CIWF Forum on Global Warming and Diet | Vegan.com

On September 8, Compassion in World Farming hosted a forum on factory farming, global warming, and the environment. The featured lecturer was Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Lots of interesting things were said by Dr. Pachauri and the event’s other speakers. And happily, CIWF has distilled the most interesting observations into a ten minute YouTube video. There’s some great stuff here, but I still think vegan advocates must be very careful when bringing up climate change. Although Dr. Pachauri’s focus is on helping slow global warming by eating less meat, I think you could make a strong case that switching entirely to chicken achieves greater greenhouse gas reductions than, say, being vegan one or two days a week. Also, it seems pretty clear that there may well be a technological fix in the works that can dramatically reduce the methane produced by the world’s livestock.

My favorite part of this video was Joyce D’Silva’s comment that people need to think about their compassion footprint as well as their carbon footprint. Given that one day soon everyone will be acutely conscious of their carbon footprint, it’s a brilliant idea to introduce the compassion footprint phrase into the dialog.

At about the 9:30 mark of the video at the link above, John Powles actually says "...simply no amount of military superiority by rich countries will stop poor countries wanting to eat more meat...".