We have our own modern version of this. When we think back on moments when history seemed to happen before our eyes—Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11—our reflex is to ask others where they were when it happened. Yet as with God in the Bible, we are not really trying to establish someone’s coordinates. We are asking something deeper about their connection to the moment, with the hope of situating our own.
The word “crisis” derives from the Greek krisis, meaning “decision.”
The environmental crisis, though a universal experience, doesn’t feel like an event that we are a part of. It doesn’t feel like an event at all. And despite the trauma of a hurricane, wildfire, famine, or extinction, it’s unlikely that a weather event will inspire a “Where were you when…” question of anyone who didn’t live through it—perhaps not even of those who did live through it. It’s all just weather. Just environmental.
But future generations will almost certainly look back and wonder where we were in the biblical sense: Where was our selfhood? What decisions did the crisis inspire? Why on earth—why on Earth—did we choose our suicide and their sacrifice?
Perhaps we could plead that the decision wasn’t ours to make: as much as we cared, there was nothing we could do. We didn’t know enough at the time. Being mere individuals, we didn’t have the means to enact consequential change. We didn’t run the oil companies. We weren’t making government policy. Perhaps we could argue, as Roy Scranton does in his New York Times essay “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” that “we [were] not free to choose how we live[d] any more than we [were] free to break the laws of physics.” The ability to save ourselves, and save them, was not in our hands.
But that would be a lie.
* * *
While information is not sufficient—without belief, knowing is only knowing—it is necessary for making a good decision. Awareness of Nazi atrocities didn’t shake Felix Frankfurter’s conscience, but without that awareness, he would have no reason to be asked, or to ask himself, “Where are you?” Knowing is the difference between a grave error and an unforgivable crime.
With respect to climate change, we have been relying on dangerously incorrect information. Our attention has been fixed on fossil fuels, which has given us an incomplete picture of the planetary crisis and led us to feel that we are hurling rocks at a Goliath far out of reach. Even if they are not persuasive enough on their own to change our behavior, facts can change our minds, and that’s where we need to begin. We know we have to do something, but we have to do something is usually an expression of incapacitation, or at least uncertainty. Without identifying the thing that we have to do, we cannot decide to do it.
The next section of this book will correct the picture by explaining the connection between animal agriculture and climate change. I have condensed what could have been several hundred pages of prose into a handful of the most essential facts. And I have not included important complementary narratives—the other kinds of destruction factory farming wreaks on the environment, like water pollution, ocean dead zones, and loss of biodiversity; the cruelty that is fundamental to contemporary animal agriculture; the health and societal effects of eating unprecedentedly large amounts of meat, dairy, and eggs. This book is not a comprehensive explanation of climate change, and it is not a categorical case against eating animal products. It is an exploration of a decision that our planetary crisis requires us to make.
The word “decision” derives from the Latin decidere, which means “to cut off.” When we decide to turn off the lights during a war, refuse to move to the back of the bus, flee our shtetl with our sister’s shoes, lift a car off a trapped person, make way for an ambulance, drive home through the night from Detroit, rise for a wave, take a selfie, participate in a medical trial, attend a Thanksgiving meal, plant a tree, wait in line to vote, or eat a meal that reflects our values, we are also deciding to cut off the possible worlds in which we don’t do those things. Every decision requires loss, not only of what we might have done otherwise but of the world to which our alternative action would have contributed. Often that loss feels too small to notice; sometimes it feels too large to bear. Usually, we just don’t think about our decisions in those terms. We live in a culture of historically unprecedented acquisition, which so often asks us and enables us to attain. We are prompted to define ourselves by what we have: possessions, dollars, views and likes. But we are revealed by what we release.
Climate change is the greatest crisis humankind has ever faced, and it is a crisis that will always be simultaneously addressed together and faced alone. We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.
Where were you when you made your decision?
II. HOW TO PREVENT THE GREATEST DYING
Degrees of Change
• From one hundred thousand to ten thousand years ago, mastodons, mammoths, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, and giant beavers roamed a world of ice. The average global temperature was four to seven degrees Celsius colder than it is today.
