(The Conversation) – I wasn’t aware of climate change until the 1980s — hardly anyone was — and even when we recognised the dire threat that burning fossil fuels posed, it took time for the role of animal production in warming the planet to be understood.

Today, though, the fact that eating plants will reduce your greenhouse gas emissions is one of the most important and influential reasons for cutting down on animal products and, for those willing to go all the way, becoming vegan.

A few years ago, eating locally — eating only food produced within a defined radius of your home — became the thing for environmentally conscious people to do, to such an extent that “locavore” became the Oxford English Dictionary’s “word of the year” for 2007.

If you enjoy getting to know and support your local farmers, of course, eating locally makes sense. But if your aim is, as many local eaters said, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you would do much better by thinking about what you are eating, rather than where it comes from. That’s because transport makes up only a tiny share of the greenhouse gas emissions from the production and distribution of food.

With beef, for example, transport is only 0.5% of total emissions. So if you eat local beef you will still be responsible for 99.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions your food would have caused if you had eaten beef transported a long distance. On the other hand, if you choose peas you will be responsible for only about 2% of the greenhouse gas emissions from producing a similar quantity of local beef.

And although beef is the worst food for emitting greenhouse gases, a broader study of the carbon footprints of food across the European Union showed that meat, dairy and eggs accounted for 83% of emissions, and transport for only 6%.

More generally, plant foods typically have far lower greenhouse gas emissions than any animal foods, whether we are comparing equivalent quantities of calories or of protein. Beef, for example, emits 192 times as much carbon dioxide equivalent per gram of protein as nuts, and while these are at the extremes of the protein foods, eggs, the animal food with the lowest emissions per gram of protein, still has, per gram of protein, more than twice the emissions of tofu.

Animal foods do even more poorly when compared with plant foods in terms of calories produced. Beef emits 520 times as much per calorie as nuts, and eggs, again the best-performing animal product, emit five times as much per calorie as potatoes.

Favourable as these figures are to plant foods, they leave out something that tilts the balance even more strongly against animal foods in the effort to avoid catastrophic climate change: the “carbon opportunity cost” of the vast area of land used for grazing animals and the smaller, but still very large, area used to grow crops that are then fed — wastefully, as we have seen — to confined animals.

Because we use this land for animals we eat, it cannot be used to restore native ecosystems, including forests, which would safely remove huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. One study has found that a shift to plant-based eating would free up so much land for this purpose that seizing the opportunity would give us a 66% probability of achieving something that most observers believe we have missed our chance of achieving: limiting warming to 1.5℃.

Another study has suggested that a rapid phaseout of animal agriculture would enable us to stabilise greenhouse gases for the next 30 years and offset more than two-thirds of all carbon dioxide emissions this century. According to the authors of this study:

The magnitude and rapidity of these potential effects should place the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture at the forefront of strategies for averting disastrous climate change.

Climate change is undoubtedly the biggest environmental issue facing us today, but it is not the only one. If we look at environmental issues more broadly, we find further reasons for preferring a plant-based diet.

The clearing and burning of the Amazon rainforest means not only the release of carbon from the trees and other vegetation into the atmosphere, but also the likely extinction of many plant and animal species that are still unrecorded.

Image by Ria Sopala from Pixabay

This destruction is driven largely by the prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat, which makes it more profitable to clear the forest than to preserve it for the indigenous people living there, establish an ecotourism industry, protect the area’s biodiversity, or keep the carbon locked up in the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet for the sake of hamburgers.

Joseph Poore, of the University of Oxford, led a study that consolidated a huge amount of environmental data on 38,700 farms and 1,600 food processors in 119 countries and covered 40 different food products. Poore summarised the upshot of all this research thus:

A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Poore doesn’t see “sustainable” animal agriculture as the solution:

Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.

Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our climate and our environment should become vegans for those reasons alone.

Doing so would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution, save water and energy, free vast tracts of land for reforestation, and eliminate the most significant incentive for clearing the Amazon and other forests.

This is an edited extract from Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer (Penguin Random House).

Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics in the Center for Human Values, Princeton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By melding theory and practice, Philadelphia’s Vanguard S.O.S. are building skills and collective power.

( Waging Nonviolence ) – On a cool, clear April morning just past 8 a.m., the sprawling corporate campus of the world’s second largest asset manager was suddenly roused from its suburban Philadelphia calm.

While about 20 activists broke into song, unfurled banners, stepped into the road and began blockading Vanguard’s entrances, around 80 more stood by in support. The ensuing commotion snarled traffic around the borough of Malvern, eventually slowing the flow of rush hour on Route 202 as drivers craned their necks toward a fleet of beaming police cars. Before most Vanguard employees had fired off their first email of the day, 16 people — aged 22 to 84 — were zip-tied at the wrists and hauled off to Chester County Prison.

The activists represented a broad coalition of grassroots organizations that had come to Malvern to stage an intervention over Vanguard’s $300 billion investments in fossil fuels. And while it wasn’t the first or even the largest of such interventions at the firm’s 115-acre campus, the April 19 action was arguably the most elaborate, with four teams operating in parallel across four sites.

Divest, decarbonize and disassociate — inside the bold new push to get fossil fuels off campus

Vanguard S.O.S., the organizing effort behind this action, is a global divestment campaign whose Philadelphia branch has been agitating in Vanguard’s backyard since May 2021. As a longtime volunteer with Extinction Rebellion Philadelphia and Earth Quaker Action Team — two of roughly 15 local partner groups — I’ve been involved in the campaign from the beginning. Our coalition has used a diversity of tactics from banner drops to rallies to a Quaker worship service outside the home of Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley. But this latest action represented a breakthrough in terms of our capacity for disruption.

