magic techno-fix for the climate crisis — one that will let us continue to self-identify as "consumers" — that even our environmental leaders can't bring themselves to talk about just plain using less (a lot less). Yes, renewables are important — but only when coupled with a serious program of energy austerity; otherwise, all those renewables only make it possible for everything to keep growing even more.
I keep hearing mention of Germany as an example of scaling up solar power — how on some days, Germany gets as much as 75% of its electricity from solar! What is not mentioned so much is that Germany's GHG emissions have kept right on increasing over the past few years, even while it was adding all that solar capacity. Others have pointed to Spain as a leader in wind power — while glossing over the fact that Spain's GHG emissions keep rising as well, right along with all those wind turbines. Not long ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed an article about the giant Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave desert: not only does the facility incinerate every bird, butterfly, or other flying creature who strays into the path of its beams; but a UC Riverside study found that the emissions savings from the plant are minimal at best, and may even be negative because of the lost carbon sinks in the pristine desert habitat that was destroyed to make room for all those mirrors. Yet we keep building (and subsidizing) these monstrosities because we just can't face the fact that we cannot keep growing indefinitely on a finite planet. A "green" energy source that will allow us to keep using all the energy we want (rather than what we actually need) without harming the environment is as fictional as a free lunch or a perpetual motion machine.
The one activist I have recently heard mention the necessity of austerity is Naomi Klein: in her recent book, she writes about how much time (and, just by the way, how much GHG emissions) it would take to scale up to replace our fossil fuel-based economy with one based on renewables. And she says that the only thing that "doesn't require a technological and infrastructure revolution is to consume less, right away." Yet so many seem so reluctant to think about that part of the equation… Making the fossil fuel companies the only villain in this lets us all off the hook.
Friday, May 30, 2014
readings on the change needed and the Anthropocene
I’m afraid I have been writing rather sporadically here… but this was originally intended to be a place to expand on the ideas in my original long missive more than a daily or weekly diary… so there it is. I have written more about my first two precepts – that is, not eating meat and not flying on airplanes; I hope to write more about that last one – not buying stuff you don’t need – as soon as I can, but I feel I need to spend a little more time studying the idea of a steady-state economy before I can write with any assurance. I will say that I have had friends respond to my first letter by saying that if we stopped buying, the economy would collapse; my response at this point would be to paraphrase Herman Daly: we can choose to follow the dictates of the imaginary system that we ourselves created (the economy), or we can follow the dictates of the very real systems that we live in and depend upon (physics and the environment).
In the meantime, there are a couple of articles that I read recently that I would like to share:
The first is The Change Within by the always-dependable and always-interesting Naomi Klein. In this one, she lays out some interesting sociological reasons as to why responding to climate change in any sort of adequate fashion is so difficult, if not nearly impossible (hint: it’s not just because of the rapacious oil barons) – a big one being, of course, consumerism: “The problem is not ‘human nature,’ as we’re often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much…”
The second is The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us by Richard Heinberg (who is less well-known than Naomi Klein, but no less interesting). The title essentially says it – we have increasingly cut ourselves off from wild nature, and “as is usually the case in discussions about humans-and-wild-nature, the conversation is all about us.” He somewhat disagrees with Klein’s point about “human nature” and not being born having to shop this much – as Heinberg states, “every species maximizes population size and energy consumption within nature’s limits” – which is one of the major problems in any attempts to voluntarily limit our consumption (before we reach nature’s limits in the form of a massive and catastrophic ecosystem collapse). He also focuses on how we have always re-engineered the world and taken over ecosystems: “paleoanthropologists can date the arrival of humans to Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas by noting the timing of the extinctions of large prey species.” But the main point of the essay is our anthropocentrism our alienation from nature which is leading to environmental disaster – “when individual human self-absorption becomes blatantly destructive we call it narcissism… Our planetary-scale narcissism is just the latest method for justifying our actions as we bulldoze, deforest, overfish, and deplete our way to world domination.” For someone like me, who fully believes in Daniel Wildcat’s axiom that we began to lose our way when we stopped thinking of other species as relatives and began thinking of them as resources, hearing this idea from another writer is powerful indeed.
