The science

Animal Agriculture

Animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change.

2005 – Alan Calverd publishes estimate of GHG from “Livestock” breathing alone is 8.8 Gt CO2e or 21% of total (Physics World).
2006 – FAO publishes Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS) calculating GHG emissions from “Livestock” sector is 7.5 Gt CO2e or 18% of total.
2009 – Goodland/Anhang publish WorldWatch report correcting errors in LLS and calculating GHG emissions from “Livestock” sector to be 32.6 Gt CO2e or 51% of total.
2011 – FAO scientists publish critique of Goodland/Anhang’s estimate in Animal Feed Science and Technology (AFST) Journal.
2012 – Goodland/Anhang publish refutation in AFST Journal and reiterate their estimate. FAO scientists decline to continue the debate despite AFST Editor’s invitation.
2013 – FAO partners with International Meat Secretariat and the International Dairy Federation and publishes revision to LLS, calculating GHG emissions from “Livestock” sector to be 7.1 Gt CO2e or 14.5% of total, without addressing any of the errors pointed out in Goodland/Anhang (2009).

At this point, we have scientific evidence that even Goodland/Anhang’s estimate of 51% is on the low side as they may have substantially under counted the negative emissions that will result if the whole world goes Vegan. This Nature paper estimates the Carbon Opportunity Cost (COC) of animal foods to be about 34.5 Gt CO2e per year (5 tons per person per year) instead of 11.5 Gt CO2e per year. Indeed, Goodland-Anhang only counted the above ground vegetation in their calculations and twice as much CO2 gets sequestered in the soil than above ground. This means that the Goodland-Anhang estimate of 32.6 Gt CO2e for animal agriculture should be closer to 55.6 Gt CO2e. Therefore, let there be no doubt that Animal Agriculture is the leading cause of climate change.

The science

Humanity’s Destructive Behavior

At current rates of decline, 100% of wild vertebrates will die off by year zero: 2026

LPR2014 reported that 52% of wild vertebrates died between 1970 and 2010. From 1970 to 2010, both human population and human per-capita consumption roughly doubled so that human impact on the planet increased by a factor of 3.84. If we extrapolate an exponential curve that has increased by a factor of 3.84 from 1970 to 2010 to determine when 100% of wild vertebrates would die off, the answer is around 2026. This calculation was corroborated when LPR2016 reported that 58% of wild vertebrates died between 1970 and 2012. Thus, even with just a linear extrapolation, at an additional 3% rate of decline per year, 100% of wild vertebrates will die off by YEAR ZERO : 2026.

Only 7% of the land area of the planet is unused forests

Please see Figure 11.9, Page 836, in Chapter 11 of Working Group 3 in the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unused Forest area is just 11 MKm2 out of 148 MKm2.

Humans use 31% of the land area of the planet for grazing farmed animals

Please see Figure 11.9, Page 836, in Chapter 11 of Working Group 3 in the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Humans use 46 MKm2 out of 148 MKm2 for grazing farmed animals.

Humans use 20% of the land area of the planet for managed forestry

Please see Figure 11.9, Page 836, in Chapter 11 of Working Group 3 in the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Humans use 46 MKm2 out of 148 MKm2 for grazing farmed animals.

Human biomass today is more than double the biomass of all wild megafauna from 10,000 years ago

Please see A. Barnosky, “Megafauna Biomass Tradeoff as a Driver of Quaternary and Future Extinctions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vo 105, Suppl. 1, August 2008. The biomass of 7.5 Billion humans today works out to approximately 500 Million metric tons. The biomass of all wild megafauna from 10K years ago is estimated to be 200 Million metric tons.

Humans extract five times as much food from the earth for farmed animals than for themselves

Please see Figure 11.9, Page 836, in Chapter 11 of Working Group 3 in the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Our farmed animals consume 7.27 Gigatons of dry matter biomass annually versus the 1.54 Gigatons that we consume.

Humans slaughtered 70 (74) billion land animals in 2014 (2016)

Statistics accessed from United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on Apr. 6, 2018.

