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No Meat: No Heat, Everyone Can Eat and Drink
Researchers from some of the most prestigious scientific institutions on Earth are telling us we only have several years to save ourselves from irreversible run away climate change, including the mass extinction of a significant percentage of all species.
Climate change and overdevelopment are also bringing us face-to-face with water shortages farexceeding normal drought cycles; and food price increases are driving a global hunger crisis with the potential to threaten the fabric of civilization.
With the potential these challenges bring for widespread devastation, a growing number of scientists and leaders are identifying meat and dairy a significant cause of global warming and recommending people embrace a vegan diet (vegetarian with no animal products) as the fastest and most effective solution we can employ to save the planet, avert catastrophic drought, and feed all the world’s hungry people.
To address this emergency, the mission of Eco Foodprint is to promote awareness of the crucial role our diet choices have as a solution to global warming. EcoFood Print would like to stress the urgency of switching to a plant-based diet (vegetarian diet) to mitigate global warming gases as well as to support and encourage political and civic action to halt subisides to the animal farming industry and to develop a carbon tax on meat.
Meat: Making Global Warming Worse
By the numbers, Pachauri is absolutely right. In a 2006 report, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that worldwide livestock farming generates 18% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions — by comparison, all the world's cars, trains, planes and boats account for a combined 13% of greenhouse gas emissions. Much of livestock's contribution to global warming come from deforestation, as the growing demand for meat results in trees being cut down to make space for pasture or farmland to grow animal feed. Livestock takes up a lot of space — nearly one-third of the earth's entire landmass. In Latin America, the FAO estimates that some 70% of former forest cover has been converted for grazing. Lost forest cover heats the planet, because trees absorb CO2 while they're alive — and when they're burned or cut down, the greenhouse gas is released back into the atmosphere.
Global Warming is happening faster Than Worse Case Scenarios.
The speed at which we surpass critical tipping points is happening decades faster than the worst case scenarios of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), causing many to realize we are in a state of planetary emergency.
Fifty years or two years to act?
Most people have embraced the idea that climate change is real and human caused. However, most of us, our media, governments and other institutions act as though we have 30 to 50 years to reverse it.
Leading earth scientists believe we have only a couple of years to act, starting now. Many have become so alarmed; they fear we have already passed tipping points beyond which the earth will take centuries or millennia to recover. They urge us to make large changes in our lifestyles quickly, including embracing a vegetarian diet with no animal products to save the planet.
No Meat → No Heat, Everyone Can Eat and Drink.
Reducing consumption of animal products is one of the cheapest, fastest and simplest solutions for reversing climate change.
Animal agriculture, including “sustainable,” locally-raised animals are huge causes of global warming, creating nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, uses up most of our water, is responsible for the majority of rainforest destruction in the Amazon, and is a direct cause of global hunger. Changing our diet to a meat-free, diary-free, egg-free vegan diet can have a significant and rapid effect on reversing global warming, lowering emissions, halting deforestation, avoiding drought, and feeding the hungry.
Emission Foodprint
- Livestock’s Long Shadow,
UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006 - Diet, Energy and Global Warming,
Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin, University of Chicago, 2006 - Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,
Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, Carnegie Mellon University (2008)
Deforestation Foodprint
- Eating Up The Amazon,
Greenpeace, 2006 - The Cattle Realm: A new phase in the livestock colonization of Brazilian Amazonia,
Amigos da Terra (Friends of the Earth), 2008
Hunger Foodprint
- Crop Prospects and Food Situation,
UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2008 - Can Britain Feed Itself?
Simon Fairlie, The Land, 2007
Drought Foodprint
- Water Inputs in California Food Production,
Water Education Foundation (1991) - Saving Water from Field to Fork,
Stockholm International Water Institute, International Water Management Institute, Chalmers, and Stockholm Environment Institute. (2008)
Pollution Foodprint
