Glenn Fay Jr.: The cheeseburger climate cure

Gov. Phil Scott, the Vermont Legislature, and vocal climate activists continue to discuss our climate concerns. But just exactly what is it that we should be doing to reduce greenhouse gases? 

This is the seminal question as the state shuffles toward meeting its own renewable energy goals while our carbon emissions continue to rise. New taxes, greener housing, public transportation, and electric cars look good on paper. But the Vermont Green House Gas Emissions Inventory fails to mention food waste and Vermonters’ impact on supporting factory farming. More on that later.  

These are important goals and big choices for our relatively tiny, poor, green state in the quest to reverse atmospheric carbon. But our carbon energy emissions are only part of a systemic problem. Paul Hawken’s 2017 bestseller, “Drawdown” offers calculations of how many gigatons of CO2-equivalents (CO2e) could be reduced by 80 different solutions. The book explores the net cost of each of those solutions, and net savings as well. In most cases, the savings outweigh the costs manyfold. The information is eye-opening since the number three solution is reducing food waste (70 gigatons of CO2e) and the number four solution is eating a plant-rich diet (66 gigatons of CO2e). 

 Hawken’s sequel book looks at regenerative sustainability. Regeneration is the idea that instead of living in a degenerative world, where humans consume finite resources and transform the environment to the point where it threatens our own existence, we need to create a regenerative culture that regards the world as a part of us. We are all, along with nature, parts of a living system, mutually co-dependent for health and survival. Daniel Christian Wahl sums up restorative and regenerative sustainability in a journal article for those who want to know more. Vermont is positioned to become a regenerative sustainability culture because of our orientation toward small-scale organic farming, universal waste management, and renewable energy innovations and goals that support this emerging model.

When pressed about what “regular people” can do to significantly lower their carbon footprints, Hawken says, the most powerful action we can take is to educate ourselves. The second most powerful action would be to eliminate food waste in our lives. (We waste 40% of our food in the U.S.) The third most powerful activity would be to eat a plant-based diet.

According to experts like Hawken and Jonathan Safran Foer, author of “We Are The Weather: Saving The Planet Begins At Breakfast,” our meat-based diet creates a huge carbon footprint. In fact, Foer proposes that according to his calculations, factory-based animal farming accounts for a whopping 51% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, when factoring in burning for deforestation, growing feed grain, water use, processing, transportation, and so on. Not to worry, he concedes that small farms (of the type that we cherish here in Vermont) are much more carbon-neutral than factory farms. 

But it is plausible that our animal eating habits and food waste, which may be under-represented in the Vermont Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report, may actually give Vermont a much larger carbon footprint than we think. And it is plausible that budget-conscious Vermonters may be unaware of the significant impact of food waste and factory farm impact on greenhouse gases. Every time we go to the store and buy animal products that aren’t locally grown and raised, we are likely supporting industrial factory farms. What can be done to educate Vermonters to act wisely, especially if it has cultural and economic consequences?

Foer acknowledges that when you ask people to eat fewer animal products you are messing with one of their most fundamental personal freedoms. If it might take a generational change for most Vermonters to enjoy plant-rich diets, what is the strategy to motivate us in the near-term? Foer, who admits to being a closet hamburger addict, suggests that eliminating animal products for breakfast and lunch would reduce more carbon than if we all became vegetarians. He calculates that alone would be enough to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and without doing it we cannot reduce greenhouse gases enough to meet our goals. 

Measuring our success at self-education, eliminating food waste, and eating plant-based diets may need a new scoring rubric than the one we use for calculating the power grid or transportation accessibility. But according to emerging science, eating a plant-rich diet and eliminating food waste should have a significant impact on Vermont’s carbon output along with the success of our energy goals. Maybe it is worth considering the suggestions about encouraging learning, reducing food waste, and evolving toward healthy plant-based diets as part of our greenhouse gases emissions goals.

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