Combatting climate change: Veganism or Green New Deal? It’s Veganism.
The appeal of veganism is the claim that by excluding animal products from our diets we could reduce food’s land use by 76%, GHG emissions by 49%, and feed the 10 billion people that will populate this planet in 2050.
BENJAMIN SELWYN: ‘Humanity is standing on the brink of catastrophic climate change. The 2018 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that ‘without societal transformation and rapid implementation of ambitious greenhouse gas reduction measures, pathways to limiting warming to 1.5°C and achieving sustainable development will be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve’. How can we begin to think about the societal transformations necessary to achieve these targets?
Over the last year, two very different but increasingly popular and seemingly realistic solutions have emerged to address this question. The first is what can be labelled mainstream veganism; the second is the Green New Deal (GND). Both approaches are based on a systemic understanding of the causes of climate change and argue for mass social participation in order to meet their objectives. But despite the seemingly complementary appeal of the two approaches, they lead in fundamentally different political directions…
The appeal of mainstream veganism is the claim that by excluding animal products from our diets we could reduce food’s land use by 76%, and food’s GHG emissions by 49%. Such a transformation could feed the projected 10 billion people that will populate this planet in 2050. It could help conserve the world’s wild animal, bird and insect species. And it could enable large-scale reforestation. Veganism also highlights the appalling treatment of factory farmed animals, and sometimes brings to the fore the highly exploitative conditions of workers in the meat sector. A recent article in the Guardian summarised the arguments as ‘Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth’.
The rise in the popularity of veganism, reflecting a desire by increasing numbers of people in rich countries to make a real difference to the fate of the planet and of humanity is, without doubt, a positive force. But there is a big mismatch between what mainstream veganism sees as the systemic problems of the global food economy and its individualist solutions to overcoming them. What we need, to avert climate catastrophe, is a systemic approach to comprehending and transforming the current global food economy’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: