Why don’t environmental groups advocate for climate-friendlier diets?

In what “was arguably the largest ever environmental protest in the world,” more than one million children in more than one hundred countries joined the “Global Climate March, demanding that governments act now to reduce climate change and global warming.” “The concerns of the young protesters are justified” and “supported by the best available science,” wrote a group of scientists and scholars. “The enormous mobilization of the Fridays for Future/Climate Strike movement shows that young people have understood the situation. As scientists and scholars, we strongly support their demand for rapid and forceful action.”

In terms of our food supply, there are a number of little tweaks that may help, like feed additives that can reduce cattle belching, but if you put them all together, according to the prestigious EAT-Lancet Commission, we’re only talking about reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by about 10 percent in 2050. In contrast, if we instead switched to plant foods, “increased consumption of plant-based diets could reduce emissions by up to 80%.”

As you can see below and at 1:02 in my video Which Diets Have the Lowest Carbon Footprint?, all those cow, sheep, and goat burps only represent a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture. 

That’s why, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), becoming a so-called “climate carnivore” and just cutting down on ruminant products like beef wouldn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as eating a healthier diet and limiting meat across the board. And the fewer animal products, the better, as seen below and at 1:32 in my video. 

“Which diet has the least environmental impact on our planet?” A systematic review found that “the vegan diet”—eating completely plant-based—“is the optimal diet for the environment,” but it isn’t all or nothing, as you can see below and at 1:49 in my video. Even just cutting down on meat to less than an ounce or two a day could get you halfway there in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

When it comes to land use, as you can see here and at 1:56, a healthier diet, like a Mediterranean diet, may decrease your footprint by about a quarter, whereas even more plant-based diets can drop land use by 50 percent or more. 

In general, diets that include meat require about 3 times more water, 13 times more fertilizer, more than twice the energy, and 40 percent more pesticides than eating patterns that don’t. If you look even more broadly at the total environmental impact of omnivorous versus vegetarian versus vegan diets and consider not just global warming, but also ocean acidification, agricultural run-off, smog, the ecotoxicity of the water and soil, and direct human toxicity of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we grow our food from, eating eggs and dairy may be 9 times worse than plants and eating eggs, dairy, and meat may be 17 times worse than sticking to plant foods. As a bonus, “replacing all animal-based items in the US diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste.” That’s more than the U.S. population and more than if we completely irradicated food waste.

“Changing meat-eating habits may be seen as a relatively cheap and easy way to mitigate climate change, in contrast to many other climate mitigation behaviors,” factors outside our control. However, surveys suggest few “seem to recognize the option of eating less meat as a significant opportunity for helping the mitigation process.” Indeed, “research has shown that consumers often underestimate the impacts of meat consumption on the environment, in general, and on climate change, in particular…The outstanding effectiveness of the less meat option (as established by climate experts) was recognized by merely 12% of the Dutch and 6% of the American sample,” and that’s after they were prompted to assume climate change is actually happening.

“There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and that we’re driving it,” but only about half of U.S. adults believe it. This is not by coincidence. Just like the tobacco industry tried to subvert the “overwhelming evidence that smoking and secondhand smoke cause cancer and heart disease,” companies like “Exxon orchestrated a climate change denial campaign that stalled meaningful efforts to reduce greenhouse gases for decades.”

Certainly, environmental groups should know better, though. “None of the highest profile NGOs examined…featured meat consumption and climate change among their primary climate change web campaigns.” They were all “aware of the scientific evidence connecting livestock production and meat consumption to climate change,” but, evidently, “scientific evidence alone was not sufficient to compel NGOs to adopt campaigns on the issue.” It’s like another form of denialism that can become “a negative feedback loop”; it’s an unpopular topic to discuss, so you don’t discuss it, so it remains unpopular to discuss. “This in turn deprives the issue of the attention that would be needed for it to increase in prominence” and break out.

When environmental groups have messaged about it, they “have favored asking for moderate reductions in meat consumption,” which is “notable given research demonstrating the environmental benefits of totally or nearly meat-free diets.” It could be a much more powerful lever at the individual level to go even further, but they don’t want to be seen as telling people what to do. Instead, they advocate for small changes, like turning off your computer monitor at lunchtime or printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. However, the “cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet, we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes.”

This is the last video in a three-part series. If you missed the first two, see Win-Win Dietary Solutions to the Climate Crisis and Which Foods Have the Lowest Carbon Footprint?.

Also check out Friday Favorites: Which Foods and Diets Have the Lowest Carbon Footprint?.

For more, I also have an older video, Diet and Climate Change: Cooking Up a Storm, and this digital download on using plant-based or cultivated meat as a climate (and pandemic) mitigation strategy.