During previous episodes of civil disobedience at Vanguard’s offices, we learned that security would rather contain and conceal our demonstrations than issue arrests, since a hawkish response would only increase our visibility and make them look bad. This time, we wanted to create a disturbance that would be more difficult to dismiss. So we devised a plan to interrupt the asset manager’s daily operations by blocking all four of its campus entrances at once.

Once in the planning stage, it quickly became clear that such a dispersed, multi-pronged disruption would require more activists trained in specialized roles. Each blockaded entrance needed a number of key positions — action lead, police liaison, photographer, song lead, media liaison and spiritual anchor — to help carry out the group’s objectives and support those risking arrest. So, to prepare volunteers for taking on new roles in April, we convened a small “core team” — me and four others — that set about designing a series of three protests that would double as training sessions.

Each of those comparatively low-risk actions allowed campaign supporters to practice new skills and observe others with more knowledge and experience. On-the-ground training was preceded by a virtual info session explaining the roles of action lead and police liaison. A reading group also met to discuss case studies in nonviolent resistance and draw inspiration from previous struggles. In short, the core team’s work was all about melding theory and practice, while also fostering the kind of camaraderie that sustains strong social movements.

“I think one of the most critical parts of success is a deepening of trust between people,” said Earth Quaker Action Team campaign organizer Lina Blount, who served on the core team. “The fact that folks could show up multiple times at these smaller actions, get to know each other well, debrief together and build some rapport also increased people’s ability to make decisions together on [the day of the big action].”

Combining theoretical and experiential learning

The core team held its first training protest in late February. About 15 demonstrators gathered at the perimeter of Vanguard’s campus to stage a satirical news broadcast as employees arrived for work. Set in a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate chaos, and anchored by fictional correspondent Terri Fied, our decidedly low-fi production involved three actors, a portable PA system and a handmade sign evoking a chyron. The topic of the report: a lawsuit filed by Vanguard stakeholders accusing the company of breaching fiduciary duty by failing to account for the social and ecological impacts of its investments.

We didn’t intend to risk arrest that day, but we tested Vanguard’s leniency — and asserted our collective resolve — when we stepped into the street for a group picture. That moment created an opportunity for my police-liaison-in-training, Rick Cole, to interact with Vanguard security. The back-and-forth that followed was typical of the role: Security told us we were obstructing private property and warned they were prepared to call in township police. We replied that we’d pass along the message to our action lead, who was the designated decision maker for the group, and report back. After a brief discussion with the action lead, we assured security that everyone would be out of the street soon.

A skilled police liaison creates a buffer between activists and law enforcement, allowing the group to limit their potential for coercion and maintain clear expectations between both camps. “It helps to create the right atmosphere,” Cole said, “so protesters can do their job.”

For Cole, one major takeaway from the training program was the significance of “the connection between the action lead and police liaison. They have to be on the same page. The action lead needs to know what the police response is or will be” in order to effectively — and safely — maneuver the group. In early March, our second core team protest brought us to the headquarters of Comcast, whose employee retirement plan is managed by Vanguard. We staked out a spot on a busy midday street corner with a bright red banner urging Vanguard to “Stop Investing in Climate Destruction.”

Our appearance in Center City Philadelphia drew a heavy-handed response from police, who outnumbered our group of 20 and roped off the plaza outside the media conglomerate’s 60-floor skyscraper. As Comcast employees flowed in and out of the building during their lunch breaks, we sang songs, delivered speeches and handed out flyers inviting them to support our campaign. The bloated police presence drew more attention to our rally, and the makeshift security checkpoints made it easier for us to identify and engage Comcast workers as they passed through. Reactions ranged from enthusiasm to indifference to outright scorn.

Zoë Johnston stepped into the role of spiritual anchor for the first time at Comcast, leading the group in grounding exercises before and after the demonstration. During the hour we spent on the street corner, she was prepared to offer interpersonal support and attend to the spectrum of emotions protesters can experience in such a charged environment.

“With spiritual anchor, I think the ‘anchor’ part is the essential piece,” said Johnston, a member of the Unitarian Universalist Young Adult Divestment Caucus. “Even for low-risk actions, being in the presence of police and in the presence of people who aren’t on the same page as you and trying to convince them to care about the climate is a deeply emotional experience, and it feels very intense in the moment. Spiritual anchors give a deeper grounding to that moment and remind us to return to the spiritual aspect of this work.”

The core team came back to Vanguard’s campus in late March for our final training protest. This time, we gathered near a different employee entrance — under a different police jurisdiction — to expose trainees to new conditions. Extinction Rebellion organizer Frank Fortino shadowed another volunteer in the role of action lead during the rally, which featured a series of call-and-response chants rebutting Vanguard’s talking points around environmental stewardship. Fortino briefed and debriefed the group and made spur-of-the-moment decisions about the placement of lawn signs conveying our messaging.

“Learning in that more relaxed atmosphere was very helpful,” said Fortino, who went on to serve as one of four action leads during the April escalation, where he was arrested.

The combination of theoretical and experiential learning offered in the core team’s training program reinforced, for him, “the basic pillars of what it means to be an action lead: communication, identifying the other roles, being able to adjust on the fly and make decisions.” Fortino built “terrific relationships” with other organizers in the process and ultimately felt “more confident to perform the role going forward.”