Humans catch and kill 1-3 trillion sea animals each year

Mood, A & Brooke, P. “Estimating the Number of Fish Caught in Global Fishing Each Year”. July 2010

Humans pour 250 billion tons of toxic chemicals into the environment each year

Julian Cribb, “Surviving the 21st Century: Humanity’s Ten Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them,” Springer, 2017.

The science

Earth’s History

When dinosaurs roamed the land, earth was void of ice

Please see Fig. 6.1 of Jansen et al., Paleoclimate, in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. S. Solomon et al., Eds. Cambridge University Press, pp. 433-497.

Direct relationship between greenhouse gases and earth’s temperature

Please see Richard Alley, “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in the Earth’s Climate History,” Bjerknes Lecture, American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 2009

In recent history, the earth has endured a series of long ice ages

Temperature reconstructions of the past reveal that the Earth has undergone ice ages with a period of ~100,000 years over the past 1 million years and with a period of ~41,000 years from 1 million years to approximately 3 million years ago. Here’s a recent spatially weighted temperature reconstruction estimated from a multi-proxy database of over 20,000 sea surface temperature point reconstructions.

The science

Enter Human Beings

Humans are new to the scene

Anatomically Modern Humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) are estimated to have evolved about 200,000 years ago.

Humans have been deforesting the earth to fuel their civilizations

The global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the dawn of human civilization.

More greenhouse gases have been emitted from land use change than from the burning of fossil fuels

Ruddiman, William F, “Earth Transformed,” W. H. Freeman, 2013

The Tyndall History of Global Warming Lecture at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Dec, 2013.

There is a safe zone for greenhouse gas concentrations for life as we know it to thrive

Hansen, et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” Open Atmos. Sci. Journal, 2, 217-231, 2008

Restored forests can sequester all of the greenhouse gases emitted during the fossil fuel age

Rao, S., et al., “The Lifestyle Carbon Dividend: Assessment of the Carbon Sequestration Potential of Grasslands and Pasturelands Reverted to Native Forests,” AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, Dec. 2015.

Erb, K-H et al., “Unexpectedly large impact of forest management and grazing on global vegetation biomass,” Nature, vol 553, Jan. 2018

The science

The Vegan Metamorphosis

New imaginal cells are born

Please find a brief history of the Vegan movement in Victoria Moran’s article here.

At first, the imaginal cells are attacked by the caterpillar’s immune system

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 defines the profitability of the Animal Agriculture industry as a matter of National Security and equates any activism on behalf of the animal victims of this industry as terrorism.

The imaginal cells multiply

The Vegan Movement is the fastest growing social justice movement in the world today.

Just between 2014 and 2017, the number of Vegans has risen 600% in the US with similar increases elsewhere.

What was once a caterpillar becomes a messy glob of imaginal goo

After decades of globalization, our political and socioeconomic system is disintegrating.

We have a unique opportunity in this pivotal time in history

In the cocoon, the caterpillar faces a stark, binary choice: evolve into a butterfly or die.

We too face a stark, binary choice: create a Vegan World or face imminent extinction. Please see below.

At the moment, while some people eat 3 meals per day, others eat 2 or less meals per day, which works out to a range of 730-1095 meals per year. In the calculations below, we assume that humans eat 1000 meals per year.

The science

Organic Vegan Meal

At every meal, we serve 1.5 million tons of organic plant foods

Currently, humans consume 1.5 Billion tons of dry matter biomass of food per year, as shown in Fig 11.9, page 836, of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of Working Group 3 (WG3), Chapter 11. This works out to roughly 0.5 lbs of food per person per meal.

At every meal, we can restore 1.5 million acres of forests

Currently, humans use 47.9 Million Sq. Km or 12 Billion acres of land for grazing farmed animals. In a Vegan World, this land can be restored to forests. At the rate of 1.5 Million acres per meal, it would take humanity 8 years to restore all 12 billion acres of land.

At every meal, we can save 3 trillion gallons of fresh water

1,100 gallons per person per day X 7.5 Billion people / 2.7 meals per day = 3 Trillion gallons per meal.