In the meantime, there are a couple of articles that I read recently that I would like to share:
The first is The Change Within by the always-dependable and always-interesting Naomi Klein. In this one, she lays out some interesting sociological reasons as to why responding to climate change in any sort of adequate fashion is so difficult, if not nearly impossible (hint: it’s not just because of the rapacious oil barons) – a big one being, of course, consumerism: “The problem is not ‘human nature,’ as we’re often told. We weren’t born having to shop this much…”
The second is The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us by Richard Heinberg (who is less well-known than Naomi Klein, but no less interesting). The title essentially says it – we have increasingly cut ourselves off from wild nature, and “as is usually the case in discussions about humans-and-wild-nature, the conversation is all about us.” He somewhat disagrees with Klein’s point about “human nature” and not being born having to shop this much – as Heinberg states, “every species maximizes population size and energy consumption within nature’s limits” – which is one of the major problems in any attempts to voluntarily limit our consumption (before we reach nature’s limits in the form of a massive and catastrophic ecosystem collapse). He also focuses on how we have always re-engineered the world and taken over ecosystems: “paleoanthropologists can date the arrival of humans to Europe, Asia, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas by noting the timing of the extinctions of large prey species.” But the main point of the essay is our anthropocentrism our alienation from nature which is leading to environmental disaster – “when individual human self-absorption becomes blatantly destructive we call it narcissism… Our planetary-scale narcissism is just the latest method for justifying our actions as we bulldoze, deforest, overfish, and deplete our way to world domination.” For someone like me, who fully believes in Daniel Wildcat’s axiom that we began to lose our way when we stopped thinking of other species as relatives and began thinking of them as resources, hearing this idea from another writer is powerful indeed.
Monday, March 10, 2014
meat-eating and the drought
Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle included a front-page, above-the-fold story titled "Farmers forced to change ways during drought." It profiled one Central Valley farmer who is going to abandon growing alfalfa, among other things, because of the loss of water deliveries from the Central Valley Project. The part that jumped out at me was far down in the article — it quotes "environmentalists" accusing farmers of exporting water in the form of crops such as alfalfa and almonds, and mentioned that alfalfa's water use far exceeds that of other crops in the state… Then in nearly the next paragraph, it cites the farmer saying that his alfalfa "isn't some thirsty boutique crop — it's vital to San Joaquin ranchers and dairies that put meat and milk in the refrigerators of millions of Californians" — so matter-of-factly, as if there isn't even the slightest question that meat and milk are absolutely necessary to have in our refrigerators!
So — yes, it is true that all that water going to all that alfalfa is used overwhelmingly to produce meat, milk, and cheese... and if lots more of us were vegetarians we probably would have plenty of water in California (even this year!). Of course, as a local columnist pointed out, any attempt by the government to promote vegetarianism would be met with fierce resistance (not that that is in any way possible, given that our current political system is completely beholden to corporate agriculture).
But official promotion is beside the point, all that is needed is to stop the subsidies and water deliveries — if all the corn, soy, and alfalfa farmers had to pay anything like the true cost of all that water, then meat would be so expensive as to become a rare luxury rather than the mainstay of the typical fast-food diet (much as, if carbon were priced at anything like its cost to the environment, flying would be a big deal again instead of a convenient commute option). If that were to happen, we would see a lot more vegetarians and near-vegetarians — with attendant improvements to general health and well-being, as well as the savings in water and carbon...
So — yes, it is true that all that water going to all that alfalfa is used overwhelmingly to produce meat, milk, and cheese... and if lots more of us were vegetarians we probably would have plenty of water in California (even this year!). Of course, as a local columnist pointed out, any attempt by the government to promote vegetarianism would be met with fierce resistance (not that that is in any way possible, given that our current political system is completely beholden to corporate agriculture).
