One bite at a time
Not many among us now will deny that climate change is real. The summers are getting hotter, and our monsoon season is bringing in ever heavier rains, and stronger typhoons.
Adecade after Al Gore’s path-breaking documentary on climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” disturbed the world’s conscience and brought the topic of global warming to the forefront of popular discourse, he has now come up with the sequel, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”
Sandwiched by 10 years between the first and second instalments, the former US vice-president’s arguments are stronger than ever. Within that time, the world has witnessed climatic events unprecedented in their fury and destruction—including the monster of a storm Haiyan, which killed thousands of our countrymen in Eastern Visayas.
Not many among us now will deny that climate change is real. The summers are getting hotter, and our monsoon season is bringing in ever heavier rains, and stronger typhoons.
When I was a kid, monster storms were few and far between—separated by years in their occurrence. Today, we can have multiples of them in any given year. Just think about Harvey and Irma—monster storms both that ravaged the US Eastern seaboard—which occurred within days of each other. Scary and existentially-threatening, and yet this is the new reality that we live with today.
As a result, many people now try to do their bit in terms of minimizing their carbon footprints, planting trees and buying smaller vehicles (or even electric-powered ones, for those who can afford them), in order to avert what seems to be an impending catastrophe that threatens our future generations.
The thing is—it seems like environmentalists have been missing a trick all along, excluding from their targets what could arguably be the biggest contributor of all to climate change—animal agriculture.
Greenhouse gas pollution
Many of us have probably heard about cow excrement and respiration giving off copious amounts of greenhouse gases (methane, to be exact), but I don’t think we ever realized the scale of the harm it is doing.
Well, as it turns out, “Globally, 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas pollution can be attributed to livestock, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the most reputable authority on this topic. And a huge hunk of the livestock industry’s role—65 percent—comes from raising beef and dairy cattle.” (“Why beef is the new SUV,” John D. Sutter, CNN, Nov. 25, 2015). Some figures, including those from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization puts the figure higher at 18 percent, which means it is a bigger polluter than all transportation sources put together.
Of course, this is not the only deleterious outcome from animal agriculture. In places from the Amazon to the Borneo rainforests, virgin jungles are being cleared to make way for pastureland, or arable land to grow grains for feed to the world’s livestock industry. And without the rainforests, we know what happens, right? Apart from losing our major converters of carbon dioxide to oxygen, we also lose valuable cover to protect us against inundation during torrential downpours. Ever wonder why we have so much flooding these days? Take a trip to the mountains sometimes, and see for yourself.
Can you truly fight lung cancer without confronting the dangers of cigarette smoking? Impossible, right? We now know that it is the primary cause of pulmonary ailments, without a shadow of a doubt.
And yet, so many of the so-called environmentalists have yet to internalize the truth that their food choices are the main reason for the environment’s sorry state in the first place.
So, the next time you look hungrily at that Jollibee burger, or about to bite into a Mang Inasal, think about the floods, droughts and typhoons that you could help avoid, one bite (not taken) at a time.
(Advanced greetings to my wife, Cynthia Marie, who celebrates her golden birthday on Sept. 20.)