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How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Veganism

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This month Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced the Green New Deal, a plan for eliminating U.S. carbon emissions and halting human-caused climate change. The Green New Deal legislation talks about life expectancy decline, decline in access to clean water and air, environmental destruction, the need to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, and a desire to provide “universal access to healthy food” and a sustainable environment.  

What’s missing in the proposal is any mention at all about animal agriculture’s effects on the environment and the correlation between diets high in animal products and diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The Left formerly cared about animal rights. Today, animal rights are barely mentioned in the Green Party’s platform and never advocated by Democrats (except hypocritically by Ocasio-Cortez). In the Left’s quest to end climate change, they’re ignoring a solution that could immediately curb it: decreasing the amount of factory farming. (RELATED: How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Climate Change

Veganism: A Diet to Save the Planet 

Almost everyone agrees: The most positive change to the environment would come from millions of people in Western countries adopting a vegan lifestyle, or at the least, dramatically reducing their consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs. A University of Chicago study showed that a person’s carbon footprint is more effectively reduced by going vegan than by switching from a conventional car to a hybrid. In addition, the U.S. EPA says that globally, animal agriculture is the single largest source of methane emissions and that methane is more than 25 times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is even worse—about 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The United Nations says the meat, egg, and dairy industries combined account for 65 percent of global nitrous-oxide emissions. 

The United Nations has also said that raising animals for food is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper by Oxford University researchers about their models of the effects of four different diets. Adopting vegetarian diets would cut food-related emissions by 63 percent and vegan diets would reduce them by 70 percent. Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, who led the research, said:

A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.

The Green New Deal and the Vegan Solution

Almost every environmental and health concern outlined in the Green New Deal could be radically helped by people in Western countries dramatically reducing our consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs, particularly those obtained from factory farms. It would not completely solve climate change, but it would go a long way and is more practical than the most solutions outlined by politicians. Here are some of the goals of the Green New Deal and how vegan-style diets could help. 

Feeding the World

Research shows that if meat and dairy consumption were eliminated, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75 percent and still feed the entire world. This is because so much farmland is currently used to raise crops to feed animals. Reforesting land currently used for animal agriculture would also benefit the environment and wildlife. 

A study from the University of Oxford published in the journal Nature notes that the rising global temperature is reducing crop yields, and at the same time earth’s growing population means we’ll need to farm 50 percent more food to feed 10 billion people in the next 30 years. Those researchers call for humanity to adopt a plant-based diet in which meat is eaten no more than once a week.  

Lowering Greenhouse Gas Emissions 

The Nature study found that “the production of animal products generates the majority of food-related greenhouse-gas emissions — specifically, up to 78% of total agricultural emissions,” according to CNN. Study author Marco Springmann, of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food at the University of Oxford, noted that “beef is more than 100 times as emissions-intensive as legumes.” Cows are especially egregious to the environment, emitting 10 times more greenhouse gases per kilogram of meat than do pigs and chickens, which still emit about 10 times more greenhouse gases than legumes. 

Improving Life Expectancy

The Green New Deal also wants to address life expectancy decline. Since the more meat you eat, the shorter your life expectancy, politicians should be promoting plant-based diets as part of their plan to help Americans’ health. One study showed that vegetarian men lived, on average, 7.28 years longer and women 4.42 years longer than non-vegetarians. Two studies of people who ate very little meat showed a lifespan increase of 3.6 years. 

Health Care

The Green New Deal also calls for universal healthcare. But they don’t mention that following a plant-based diet lowers your risk for heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and other diseases. If Americans lowered their meat consumption and had fewer preventable diseases, our nation’s healthcare bill would be more affordable and perhaps we could implement universal healthcare. 

Clean Water and Air

Lowering consumption of animal products is also key for securing clean water and air. This is important because by 2030, the world will only have 60 percent of the water we need. Other estimates say that by 2050, we’ll need triple the amount of water humans currently use. And of the 3.8tn cubic meters of water used annual by humans today, 70 percent is consumed by the global agriculture sector, according to a 2013 report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME). 

