Going vegan and quitting flying are not equivalent
Following the bombshell that was the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report on the climate crisis, people have been reassured by the implication that giving up flying is more impactful than giving up meat. This could not be further from the truth, as Claire Hamlett explains.
Since the latest IPCC report dropped on Monday, there has been a good deal of commentary from newspapers and social media on what people can do to fight climate change. Besides fighting for systemic change through direct action, community building, and/or political engagement, people may naturally want to know what are the most effective steps they can personally take to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
In terms of the personal activities that are within the means of most people to easily change, among the main ones are modes of transportation and diet. Flying, in particular, has received significant attention from the climate movement, with Greta Thunberg’s low-carbon train travel to take her climate message around the world inspiring ‘flight shame’ (or flyskam in Thunberg’s native Swedish). Meanwhile switching to a plant-based diet has been both slower to catch on and far more contentious.
That’s why people are reassured by messages that imply giving up flying regularly is more impactful than giving up meat, like this tweet by conservationist Miles King arguing that one person taking one return flight from London to Greece has the same carbon footprint as that person eating beef for a year.
One of the problems with this is that it presents quitting air travel or going vegan as equivalent choices, and someone who doesn’t fly but eats beef might feel they are doing enough to cut their own footprint.
On the grounds of climate impact, this is not exactly accurate. Flying from London to Athens generates around 353kg to 405kg of CO2 per passenger. According to a BBC carbon footprint calculator, eating a 75g serving of beef one to two times a week for a year generates 604kg of CO2 emissions. Another way to look at it is that one kg of beef, which a person would consume in seven weeks if eating a serving a couple of times a week, generates 100kg of CO2 equivalents (the non-CO2 gases produced by beef, mostly methane, which has over 80 times more warming potential than CO2). This would mean eating beef twice a week for a year would produce more than 700kg of CO2 equivalents. Moreover, animal agriculture accounts for up to 18 per cent of global emissions, while aviation accounts for around two per cent.
None of this is to say that flying is not a climate problem. It is, and limiting your air travel - say by holidaying domestically or travelling by train most of the time - or not flying at all is going to save a significant amount of carbon from being emitted. But even if, like Thunberg, you are a vegan who doesn’t fly, your veganism is still more effective at minimising harm than your flight-free life. That’s because the problems with beef, and with meat and dairy in general, cannot be reduced to the amount of GHGs it emits.
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We know that animal agriculture has major negative impacts on other species, taking the biggest share (78 per cent) of the land used for food production and driving habitat destruction and biodiversity loss in the process. We know it uses one-tenth of the world’s freshwater use and is the biggest source of water pollution, causing dead zones and eutrophication. We know that predators and wild grazing herbivores are frequently persecuted in order to protect the interests of livestock farmers. If we move away from an animal-based food system and free up the massive amounts of land used to support it, we can rewild vast swathes of the world. This would also be more effective at drawing down carbon than the improvements in livestock grazing that the meat industry is increasingly banking on. Scientists recently warned in a major report that the nature and climate crises must be tackled together or neither will be solved. Nowhere is the confluence of these crises more acute than in the livestock sector.
Farming animals also helps to spread diseases both between animal species and between animals and humans, from bovine TB driving the mass slaughter of badgers in the UK in the name of protecting cattle to the pandemic risks posed by avian flu mutating and spreading on poultry farms. Clearing more land for agriculture also brings humans into closer contact with wild animals that can transmit zoonotic diseases.
Even if the climate and environmental impacts of animal agriculture could be somehow magically neutralised, it would still be worth going vegan for the sake of the animals that otherwise needlessly suffer and are killed - both the billions farmed globally every year and for the wild animals displaced and killed by the meat industry. Many meat-eaters will of course disagree with that, but it is a position that vegans should not be shy about advocating for.
A narrow focus on the GHG emissions of our diets will always result in a skewed argument about how best people can limit their own impact on the planet. And it’s those who most want to keep meat on people’s plates who will work hardest to obscure its other harms.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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