SUBSIDIES

OSCAR RUEDA: To limit global warming at 1.5°C, climate mitigation pathways project the need to remove 100–1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been the most prominent carbon removal method considered. However, massive BECCS deployment would likely require cropland expansion to produce the biomass feedstock needed. Such an expansion may worsen biodiversity due to the loss of natural land and food and water security due to competition for land and water resources. A transition from consuming animal-source proteins to…

SYSTEM UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald interviews Wayne Hsiung (Direct Action Everywhere) and John Oberg (animal advocate) on the multi-level atrocities of industrialized factory farms, and how Washington abuses its power to protect them. VIDEO PODCAST

VICKY BOND: Take a moment to picture a farm animal enjoying dinner. Are you imagining a cow grazing on grass or perhaps a chicken pecking at the ground, foraging for seeds and insects? In today’s factory farming system, the “feed” these animals eat is far removed from their natural diets. Rather than munching on grass or insects, most animals on factory farms eat some type of animal feed—a cost-effective mixture of grains, proteins, and often the addition of antibiotics designed to make them grow as quickly as possible. The ingredients in animal feed don’t just matter to the animals’…

NURIA ALMIRON: Climate change denial refers to the stances that advocate against the evidence posited for human-induced global warming... Since the publication of Livestock's Long Shadow by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2006, an increasing number of governmental and non-governmental organizations and independent researchers have pointed at animal agriculture, and, by extension, animal-based diets, as a primary contributor to global warming. At the same time, over the last few decades, animal advocates, animal rights organizations, and many scholars and experts from a wide array…

VEGCONOMIST: The European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change has released a report outlining several recommendations for addressing the climate crisis, including shifting subsidies away from animal agriculture. The authors say that the common agricultural policy (CAP) “should be better aligned with EU goals”. This could include “shifting CAP support away from emission-intensive agricultural practices, including livestock production”, instead prioritising lower-emissions products and other environmental policies. Furthermore, the report recommends measures to “encourage healthier,…

STEVEN GAYDOS: “All Illusions Must Be Broken” is the third feature documentary the couple Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell has made for executive producers Robert Redford and Terrence Malick; they picked up SXSW and Nashville Fest awards for the 2016 portrait of celebrated poet Wendell Berry, “Look & See,” and the Indie Spirit Award for their 2007 environmental doc, “The Unforeseen.” For those who love documentaries filled with provocative ideas that demand engagement, “Illusions” packs a walloping punch in the face of complacency and acceptance of a global social order that remains plagued…

MICHAEL BURROWS: The scientists, government officials, and activists that make up the fields of conservation and wildlife management govern many important aspects of our society’s relationship with the natural world – yet vegan ethics are virtually nowhere to be seen. There is much need for vegans to engage with our relationship with wild lands and the animals living on them, because the principles that vegans live by could push conservation in a new and more principled direction. By influencing them with the ethical principles that vegans live by, we can help advocate for an end to the…

JONATHAN DICKSTEIN: When bacon appears on the shelves of a supermarket refrigerator – pre-sliced, cling-wrapped, and bloodless – it does its best to seem a commodity like any other. American consumers, who eat around 50 pounds of pork each year, in thrall to the cultural and marketing phenomenon of “bacon mania”, live in a society where their relationship to animals is almost entirely mediated by complex value chains and where they can therefore “eat meat without the killers or the killing”. At the supermarket, there is no sign of the artificial insemination to which sows were subjected, or…

MARKUS WILD: Humanism has elevated humanity above its natural condition, but our relationship to animals remains in a state of war. The legally sanctioned slaughtering machine now operates globally, with the poultry industry in particular wielding huge market power... Like so many things that define our everyday life, factory farming is an American invention. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle depicts conditions in the Union Stock Yards slaughterhouse in Chicago, the massacre of animals, the dehumanizing work of Eastern European migrants: ‘It was all so very business-like … this…

PAUL SOLOTAROFF: Sarah, like anyone who’s spent much time working farms, is functionally built through the thighs and trunk, herding pregnant hogs who weigh triple what she does into chutes to birth their litters and hefting buckets of dead piglets down quarter-mile alleys to where they’re later processed. It’s backbreaking labor, nine-hour days in stifling barns in Wyoming, and no training could prepare her for the sensory assault of 10,000 pigs in close quarters: the stench of their shit, piled three feet high in the slanted trenches below; the blood on sows’ snouts cut by cages so tight…