RECONSIDERING CLIMATE AND FOOD IN 2025

By Eleanor Boyle

Eleanor Boyle is a Vancouver-based researcher, blogger, and educator on sustainable food, and a member of WE-CAN. She has degrees in psychology, neuroscience, and food policy, authored  Mobilize Food: Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today (FriesenPress, 2023), and welcomes discussion, here or at  eleanor@eleanorboyle.com

For climate activists, it can be a stretch to prioritize the problem of big meat and dairy. Climate advocacy focuses mostly on fossil fuels and emissions from carbon dioxide, only a fraction of which comes from livestock. Methane and nitrous oxide, those other GHGs, may not seem as critical as CO2, though they’re more lethal global warmers, and they come significantly from animal agriculture. So it’s understandable that we don’t always think about cheeseburgers when we think about the climate crisis.

FOR CLIMATE TARGETS, WE’LL NEED LESS ANIMAL-SOURCE FOODS

Yet meat and dairy production, when all its emissions are counted, is responsible for at least 18% of all human-caused GHGs, and almost 60% of the GHGs attributable to food systems. It’s been laid out by scientists for years, and spun and suppressed by big meat and dairy for almost as long. International researchers have shown repeatedly that we can’t achieve our climate targets without massive cutbacks to meat and dairy.
Still, lots of progressives find it hard to talk about animal agriculture, knowing that Indigenous people eat animals; that the topic is complex and emotional; that they don’t want to alienate their friends and supporters; and that sitting down to a meat-centred meal is what most people do. Industry lobbying has created further confusion with disingenuous claims that livestock isn’t part of the problem but part of the solution.

WE CAN GET MEAT AND DAIRY OFF OUR PLATES AND ONTO OUR AGENDAS

But for climate activists who feel it’s time to eat less meat, but talk about it more, here are some ideas:

• Act in our own lives to eat mostly plants, and work toward the 50-75% decrease in animal-source foods that scientists say we need in high-consumption countries.
• Encourage our activist networks to serve only plant-based food at meetings and events.
• Suggest that climate organizations make bolder statements about the need for less industrial animal production and consumption.
• Liaise with Indigenous groups that have criticized factory farming, which uses disproportionate amounts of land and depletes biodiversity and habitats, fuelling land dispossession and threatening aspirations for Indigenous and local food sovereignty.
• Broaden the tent and build strategic alliances with food, animal, and health activists who have additional reasons, along with climate, to fight factory farming and excessive consumption. These include moral standards on how we should treat non-human animals; the pollution of water, soil, and air from mountains of livestock manure; and avian flu stoked by the intensive farming of chickens.
• Update our knowledge of the science on this complex and evolving topic by checking out the resources appended below.

As climate activists, we have a history of pushing back on spurious claims from oil and gas. Sophisticated spin from meat and dairy deserves an equally courageous response.