The food you DON'T need to avoid if you care about climate change Your culinary choices are not the problem, and going Vegan isn't going to make any difference

Welcome to this installment of false choices, and how to avoid them, brought to you today by Vox media, who posted this video on YouTube.

I watched the video so that you don't have to, but feel free if you want to fact-check the claims that I'm about to make about the argument they made. Basically, it boils down to a few key points:

1. Beef production produces more greenhouse gases than all other agricultural activity combined;
2. Eliminating beef producers would therefore go a long way to solving the problem of global climate change.

Let us stipulate that point #1 is correct. Does point #2 necessarily follow? Spoiler alert: it doesn't. To understand why, all you need to look at is one chart, which I found on the Center for Climate and Engery Solutions' website.



These numbers are a little out of date, and other sources may calculate things slightly differently, but we're only going to be doing napkin math here, so these numbers will do for now. What this chart shows is the breakdown, by industry or sector, to global greenhouse gas emissions. You'll notice that Energy is the single largest contributor, at 72% (further broken down on the right-hand pie chart), while agriculture, including beef production, is only 11%.

And now, to complete the picture, we need one more number: the amount of global greenhouse gas emission reduction that we need to achieve in order to stop global climate change from continuing to accelerate, which some sources put at 55% in reductions, globally, by 2030.

So, napkin math time. Assume that beef produces twice as much carbon as all other agricultural activity combined; two-thirds of that 11%. That would mean that eliminating beef consumption entirely, worldwide, would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds of 11%, or about 8%, leaving 47% of or greenhouse gas emission reductions still to go.

In other words, it's mice nuts - not quite zero, but so ineffective compared to the overall scale of the problem that it may as well not happen. It would eliminate the livelihoods of everyone who depends on the beef industry to put food on the table, causing enormous harm to them and their families, while leaving the actual problem, the 72% that's actually causing our climate change problems, to grow unchecked.

In fact, if you completely eliminated all other sectors except Energy, you'd still be 27 percentage points short of your emission reduction total. So, if you really care about climate change, which industry do you really need to be concerned about?

Fossil fuel energy producers have spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to convince people that climate change is something they can affect through their lifestyle changes, but the brutal reality is that there's almost nothing that you, as an individual, can do to alter the outcome at this point. In order to address climate change, we need to alter the way we produce the energy that we use to drive everything else we do; until that problem is addressed, nothing else matters. And the problem of energy production is far bigger than your choice of what food you put on your plate; it's global, and it's systemic, and the solution needs to be equally global and systemic.

Yes, changing the way we produce our energy enough to reduce that sector's emissions by 55% will almost certainly involve change everything else about the way we live, including eating less beef. But to waste time now targeting the beef industry is not only ridiculous, it feels vindictive. It's as if activist vegans have been searching for an excuse to destroy beef producers' livelihoods for decades, and finally have a sales pitch that they think will work, and to hell with the impact on actual human beings.

And if you think that groups like Peta are above championing the ugliest possible treatment of human beings in order to push a vegan agenda, just look no farther than the fact that PETA came out in support of Bryan Adams' racist remarks about Chinese people recently, apparently for no other reason than Adams' call for everyone to go Vegan. (Adams, incidentally, apologized for the ugly racism of his remarks; PETA has not. If you're wondering why non-Vegans routinely view Vegans as insufferable, this is a perfect example of why.)

This same napkin math can serve to illustrate why, even in the energy sector, not all reductions are equally worth pursuing. Bitumen, for example, which is extracted from oil sands or tar sands, is pretty dirty as oil goes, which is why environmentalists have singled out Canadian bitumen as the target of their particular ire. But, even if all of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions could be laid on the oil sands, Canada only produces 1.4% of the global total; eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions of Canadian oil sands will have effectively no impact on the actual course of global carbon emission reductions.

So, who should you be looking at? Well, here's another handy chart from C2ES with the answer:

If these six emitter nations (plus the EU, which combined is #3) reduce their emissions by 55%, that gets us two-thirds of the way there. So, if you really care about global climate change, do you target Canada for your activism, or China? Or the United States, who are the second-biggest emitter, and also the only major emitter nation to withdraw from the Paris Accords? What are your priorities, really, and what should they be?

So, no, you don't have to personally give up beef to save the planet. You can reduce the amount of beef that you consume (and, if you're an average North American, you probably should do, since you're likely eating several times the recommended daily amount of red meat anyway), but your failure or refusal to forego meat will not doom the planet, just like forgoing meat won't lead to any meaningful improvement.

So, what should you do, which might have more of an impact? Write your elected official, and advocate for them to enact carbon pricing, end fossil fuel production subsidies, or increase subsidies for renewables, or for climate research, or for alternative energy research. And by your elected official, I mean the member of parliament, or congressperson, or senator, that was elected to represent the place where you live. And write physical letters, not emails; emails can be easily ignored, but an avalanche of envelopes cannot be.

In the meantime, maybe leave off the Vegan propaganda. The time for all of us to change everything about our way of life will come soon enough, without you demanding that other people make sacrifices that you won't bear the cost of.