It is said that it is not important who will vote or how, but it is extraordinarily important who will count the votes and how. The same is true for greenhouse gas emissions accounting.

Lifecycle or “cradle-to-grave” emissions accounting, taking into account opportunity costs and opportunity benefits, would illuminate a path to solving climate change, if there exists one. Systems engineers routinely use such accounting methods to evaluate potential solutions to problems. Using such emissions accounting, the Climate Healers position paper reached the conclusion that animal agriculture is responsible for at least 87% of greenhouse gas emissions on an annual basis.

Unfortunately, in its Summary for Policy Makers, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses a set of peculiar greenhouse gas emissions accounting conventions that obfuscate rather than illuminate solutions to climate change. Since the IPCC is actually a governmental body, these IPCC greenhouse gas emissions accounting conventions are political and they have been influenced by vested interests, just as school text books have been influenced by vested interests in our political system.

School text books around the world have been deceiving children about the animal foods that they are systematically persuaded to consume. By addicting them to sugar, oil, salt and animal foods, vested interests, aided by our governments, are factory farming our children into becoming consumers of pharmaceuticals and medical procedures to alleviate chronic diseases that they will likely contract in adulthood.

As Dr. John McDougall points out, there are 4 deadly dietary deceptions that get drilled into our heads in this system. This begins when we are school children, no matter where we live on planet Earth – the first two can be found in the sixth grade scholastic science text book that Kimaya uses today:

1) The Protein deception – I mention protein and you echo meat, even though protein is ubiquitous in all plant foods as well.

2) The Calcium deception – I mention calcium and you respond milk, even though plant foods such as leafy greens are the original source of calcium for the cow.

3) The Omega 3 deception – I mention Omega 3 fats and you answer fish, even though only plants make these Omega 3 fats and fish ingest seaweed and algae to store Omega 3 in their body fat.

4) The Carb deception – I mention unhealthy, fattening foods and you reply starch or carbs, even though populations that eat more starch are invariably much leaner than those that eat more animal foods.

It is therefore quite understandable that such vested interests will also deceive us to hide the fact that animal agriculture is the leading cause of almost every known environmental catastrophe on the planet, including climate change. Indeed, there are 6 deadly climate deceptions in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s) greenhouse gas emissions accounting conventions, which is why Gerard Bisshop declared that the IPCC’s conventions are not fit for purpose – the purpose of solving climate change.

1. The Narrowed Timeline deception – the deception that humans started tinkering with the climate only from 1750 onward with the discovery of fossil fuels, even though the IPCC simultaneously claims that carbon dioxide (CO2), once emitted, lasts for a long time in the atmosphere, with 20-40% of it lingering even after tens of thousands of years.

2. The Methane Averaging deception – the deception that makes methane seem like a much more benign greenhouse gas compared to CO2 by averaging its impact over 100 years, when it is the leading contributor to planetary heating on an instantaneous basis.

3. The Airborne Fraction deception – the deception that counts all of the CO2 emitted from fossil fuel combustion even though only 45% of the CO2 is airborne, while counting only the net of deforestation and afforestation for the animal agriculture land use change component.

4. The Natural Cycle deception – the deception that ignores the CO2 emissions from animal respiration, pasture maintenance fires and bottom trawling of the oceans, while claiming that these animal agricultural CO2 emissions are all part of the natural carbon cycle.

5. The Opportunity Cost deception – the deception that ignores the fact that we could be sequestering billions of tons of atmospheric CO2 on the land that is currently being used for animal agriculture on an annual basis, if we were to switch to a plant-based economy immediately.

6. The Opportunity Benefit deception – the deception that ignores the fact that we would be inducing a significant and potentially catastrophic increase in global temperature if we were to switch to a clean energy economy immediately as we would stop emitting the cooling gases and cloud aerosols co-emitted with CO2 through fossil fuel combustion.

In the next six newsletters, I will go through each of these six deadly climate deceptions, one by one, in detail.

Meanwhile, please check out the amazing Punk Rock Vegan movie, a labor of love and activism by the one and only Moby. It features the talking dog Bagel as well as our dear friends, Keegan Kuhn and Rachel Atcheson, with cameo appearances by Anita Krajnc, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Jean Davis.

Keegan had told me a lot about the animal rights sensibilities in the punk rock scene, but it is good to see it all formally documented in this free movie on Youtube. I’m grateful to Geoff Francis for bringing this movie to my attention.

Punk rock and Hip hop are musical genres created to express our frustration with the system. Naturally, they both gravitated towards promoting animal liberation because as Aph Ko said, “as long as animals are oppressed, as long as ‘animal’ means something degrading, we will never be set free.” Free, that is, from the clutches of this economic system founded on deception, domination, death, disease and destruction.

Thank you for your support.

HELP us every day to

Heal the planet.
Eat plants.
Love animals.
Plant trees.

It’s that simple.

Thanks again for being a superhero and joining our herd. Please forward this post to all your friends and let’s grow our MOOOvement together.

With much love,
Sailesh on behalf of Vega, Cow and Climate Healer and the Climate Healers core team
(Akhil, Alison, Anne, BJ, Carl, Chip, Debra, Gabriele, Ilse, Jamen, Kelly, Ken, Kimaya, Krish, Maggie, Marco, Paige, Pareen, Ray, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer).

PS: If you are looking for Vega the Cow’s weekly update on “50 Ways to Leave My Udder“, please click here.