We have 12 years to reduce carbon emissions by 40%. Americans Need to Eat 90% Less Beef and 60% Less Dairy to Avoid Environmental Devastation
Thank you for visiting our animal defence section. Before reading our main essay, please join us in a moment of compassion and reflection.
The wheels of business and human food compulsions are implacable and totally lacking in compassion. This is a downed cow, badly hurt, but still being dragged to slaughter. Click on this image to fully appreciate this horror repeated millions of times every day around the world. With plentiful non-animal meat substitutes that fool the palate, there is no longer reason for this senseless suffering. Meat consumption is a serious ecoanimal crime. The tyranny of the palate must be broken. Please consider changing your habits in this regard.
Even at this late hour humanity still has a fighting chance to delay and neutralise much of the otherwise inevitable horrid effects of climate change spelling the end of life on this planet as we know it. The corporate media and politicians, both servants of the sociopathic status quo, are worse than worthless in this regard, selling us distractions, false leadership, and indifference, so it's up to you to implement at least this simple step. You can do this!
By Estelle Rayburn
UN Warns We Have 12 Years to Reduce Carbon Emissions by 40% – Here’s How You Can Halve Your Footprint Today!
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ccording to an alarming report recently released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we only have around a dozen years left to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) if we wish to avoid a significantly heightened risk of extreme heat, droughts, floods and poverty affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world.
As underlined in the assessment, which was written by leading climate scientists, achieving this goal will “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
If we fail to meet this objective and global temperatures rise by even a mere half a degree Celsius more to 2°C (3.6°F), the effects on our planet are expected to be devastating. According to scientific predictions laid out in the report, this amount of warming would likely make extremely hot days both more common and more severe, thus increasing the incidence of forest fires and heat-related deaths. And that’s just the start of the detrimental impacts expected to result from a warming of 2°C or more.
In addition, insects and plants will be nearly twice as likely to lose half of their habitat if global temperatures rose by 2°C as compared to if they went up by 1.5°C. Further, scientific projections suggest that 99 percent of the world’s corals will be lost at the higher end of the temperature range whereas more than 10 percent would have a fighting chance at survival if temperatures are limited to the lower target.
Not to mention a warming of 1.5°C would be associated with far more water stress, food scarcity issues, and climate-related poverty for hundreds of millions fewer people, particularly in poor countries, than a warming of 2°C.
Clearly, that deceivingly small half-degree difference has the potential to bring about significantly worse effects. And we’re already seeing just how powerful climate change can be. With global temperatures around 1°C (1.8°F) above pre-industrial levels at present, severe forest fires, hurricanes, and droughts are already ravaging nations around the world.
As internationally recognized scientist Johan Rockström reportedly told the Guardian, “Climate change is occurring earlier and more rapidly than expected. Even at the current level of 1°C warming, it is painful. This report is really important. It has a scientific robustness that shows 1.5°C is not just a political concession. There is a growing recognition that 2°C is dangerous.”
So how can we make sure that warming does not exceed 1.5°C and take us into highly dangerous territory? According to the report, carbon pollution will need to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 in order to meet the important target.
While this objective may seem daunting and extremely difficult to achieve, the truth is that doing so is very possible if we all make minor some lifestyle changes. For example, leaving meat and dairy off our plates and embracing a plant-based diet has the power to save an enormous amount of carbon emissions and water, plus redirect grain to people instead of animals.
To be more specific, if everyone stopped consuming meat, it would free up enough grain to feed 1.4 billion people a plant-based diet, thus combating world hunger in a huge way.
Further, if Americans who currently eat an animal-heavy diet shifted their diets to add more plant-based foods, the one-day reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would be equivalent to eliminating 661 million passenger-vehicle miles. If you eat plant-based for a year, you can halve your dietary carbon footprint. Further, a recent study found if a nation of 320 million people (about the size of the U.S.) switched from a meat-heavy diet to a plant-based diet, we could REDUCE greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by about 28 percent. Not to mention, for every person who chose to fuel themselves with plants rather than animals, over 200,000 gallons of water would be saved every year!
Part Two
Americans Need to Eat 90% Less Beef and 60% Less Dairy to Avoid Environmental Devastation
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he devastating effects that raising animals en masse on factory farms are having on our one and only Earth are well documented by scientific experts. In the modern day, industrial animal agriculture is depleting our finite resources at wildly unsustainable rates while driving deforestation, killing our oceans, and putting unfathomably large amounts of climate change-causing greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.
As a direct result of how we’ve chosen to produce food, we are beginning to experience the disastrous effects of global warming and resultant climate change. But the powerful natural disasters and unseasonable weather we’re experiencing now will pale in comparison to what we’ll be facing in the near future if we don’t drastically change our diets.
According to a comprehensive new analysis on the ways in which our food system impacts the environment, global meat consumption needs to be cut enormously if we hope to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) and prevent seriously dangerous climate change effects as our world population skyrockets to 10 billion people in the coming decades.
By just how much does meat-eating need to be reduced, you ask? This latest research, which was published in the journal Nature, estimates that the average world citizen needs to eat 75 percent less beef, 90 percent less pork and half the number of eggs they currently consume in order for us to avoid a climate catastrophe.
And here in the U.S. as well as in other wealthy Western countries like the U.K., the necessary cuts need to be even greater since people in these nations currently consume more animal-sourced foods on average than those in developing countries. To be specific, U.K. and U.S. citizens need to begin eating 90 percent less beef and drinking 60 percent less dairy milk while increasing their consumption of beans and pulses between four and six times, the research team concluded.
In the words of one of the researchers, Professor Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, “Feeding a world population of 10 billion is possible, but only if we change the way we eat and the way we produce food. Greening the food sector or eating up our planet: this is what is on the menu today.”
Indeed, forging a more sustainable food system by dramatically reducing meat and dairy consumption around the world is not something we can afford to put on the back burner – it’s a critically important step which needs to be taken right away if we want to have any chance at feeding our rapidly growing population and ensure that our planet remains habitable.
As the reality of our climate crisis has become impossible to ignore, more and more people have started to embrace plant-based eating by adopting vegan, vegetarian or “flexitarian” diets. However, according to researchers, these trends need to go global and catch on with many more world citizens if they are to solve our current predicament.
While we wait for world leaders to step up and take this pressing problem seriously, we can all help enact change on an individual level by reducing our own personal consumption of meat and dairy. Skeptical of the power of one person going plant-based? Consider this: Ditching meat for a single year will slash your carbon footprint in half!
To learn more about how you can help preserve our beautiful Earth and stave off deadly environmental consequences, check out the Eat For The Planet book!
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