But official promotion is beside the point, all that is needed is to stop the subsidies and water deliveries — if all the corn, soy, and alfalfa farmers had to pay anything like the true cost of all that water, then meat would be so expensive as to become a rare luxury rather than the mainstay of the typical fast-food diet (much as, if carbon were priced at anything like its cost to the environment, flying would be a big deal again instead of a convenient commute option). If that were to happen, we would see a lot more vegetarians and near-vegetarians — with attendant improvements to general health and well-being, as well as the savings in water and carbon...
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
the carbon cost of eating meat
So, on to the next of those three precepts: vegetarianism, or the huge carbon cost of eating meat. From what I have seen, this is too often ignored in discussions about solutions to the global warming crisis, for whatever reasons — too personal, too threatening? Or, more cynically, because of the influence of Big Agriculture — or that there is little profit to be made from a wholesale transition to giving up meat (as opposed to, for instance, pushing "green" products like electric cars or solar panels).
When I first began looking up "personal carbon footprint" calculators a few years back, they almost completely ignored the issue of diet, focusing exclusively on how much you drive, what kind of energy you use in your home, how efficient your appliances are, etc. The Sierra Club (as recently as 2008), in its listing of things you can do to lessen your carbon footprint, included small actions such as hanging your clothes out to dry, but did not include eating less (or no) meat. Until pretty recently, Al Gore had never so much as mentioned the environmental impact of meat (according to Ben Adler). I heard only last month that Gore has now adopted a vegan diet (about time, I'd say); and when I looked again at carbon calculators, I found some that were much improved, taking vegan diets and local food into account — but still diet is given very little attention considering the outsized impact it could have on the crisis.
Whatever the reason for neglect in most discourse, switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet is surely the single most effective thing any individual can do to lower demand for fossil fuels and decrease GHG emissions — and some experts believe that a massive reversion to vegetarianism, coupled with re-forestation of lands now devoted to livestock, is our only hope of being able to drastically reduce emissions as rapidly as necessary in our constantly-worsening emergency.
More on that later; first — meat is essentially grain, water, and land, greatly concentrated. Here are a few specifics:
1. Grain: I have often read arguments that it is cereal monocrops — with their profligate use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers — that are most intensively contributing to environmental degradation. Those who point this out often argue that people should stop eating bread and pasta, not meat. This completely ignores the huge proportions of cereal crops that are fed directly to livestock — according to the World Bank, 65% of world corn production is used for animal feed, with only 15% used for feeding humans. In the US the numbers are even more striking: about 80% of the corn crop goes to feed livestock, and 98% of soybean meal is destined to feed animals, not human tofu-eaters! Meat is essentially grain, greatly concentrated. Estimates vary, but even for chicken (the least carbon-intensive meat) it takes about 2 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain (which presumably includes the bones, beak, feathers, and all the other "waste" parts that get thrown out). Beef is much worse — I've seen estimates ranging from 3 - 16 pounds, but most sources put the ratio at 7 or 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain. Most certainly, we could get much more food much more efficiently from those vast amounts of corn and soybeans if we just fed them directly to humans!
2. Water: Water use may not have a direct effect on climate change — but it is certainly a consideration, given the increased potential for drought (as we Californians are realizing right now). It takes 29 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, 219 gallons to produce a pound of tofu, and 2,464 gallons to produce a pound of hamburger (Water Education Foundation). Enough said.
3. Land use: Of course, it takes lots of land to grow not only all those cereal crops, but also to graze vast herds of cattle. The total land area of the US is about 2.3 billion acres; the lower 48 states (excluding a lot of ice and tundra in Alaska) totals about 1.9 billion acres. Of that, the USDA lists 614 million acres of pasture and rangeland, or nearly one-third of the total. Even that is a low estimate, as it does not include so-called "cropland used for pasture" — other estimates have put the total as high as 788 million acres, or 41% of total land area in the lower 48! Add to that the 200-plus million acres used to plant feed corn, soy, and alfalfa hay used for feeding livestock, and we can see that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous United States goes to growing and feeding animals destined to be eaten (dwarfing the 3% that is urban land). On a global scale, "livestock systems" are estimated to occupy 45% of all land on earth — a pretty astounding figure, I'd say.
