“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together” – Vincent Van Gogh.

Share Vega’s message about animal agriculture and climate change.

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Climate Healers Family,

There are two kinds of people:
1) Out Vegans; and
2) Closeted Vegans.

We know this empirically because in all our interactions with people over the past 18 years at Climate Healers, we have never met a single person who would deliberately hurt an innocent animal unnecessarily.

The conventional theory of change is that in order for the Vegan movement to grow, the Out Vegans must reach out to the Closeted Vegans and convince them through the health, environmental, ethical and spiritual aspects of Veganism to come out of the closet and act on their true feelings regarding the systematic and unnecessary exploitation of animals (including humans) on Planet A.

During my visit to India, my interactions with Out Vegans in India have convinced me that we may have this backwards. Our number one task is not to convince Closeted Vegans to come Out, but to convince Out Vegans to be Proud while Out so that they become better ambassadors for the Vegan movement. At the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples #20 (V-COP20), Capt. Paul Watson made a startling revelation about a new children’s book that he’s writing called Starship Earth. He said,

“Starship Earth needs engineers and we have them. These engineers keep everything running, maintain all of the systems. We humans, we are not engineers. We are passengers. We are having a great time amusing ourselves, entertaining ourselves. But what we are doing is we are killing the engineers, we are committing murder on all of these engineers. We are wiping them out, the bees, and the trees, and the fish, and the microbes, and the fungi.”

In that telling, Starship Earth would be better off without humans. During my talk in Mysuru, India, the other day, I asked the audience to raise their hand if they thought our planet would be better off without humans. And to my horror, almost every Out Vegan in the audience did.

When I first watched “Earthlings” in early 2009, I too was ashamed to be a member of my species and thought the same way about humans. Therefore, I’m not surprised that Out Vegans who have informed themselves about the cruel reality of animal husbandry are not too enamored of our species. However, as Dr. Baruch pointed out at V-COP20, it is extremely important that we get over that quickly and begin to love ourselves and our species to become effective change makers.

The Climate Healers story is that we humans are also engineers, not just passengers, on Starship Earth. We are doing the difficult job of installing a climate control system so that Starship Earth does not go in and out of glaciation, largely frozen stiff except around the equatorial midriff for 90,000 out of every 100,000 years.

Three decades ago, when we acknowledged that humans are responsible for changing the climate and unbalancing the life support systems of the planet, we humans automatically became responsible for stabilizing the climate while rebalancing the life support systems of the planet.

Yes, we have killed a lot of our fellow engineers and made a mess in the process, but we can and will clean up and make amends to our fellow engineers so that Starship Earth will benefit in the long run.

It is important that we tell such a story to children so that they know and feel that they belong. It is equally important that all Out Vegans internalize such a story so that we know and feel that we belong. We must also know that humans belong as a species, because, Nature is the perfect system design.

It is only when we know and feel that we belong that we can truly shine our light and help others come out of the closet.

Shining our light means seeing and highlighting the positive in people and especially, the news.

Just last week, the Times of India openly proclaimed the V for Vegan mantra and highlighted the enormous impact of animal husbandry on the environment, attributing 66% of greenhouse gas emissions to the animal agriculture sector. It even wrote,
“If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world.”

Wow, I’ve been waiting to see something like that in a mainstream news paper for nearly two decades! Better yet, the Economic Survey, which the “V for Vegan” article referenced, is by the Finance Ministry of the Indian Government.

In a recent paper, Hansen et al. made a credible case that the IPCC has underestimated the cooling effects of SO2 aerosol emissions as well as the warming impact of CO2 emissions. They estimate the Charney sensitivity for CO2 doubling, the equilibrium temperature increase due to a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, to be 4.5ºC as opposed to the IPCC’s estimate of 3ºC.

With that Hansen update, and including corrections to the IPCC’s three mistakes in accounting that Gerard Bisshop highlighted during his V-COP20 Keynote speech:
1) undercounting Land Use Change CO2 emissions by a factor of 3;
2) undervaluing methane emissions by a factor of 3; and
3) not counting cooling effects;
the animal agriculture component of the Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) rises to 66% and the fossil fuel component nearly vanishes to 2%, implying that almost all the heating from fossil fuel combustion has been offset by the cooling effects. This means that a rapid phaseout of fossil fuel use will lead to an 87% increase in the anthropogenic global warming ERF on the planet, from 2.6 W/m2 to 4.9 W/m2 in a matter of weeks.

The above pie charts reveal a vast gulf between how the IPCC frames the planet is being heated and our best engineering estimate on how it is actually being heated, using the exact same data in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).

Despite these differences, the IPCC would also admit that there is nothing that does not improve when we shut down the folly of animal husbandry and go Vegan.

Even the Guardian is acknowledging this fact, using phrases like, “essential to reduce the consumption of meat and dairy,” “huge impact of livestock production”, though still downplaying the emissions numbers to 12-20%.

Surely, how can something be essential to reduce and have a huge impact if it only caused 12-20% of the emissions? Despite such wink-wink, nudge-nudge journalism on this topic, the Guardian is slowly coming around to embrace a Vegan movement that feels largely native in the global South.

The Economic Survey of India states that “nudging family, friends and colleagues to a more sustainable dietary preference and moderation in lifestyles globally may be an idea whose time has come.” But before we do such nudging, let us first become Proud while Out as Vegans.

Are you passionate about seeing a Vegan world? Do you feel frustrated about the endlessly futile UN COPs where decision makers are dealing with our planetary fire as if they are Keystone Cops spraying each other instead of the fire?

Join us at the Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples (V-COPs) where the REAL work of healing the planet is being done, where climate scientists, systems engineers, media icons, vegan change makers and other distinguished speakers will discuss “Making BIG change happen” at the upcoming 21st V-COP event, Apr 26-27, 2025.

Register for this Zoom/Youtube/Facebook V-COP21 event to be part of the conversation.

Join us for “Making BIG change happen” together.

Sign Our Open Letter to the UN IPCC

Please join our call to the UN IPCC to stop cooking the emissions books and reveal the true impact of animal agriculture on climate change.

It is a technical letter intended for the scientists at the UN IPCC to help them break free from the shackles imposed by their political overlords, but please read through it and let us know if you would like to endorse it.

The instructions for endorsement are in RED at the top of the letter.

Will you join retired NOAA Climatologist, Dr. Abraham Oort, Olympic medalist Dotsie Bausch, the founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, Cowspiracy co-producers, Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn, the Game Changers co-producer, Louie Psihoyos, actress Alexandra Paul and other distinguished signatories to endorse the letter?

A Call to Action

If this message has touched your heart and you want to act, then here are 3 easy steps YOU can take NOW to ACTUALLY make this happen:

1) Say out loud to yourself, THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN! IF you really mean it, then take the next two steps.
2) Write down the names of three people who will listen to you when you speak. Not that they are presupposed in any way, just that they will listen to you when you speak.
3) In the next 30 minutes, forward them this entire message with a simple personal statement that you think this needs to happen and you would like them to take these actions with you.

With much love,