At every meal, we can save 40,000 human lives

71.3% of deaths each year are due to preventable, lifestyle related diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, according to a Lancet study. This works out to 39.4 Million deaths per year or approximately 40,000 human lives per meal.

The science

Conventional Meal

At every meal, we serve 9 million tons of conventional foods

Currently, humans consume 1.5 Billion tons of dry matter biomass of food per year and our animals consume 7.3 Billion tons, as shown in Fig 11.9, page 836, of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of Working Group 3 (WG3), Chapter 11. This works out to roughly 0.5 lbs of food per person per meal for direct consumption, while 2.5 lbs per person is fed to the animals. The animal food derived from that input is approximately 1 oz per person per meal, a 40:1 reduction in biomass up the trophic level.

At every meal, we drive 70 species extinct

With our current consumption patterns, we are driving 200 species extinct each day, which works out to 70 species per meal.

At every meal, we kill 2 billion animals

With our current consumption patterns, we kill 0.97-2.7 Trillion sea animals and 74 Billion land animals per year for food alone. The mid-point of this range is roughly 2 Trillion animals per year, which works out to 2 Billion animals killed per meal.

At every meal, we destroy 20,000 acres of forests

With our current consumption patterns, we destroy 30 Million acres of forests and let 10 Million acres of fallow land regenerate each year. This works out to a net destruction of 20 Million acres of forests each year or 20,000 acres per meal.

At every meal, we degrade 7 million acres of land

In the latest Global Land Outlook, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) states that 20% of the Earth’s vegetated land is being degraded annually, which works out to a whopping 7.2 billion acres that are being degraded annually or 7 million acres per meal.

At every meal, we hypoxify 1 million acres of ocean dead zones

Annually, we create an area the size of the European Union in ocean dead zones due to fertilizer run off from industrial agriculture. This works out to roughly 2 million square miles annually or 1.3 million acres per meal. 

The science

The Power of Facts

”It is our duty to induce people, by any honest means necessary, to Go Vegan.”

Paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi who said this about wearing “Khadi” clothes in 1926

Mahatma Gandhi employed Satyagraha or “Truth Force.” He abhorred violence. He cajoled people with facts about British colonialism and what it was doing to ruin India in the early 20th century. He put his body on the line in defense of this Truth Force. He walked the walk, not just talked the talk. He employed honest inducement, not compulsion, to get Indians to ditch their British clothes and wear “Khadi” clothes instead.

Honest inducement is Truth Force or Nonviolence. Compulsion is Violence

At Climate Healers, we aspire to follow Gandhi’s fine example in this regard. We present facts about animal agriculture, climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystems collapse. These facts are not compiled by Vegans, – there are very few scientists practicing Veganism today – but by respected international scientific bodies. If you find these facts compelling, then that compulsion is the “Truth Force” arising internally within you. The source of this Truth Force is the compassion at the very core your being. May this Truth Force always be with you.

If you wish, we would be delighted to help you with going Vegan.

The science

The Go Vegan Card

GOING VEGAN is the single most powerful act that we can do today. The “Go Vegan” card is a simple device to empower Vegans into becoming effective activists. It contains all the useful information for a Vegan transition in a simple format that is easy to follow. When you hand this card to a friend or relative, you are turning them into a potent force for positive change on Earth.

We firmly believe that in the metamorphosis to Vegan World 2026! over the next few years, the single-most potent force for positive change is the informed global citizen. Through our trilogy of documentaries, “The Human Experiment,” “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret,” and “What The Health,” and through our Meatocracy research, we have established that our Governments, NGOs, Corporations and Institutions will not be leading in this regard.

Please download the images of the front and back of the card from your browser (right-click and save image) and take them to any print shop to get Go Vegan personal cards made.

We have uploaded the front and back images of the business cards we use at Climate Healers. The back image of this card can be downloaded and printed on the back of your regular business card so that it becomes an effective tool for Vegan advocacy.

Let’s get empowered!

We are what we eat, drink, think, say and do

Patricia Bragg