• Fifty million years ago, the Arctic was filled with tropical rainforests. Crocodiles, turtles, and alligators lived in the polar forests of what is now Canada and Greenland. Two-hundred-pound penguins waddled in Australia, and palm trees grew in Alaska. There were no polar ice caps. The Antarctic seas were warm enough for a balmy swim, and around the equator, the oceans were the temperature of a hot tub. Earth was five to eight degrees Celsius warmer than it is today.
• As with body temperature, a few degrees can be the difference between health and crisis.
The First Crisis
• There have been five mass extinctions. All but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change.
• The most lethal mass extinction occurred 250 million years ago, when volcanic eruptions released enough carbon dioxide (CO2) to warm the oceans by about ten degrees Celsius, ending 96 percent of marine life and 70 percent of life on land. The event is known as the Great Dying.
• Many scientists call the geological age from the Industrial Revolution to the present the Anthropocene, the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the earth.
• We are now experiencing the sixth mass extinction, often referred to as the Anthropocene extinction.
• Taking into account natural mechanisms that influence climate, human activity is responsible for 100 percent of the global warming that has occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1750.
• The current climate change is the first caused by an animal and not by a natural event.
• The sixth mass extinction is the first climate crisis.
The First Farming
• If human history were a day, we were hunter-gatherers until about ten minutes before midnight.
• Humans represent 0.01 percent of life on Earth.
• Since the advent of agriculture, approximately twelve thousand years ago, humans have destroyed 83 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants.
Our Planet Is an Animal Farm
• Globally, humans use 59 percent of all the land capable of growing crops to grow food for livestock.
• One-third of all the fresh water that humans use goes to livestock, while only about one-thirtieth is used in homes.
• Seventy percent of the antibiotics produced globally are used for livestock, weakening the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat human diseases.
• Sixty percent of all mammals on Earth are animals raised for food.
• There are approximately thirty farmed animals for every human on the planet.
Our Population Growth Is Radical
• Before the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy in Europe was about thirty-
five years. It is now about eighty.
• It took two hundred thousand years for the human population to reach one billion, but only two hundred more years to reach seven billion.
• Every day, 360,000 people—roughly equal to the population of Florence, Italy—are born.
Our Animal Farming Is Radical
• In 1820, 72 percent of the American workforce was directly involved in agriculture. Today, 1.5 percent is.
• Like the video game console, the factory farm was an invention of the 1960s. Before then, food animals were raised outdoors in sustainable concentrations.
• Between 1950 and 1970, the number of American farms declined by half, the number of people employed in farming declined by half, and the size of the average farm doubled. During that time, the size of the average chicken also doubled.
• In 1966, distorting contact lenses were invented to make it harder for chickens to see their increasingly unnatural surroundings, thereby easing the stress that caused violent pecking and cannibalism. The lenses were considered too burdensome for farmers, so automated debeakers—which burn off the ends of chickens’ faces—became the industry norm.
• In 2018, more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in America were raised on factory farms.
Our Eating Is Radical
• The current level of meat and dairy consumption is the equivalent of every person alive on the planet in 1700 eating 950 pounds of meat and drinking 1,200 gallons of milk every day.
• There are twenty-three billion chickens living on Earth at any given time. Their combined mass is greater than that of all other birds on our planet. Humans eat sixty-five billion chickens per year.
• On average, Americans consume twice the recommended intake of protein.
• People who eat diets high in animal protein are four times as likely to die of cancer as those who eat diets low in animal protein are.
• Smokers are three times as likely to die of cancer as nonsmokers are.
• In America, one out of every five meals is eaten in a car.
Our Climate Change Is Radical
• We are currently in the Quaternary glaciation, a period with continental and polar ice sheets. Such a period is more commonly known as an ice age.
• According to models of cyclical climate change, Earth should be experiencing a period of slight cooling right now.
• Nine of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since the first YouTube video, “Me at the Zoo,” was posted, in 2005.
• During the Great Dying, a series of Siberian volcanoes produced enough lava to cover the United States up to three Eiffel Towers deep.
• Humans are now adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere ten times faster than the volcanoes did during the Great Dying.
Why Greenhouse Gases Matter
• Sunlight passes through the atmosphere and heats the Earth. A portion of that heat bounces back into space. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap some of the outgoing heat, as a blanket traps body heat.
• Life on Earth depends on the greenhouse effect. Without it, Earth’s average temperature would be near zero degrees Fahrenheit, instead of fifty-nine degrees.
