the panellists?
Effective debate demands erudite experts.
Our panel had been chosen from various fields, from science, from trusts, from the world of medicine, universities and from the media.
Each had a strong opinion and each had a compelling argument. One was a particular expert in her ‘field’.
Check out their bios below.
Disha Hegde
For the proposition
President of The Oxford Union
History Undergraduate at St John’s College, University of Oxford
Dr Sailesh Rao
For the proposition
Founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, a non-profit dedicated towards healing the Earth’s climate.
Dr Chidi Ngwaba
For the proposition
A physician who specialises in lifestyle medicine. He is an international speaker on wellness, having appeared on BBC One and Good Morning Britain.
Joey Carbstrong
For the proposition
Animal rights activist and youtuber. A former gang member, he became vegan after his release from prison. His videos have garnered over 300M views online.
Hannah Edwards
Against the proposition
Third year PPEist and President-Elect of the Union.
Mr David Rose
Against the proposition
A 2023 Fulbright Professor at Cornell University specialising in farming practices.
Manon Hammond
Against the proposition
Third year History student and Press and Sponsoring officer at the Union.
Katie Hopkins
Against the proposition
A former contestant on the Apprentice, she is now a media personality, commentator and businesswoman. Hopkins has been dubbed by various news outlets as a ‘professional troll’ due to her array of controversial views.
Vega the cow.
Aka. The Cow in the Room
Occupation. Climate healer.
email: vega@climatehealers.org
From humble beginnings grazing in a natural field, I became increasingly aware how animal agriculture was changing the planet for the worse through CO2 and my own methane emissions.
Excuse me but I can’t help the methane, it’s only natural after all, but the CO2 isn’t my fault but the fault of humans, but no one was admitting it but blaming it all on fossil fuels instead.
I became The Cow In The Room.
My career goals became fixed on alerting the world to the problems caused by meat eating and the need to go vegan.
Wherever I went I made myself visible. At COP 26 I got gassy and flew over the heads of the delegates who were so blind to the truth they even had meat, me, on their menus!
I was spotted by the national press and featured on their front pages with my good human friend Sailesh beside me.
From Los Angeles to Kathmandu, from Glasgow to Jakarta, I have roamed the world to spread the vegan word, that Animal Agriculture is the Cow in the Room.
I am a tireless worker and dedicated to my cause.
Dr. Sailesh Rao.
Founder & Executive Director
Climate Healers
www.climatehealers.org
Dr. Sailesh Rao has over three decades of professional experience and is the Founder and Executive Director of Climate Healers, a non-profit dedicated towards healing the Earth’s climate. He was the co-founder of Silicon Design Experts in 1991 which was acquired by Level One Communications in 1996 and which was later acquired by Intel Corporation in 1999.
In 2006, he switched careers and became deeply immersed, full time, in solving the environmental crises affecting humanity. Dr. Rao is the author of four books, Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of Butterflies, Carbon Yoga: The Vegan Metamorphosis, Animal Agriculture is Immoral and The Pinky Promise, and an Executive Producer of several documentaries, The Human Experiment (2013), Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014), What The Health (2017), A Prayer for Compassion (2019), They’re Trying to Kill Us (2021), The End of Medicine (2022), The Land of Ahimsa(2022), Animals – A Parallel History (est. 2023) and Milked (2022). His work is featured in the award winning film, Countdown to Year Zero produced by Jane Velez-Mitchell and Unchained TV.
Exceeding the limits,
concealing the truth.
Click on the graphic to enlarge.
This graph shows in the green central zone the acceptable limits, the safe operating space, the boundaries, that current science in general has set for how we humans affect the planet. As you can see, on six issues we are already dangerously in the orange and red.
This is misleading as all six transgressions concern animal agriculture and this is the cow in the room that needs to be addressed.
For all of them, if we restore the native ecosystems on the grazing lands that are currently being used for animal agriculture, we can reverse these planetary boundary transgressions.
Animal Agriculture,
the cow in the room.
Read the top six facts on the connection between Animal Agriculture and Climate Change.
1. 72% of the agricultural land on the planet is directly used for raising animals, while 28% is used for raising crops. Since half the crops are fed to animals, animal agriculture accounts for 86% of the agricultural land area of the planet.
2. 7% of the ice-free land area of the planet provides 85% of the food we eat in the form of plant foods. All plant foods contain all 20 amino acids (proteins). Animal agriculture takes up 43% of the ice-free land area of the planet, while providing just 12% of the food we eat in the form of meat, dairy and eggs. The seafood we eat constitute the remaining 3%, for which we have been destroying the entire ocean,
3. Each and every year, the methane that is emitted from animal agriculture causes more incremental planetary heating than the CO2 emitted from all fossil fuel sources combined.
4. Land stores three times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. 98% of the CO2 stored on land is in forests and croplands while 2% is in deserts and grazing lands used for animal agriculture.
5. In the past 10,000 years, humans have cut about 3 trillion trees, about half the trees on the planet, mainly to raise animals for food.
6. If we restore the native ecosystems on the grazing lands that are currently being used for animal agriculture, we can reverse climate change.
Sources:
[1] Calculated from the land use breakdown on Page 4 of the UN IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land Use, 2019 and the biomass distribution on Page 836 of the UN IPCC AR5 WG3 Chapter 11.
[2] Calculated from the biomass distribution on Page 836 of the UN IPCC AR5 WG3 Chapter 11.
[3] Rao, S. K., “Animal Agriculture is the Leading Cause of Climate Change,” Journal of Ecological Society, Vol 32-33, 2021.
[4] The ratio of the CO2 sequestration on land to the CO2 in the atmosphere is calculated from data found in the UN IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 6, Fig 6.1, Page 471. The percentage distribution of CO2 is taken from the Integrated Science Assessment Model (ISAM) of the University of Illinois and it was reported in Rao, Jain and Shu, “The Lifestyle Carbon Dividend,” AGU 2015.
[5] Crowther, T.W., et. al., Mapping Tree Density at a Global Scale, Nature 525, Sep 2015, pp. 201-205.
It’s time to address the Cow In The Room.
And it was debated in the Union.
“This House Would Go Vegan”.
Buying electric cars, flying less, using only green energy, these are all good things but they ignore the obvious. The Cow In The Room.
Animal Agriculture, aided and abetted by vested interests, corrupt officials and wilfully blind ‘experts’ is the Cow. By destroying vast forests and with massive production of methane, it is the primary cause of the planet’s problems and not fossil fuels, and veganism is the primary solution.
Disagree? Then listen to the experts in their field make their case at the Oxford Union when they debated This House Would Go Vegan.