Animal products take literally tons more water to produce than if millions of people were eating vegetables and beans instead. Even if everyone cut their meat consumption in half rather than eliminated it completely, the environmental savings would be enormous. According to the IME, meats require much more water to produce than most non-meat foods: 

 Food  Water required to produce (liters) 
Beef (1kg) 15,415
Pork (1kg)  5,988
Butter (1kg)  5,553
Chicken (1kg)  4,325
Cheese (1kg) 3,178
Rice (1kg) 2,497
Pasta (dry, 1kg) 1,849
Bread (1kg)  1,608
Milk (4 x 250 ml glasses, roughly 1kg) 1,020
Apple (1kg) 822
Bananas (1kg)  790
Potatoes (1kg)  287
Cabbage (1kg)  237

The United Nations 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options discusses the catastrophic effects the livestock industries will continue to have on the earth over the next half-century. Chapter Four, “Livestock’s Role in Water Depletion and Pollution,” cites estimates “that the livestock sector may account for some 45 percent of the global budget of water used in food production.” While Americans consume a lot of meat per capita and are often blamed for problems caused by factory farming, developing countries are ramping up their industrialized farming, regulations to avoid pollution are often nonexistent or ignored, with both animal waste and slaughterhouse waste discharged directly into waterways. The report says that 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus that farm animals eat is eventually excreted as waste, and that millions of tons of nitrogen and phosphorus are added to the environment through their manure each year. These enter the water supply in the form of dangerous nitrates, as well as bacteria like Salmonella and E. coli and drug residues, like antibiotics and hormones. Besides sickness, these can cause bacterial resistance, and hormones can cause sex reversals in fish and also contribute to higher rates of cancers in wildlife and humans, according to the report. The U.N. report describes livestock’s contribution to water scarcity and pollution as “on a massive scale.”

We could significantly impact air quality by cutting back meat as well. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, “if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.” 

‘Universal Access to Healthy Food’ 

Global food security is already a huge issue, with 815 million people, or 11 percent of the world’s population, going hungry in 2016, according to the U.N. As the population increases, food scarcity is expected to only get worse. Combined with that, developing countries are increasing their intake of animal products as food, and Western countries are taking increasing numbers of immigrants from developing countries, which means those people are eating more meat than if they remained in their home country. (RELATED: How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Immigration)

A 2010 U.N. report urged a global shift to a vegan diet to combat global food shortages and curb climate change. By reducing meat consumption, more people in the world will have access to healthy food. 

Sustainability

Raising animals results in soil erosion, “such as through hoof and grazing impacts on pastures and rangelands.” Once soil is eroded, farmers must add chemical fertilizers to maintain the same yields due to nutrients being depleted from the soil. The chemicals further degrade the soil, and leach into waterways.  

A report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s international panel of sustainable resource management said that diets rich in meat and dairy are unsustainable. Lead author Professor Edgar Hertwich said:

Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels.

The Left’s Inane Response to a Real Solution? Veganism = White Privilege 

It’s obvious that one of the most practical ways to reduce pollution and truly save the environment is a mass adoption of veganism in industrialized nations. But SJWs on the Left are responding with outrage when meat’s disastrous impacts are voiced. 

As one article says:

A vegan lifestyle message as a way to combat climate change could ensure the environmental movement remains a space dominated by those who are white and enjoy class privilege.

The message is, feelings are more important than saving the planet. 

Some claim that since some people need to eat meat for medical reasons, we should abandon all discussions of veganism to solve climate change. That’s easily solved: For one, animal food would be more expensive, not eliminated completely, so people would still have access. Perhaps the government could issue tax rebates for people with medical problems requiring high-meat diets. 

Others claim that promoting veganism isn’t fair to indigenous people who rely on hunting. As far as I know, animals hunted in the wild aren’t contributing to climate change, so those people should be left alone. People who make this argument are missing the point that the problem isn’t people who hunt, but industrialized animal agriculture. 

Others claim that some people can’t eat high-carb diets. That’s a moot point too, given that it’s possible to curb animal products and eat a high-protein, low-carb diet. 

Sharon Palmer, a plant-based food and sustainability expert, commented on the findings from the University of Oxford study published in Nature:

Research consistently shows that drastically reducing animal food intake and mostly eating plant foods is one of the most powerful things you can do to reduce your impact on the planet over your lifetime, in terms of energy required, land used, greenhouse gas emissions, water used and pollutants produced.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than a decade and a vegan for five years. I know it can be difficult. But to help the environment, you don’t have to go completely vegan. Every time you cut down on meat, dairy, or eggs it will help. On a mass scale, we’ve solved almost all of the world’s environmental problems. 

Click to read How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Immigration and How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Climate Change

The post How the Left Abandoned the Environment: Veganism appeared first on Aristocrats of the Soul.


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