• CO2 accounts for 82 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity. The majority is emitted by industry, transport, and electrical use.
• For the eight hundred thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere remained stable. Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by about 40 percent.
• Methane and nitrous oxide are the second and third most prevalent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions and 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions.
• Between the advent of factory farming in the 1960s and 1999, concentrations of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere grew about two times faster, and concentrations of methane grew six times faster, than they had over any previous forty-year period during the last two thousand years.
Climate Change Is a Ticking Time Bomb
• Different climate scientists have given different deadlines by which we must halt greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Such statements usually take the form “We have X years to solve climate change.”
• Climate change is not a disease that can be managed, like diabetes; it is an event like a cancerous tumor that needs to be removed before the cells fatally multiply. The planet can handle only so much warming before positive feedback loops create “runaway climate change.”
• One of the most powerful feedback loops is called the albedo effect. White ice sheets reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere. Dark oceans absorb sunlight. As the planet warms, there is less ice to reflect sunlight, and more dark ocean and land to absorb it. Oceans become hotter, melting ice faster.
• The former United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres has said that we have until 2020 to avoid temperature thresholds leading to runaway, irreversible climate change.
Because Climate Change Is a Ticking Time Bomb, Not All Greenhouse Gases Matter Equally
• Methane has 34 times the global warming potential (GWP)—the ability to trap heat—as CO2 does over a century. Over two decades, methane is 86 times as powerful. If CO2 were the thickness of an average blanket, imagine methane as a blanket thicker than LeBron James is tall.
• Nitrous oxide has 310 times the GWP of CO2. Imagine a blanket so thick you could commit suicide by jumping off it.
• When global emissions are calculated, greenhouse gases are converted to carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e). Calculations are usually based on a hundred-year timescale. This means that one metric ton of methane should be counted as thirty-four metric tons of CO2 in an overall greenhouse gas assessment.
• We can think of our atmosphere as a budget and our emissions as expenses: because methane and nitrous oxide are significantly larger greenhouse expenses than CO2 in the short term, they are the most urgent to cut. Because they are primarily created by our food choices, they are also easier to cut.
Why Deforestation Matters
• Trees are “carbon sinks,” which means they absorb CO2.
• Imagine a bathtub filling up with water. If the drain slows, the tub will fill up more quickly. This is similar to the earth’s photosynthetic capacity: already, humans are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a rate that exceeds Earth’s ability to regulate them, but vegetation currently stores a substantial amount of CO2—about one-quarter of anthropogenic emissions, or about half a century’s worth of emissions at the current rate.
• The more forests we destroy, the closer we come to plugging the drain.
• Allowing tropical land currently used for livestock to revert to forest could mitigate more than half of all anthropogenic GHGs.
• Trees are 50 percent carbon. Like coal, they release their stores of CO2 when burned.
• Forests contain more carbon than do all exploitable fossil-fuel reserves.
• The cutting and burning of forests is responsible for at least 15 percent of global GHGs per year. According to Scientific American, “By most accounts, deforestation in tropical rainforests adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the sum total of cars and trucks on the world’s roads.”
• About 80 percent of deforestation occurs to clear land for crops for livestock and grazing.
• Every year, wildfires in California create more greenhouse gas emissions than the state’s progressive environmental policies save.
• Burning forests is like further opening the tap while clogging the drain.
Not All Deforestation Matters Equally
• In 2018, Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro as president.
; • Bolsonaro campaigned on a plan to develop previously protected swaths of the Amazon (i.e., deforestation).
• It has been estimated that Bolsonaro’s policy would release 13.2 gigatons of carbon—more than two times the annual emissions of the entire United States.
• Animal agriculture is responsible for 91 percent of Amazonian deforestation.
Animal Agriculture Causes Climate Change
• As they digest food, cattle, goats, and sheep produce a significant amount of methane, which is mostly belched but also exhaled, farted, and passed in the waste of the animal.
• Livestock are the leading source of methane emissions.
• Nitrous oxide is emitted by livestock urine, manure, and the fertilizers used for growing feed crops.
• Livestock are the leading source of nitrous oxide emissions.
• Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation.
• According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.
Animal Agriculture Is a/the Leading Cause of Climate Change
We Are the Weather Page 6