The carbon cost of meat is truly enormous — even the UN FAO's extremely conservative estimate is that 18% of global GHG emissions can be traced to meat, more than the entire transportation sector; and WorldWatch's Goodland and Anhang, taking into account all of the factors the FAO missed, calculated that an astonishing 51% of worldwide emissions are attributable to meat production. But it is because of that land use that, according to Goodland, switching to vegetarian/vegan diets may be the only hope for pulling back from the brink of our climate catastrophe. James Hansen recently recommended immediate decreases in carbon consumption of 6% a year, coupled with massive reforestation, as the only way to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures (subsequent developments have shown that that challenging figure is not enough — we need to cut back something more like 10% per year, starting now — but the principle still stands). But where is it possible for that massive reforestation to happen? Some of us may fantasize about turning shopping malls, parking lots, and golf courses back into forested land — but even if that were possible, the acreage wouldn't be nearly sufficient (remember, we're talking about massive reforestation here). But remember that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous US, and 45% in the world, is devoted to grazing and feeding livestock, and the solution becomes obvious. According to Goodland, only by taking meat out of our diets and taking these vast rangelands and feedlots out of production could we find enough land for the reforestation that might — just might — give us a chance of averting catastrophe.
I want to be really clear, here — I am not proposing vegetarianism as a solution by itself. There is only so much that reforestation can do, and it could only work if accompanied by those massive cuts to consumption (10% per year until we reach zero), which entail serious changes in the way we do everything we do (another subject for a long post yet to come…). But in terms of what an individual can do, going vegan is undoubtedly the single most effective way to decrease emissions… And aside from the numbers, there is the consideration that going vegetarian is one of the simplest ways to affect climate change as an individual — as Adler says, "consumers may not have a say in whether or not another coal power plant will be built, but they do have control over how much meat they personally eat." Or, in other words, it is probably a lot more feasible to give up eating meat than it is to stop driving to work or to completely turn off the heater in the winter (plus there is the added benefit of better health... not to mention the massive cruelty of factory farming — but that could be an entire subject in itself...).
When I first began looking up "personal carbon footprint" calculators a few years back, they almost completely ignored the issue of diet, focusing exclusively on how much you drive, what kind of energy you use in your home, how efficient your appliances are, etc. The Sierra Club (as recently as 2008), in its listing of things you can do to lessen your carbon footprint, included small actions such as hanging your clothes out to dry, but did not include eating less (or no) meat. Until pretty recently, Al Gore had never so much as mentioned the environmental impact of meat (according to Ben Adler). I heard only last month that Gore has now adopted a vegan diet (about time, I'd say); and when I looked again at carbon calculators, I found some that were much improved, taking vegan diets and local food into account — but still diet is given very little attention considering the outsized impact it could have on the crisis.
Whatever the reason for neglect in most discourse, switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet is surely the single most effective thing any individual can do to lower demand for fossil fuels and decrease GHG emissions — and some experts believe that a massive reversion to vegetarianism, coupled with re-forestation of lands now devoted to livestock, is our only hope of being able to drastically reduce emissions as rapidly as necessary in our constantly-worsening emergency.
