Humanity’s Leap to the Golden Era: Washington, D.C., Climate Change Conference, Part 4 of 17

Dr. Noam Mohr (vegan): “The UN has estimated that 18% of our emissions causing global warming today are due to animal agriculture. For a comparison, as Mr. Holm pointed out, all the cars, and trucks and SUVs and planes and trains and other modes of transportation in the world together amount to about 12%. So, animal agriculture alone is a far bigger chunk of the problem than all those sources, important sources as they are, put together.” “As we burn forests in order to produce pasture land and farming land to grow feed for animals, we’re emitting all the carbon these trees have taken out of the atmosphere during their entire lifetimes, emitting them all at once, that’s a huge source of our carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. And if you look at formerly forested Amazon rainforest now converted into land used for growing animals for food, it amounts to 90% of all the Amazon rainforest that’s been deforested since 1970 - 90%!”

“If you look over 20 years, methane is not 25 times more powerful, it’s 72 times more powerful.” “And in the near-term effects, sources of other gases, like sources of methane, have an outsized effect; and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture. So, that’s one reason why animal agriculture has a bigger effect than even these large numbers suggest.”

“So, the huge numbers of animals we produce end up producing huge amounts of methane. The biggest culprit is dairy production; they produce more methane than any other source.” “One study found that we could reduce the economic burden of reaching our climate targets by 80% if we focused on animal agriculture rather than traditional sources.”

“Every time we sit down to dinner, simply by switching your hamburger to a veggie burger, you can make a difference for the future of the planet, for the health of the planet.”

Host: The Worldwatch Institute has released a new study called "Livestock and Climate Change” which states, and I quote: “…our analysis shows that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 51% of annual worldwide greenhouse gas emissions."