More on that later; first — meat is essentially grain, water, and land, greatly concentrated. Here are a few specifics:
1. Grain: I have often read arguments that it is cereal monocrops — with their profligate use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers — that are most intensively contributing to environmental degradation. Those who point this out often argue that people should stop eating bread and pasta, not meat. This completely ignores the huge proportions of cereal crops that are fed directly to livestock — according to the World Bank, 65% of world corn production is used for animal feed, with only 15% used for feeding humans. In the US the numbers are even more striking: about 80% of the corn crop goes to feed livestock, and 98% of soybean meal is destined to feed animals, not human tofu-eaters! Meat is essentially grain, greatly concentrated. Estimates vary, but even for chicken (the least carbon-intensive meat) it takes about 2 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain (which presumably includes the bones, beak, feathers, and all the other "waste" parts that get thrown out). Beef is much worse — I've seen estimates ranging from 3 - 16 pounds, but most sources put the ratio at 7 or 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain. Most certainly, we could get much more food much more efficiently from those vast amounts of corn and soybeans if we just fed them directly to humans!
2. Water: Water use may not have a direct effect on climate change — but it is certainly a consideration, given the increased potential for drought (as we Californians are realizing right now). It takes 29 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, 219 gallons to produce a pound of tofu, and 2,464 gallons to produce a pound of hamburger (Water Education Foundation). Enough said.
3. Land use: Of course, it takes lots of land to grow not only all those cereal crops, but also to graze vast herds of cattle. The total land area of the US is about 2.3 billion acres; the lower 48 states (excluding a lot of ice and tundra in Alaska) totals about 1.9 billion acres. Of that, the USDA lists 614 million acres of pasture and rangeland, or nearly one-third of the total. Even that is a low estimate, as it does not include so-called "cropland used for pasture" — other estimates have put the total as high as 788 million acres, or 41% of total land area in the lower 48! Add to that the 200-plus million acres used to plant feed corn, soy, and alfalfa hay used for feeding livestock, and we can see that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous United States goes to growing and feeding animals destined to be eaten (dwarfing the 3% that is urban land). On a global scale, "livestock systems" are estimated to occupy 45% of all land on earth — a pretty astounding figure, I'd say.
The carbon cost of meat is truly enormous — even the UN FAO's extremely conservative estimate is that 18% of global GHG emissions can be traced to meat, more than the entire transportation sector; and WorldWatch's Goodland and Anhang, taking into account all of the factors the FAO missed, calculated that an astonishing 51% of worldwide emissions are attributable to meat production. But it is because of that land use that, according to Goodland, switching to vegetarian/vegan diets may be the only hope for pulling back from the brink of our climate catastrophe. James Hansen recently recommended immediate decreases in carbon consumption of 6% a year, coupled with massive reforestation, as the only way to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures (subsequent developments have shown that that challenging figure is not enough — we need to cut back something more like 10% per year, starting now — but the principle still stands). But where is it possible for that massive reforestation to happen? Some of us may fantasize about turning shopping malls, parking lots, and golf courses back into forested land — but even if that were possible, the acreage wouldn't be nearly sufficient (remember, we're talking about massive reforestation here). But remember that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous US, and 45% in the world, is devoted to grazing and feeding livestock, and the solution becomes obvious. According to Goodland, only by taking meat out of our diets and taking these vast rangelands and feedlots out of production could we find enough land for the reforestation that might — just might — give us a chance of averting catastrophe.
I want to be really clear, here — I am not proposing vegetarianism as a solution by itself. There is only so much that reforestation can do, and it could only work if accompanied by those massive cuts to consumption (10% per year until we reach zero), which entail serious changes in the way we do everything we do (another subject for a long post yet to come…). But in terms of what an individual can do, going vegan is undoubtedly the single most effective way to decrease emissions… And aside from the numbers, there is the consideration that going vegetarian is one of the simplest ways to affect climate change as an individual — as Adler says, "consumers may not have a say in whether or not another coal power plant will be built, but they do have control over how much meat they personally eat." Or, in other words, it is probably a lot more feasible to give up eating meat than it is to stop driving to work or to completely turn off the heater in the winter (plus there is the added benefit of better health... not to mention the massive cruelty of factory farming — but that could be an entire subject in itself...).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)