The Swamp logo

Why Transitioning to a Vegan Economy Wouldn't Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

And why it wouldn't be able to feed the population.

By Sam CottlePublished 5 years ago 14 min read
Like
Dairy cows.

Pretty much every activity humans undertake has an emissions footprint of some description, and animal agriculture is no different. However, when the suggestion arises that since animal agriculture is responsible for quite a large proportion of manmade greenhouse gas emissions and that we can eliminate these emissions immediately through simply getting rid of it, there are major issues that the vegan activist community has failed to address, and which could spell disaster if such a system were to be implemented. What they've as yet failed to establish is what the current system of agriculture is to be replaced with, the timescales involved and whether or not this new paradigm will actually emit less methane and CO2; additionally, they've failed to answer the most important question in all this: whether or not vegan agriculture can actually feed the population. In addition to this, I suspect that animal agriculture isn't the progenitor of the rising levels of atmospheric methane, which started in the 19th century, since this rise followed the Industrial Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, not the Agricultural Revolution of the 17th century.

Human sources of methane are not the largest sources of methane on the planet, and I think for the sake of balance, it's valuable to first point out that the proportion of human contributions of methane to the atmosphere is as yet indeterminate. Current methane statistics fail to include the contributions from all wild, as opposed to farmed, plant and animal life on the planet. As recently as 2006, it was "suggested" that the contributions of plant life may count for anywhere between 10-30% of atmospheric methane. This hypothesis would explain why, for instance, satellites detect unusually high concentrations of methane over tropical rain forests. So, the statistics are incomplete to begin with when it comes to methane; however, rates of methane in the atmosphere have been increasing in tandem with the rise of human industrialization over the last one hundred and fifty years, which leads to my next point.

It's not hard to see how burning the remains of plants and animals which existed on this planet hundreds of millions of years ago would introduce unnaturally large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But when it comes to natural systems, and farming is a natural system, I can't see how any changes made to an ecosystem, without emitting CO2 into the atmosphere, could lead to the emission of more methane, much less the rising global temperatures themselves. In the case of systems of agriculture, I fail to see how, since nothing novel is being introduced into the complex array of chemical processes inherent in any ecosystem, a change in the levels of particular emissions may occur without introducing, say, large quantities of carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels. I fail to see how anything emitted from forms of plant and animal life which can be sustained by the environment itself, or forms of plant life growing in it, could add or subtract from the emissions spectrum of that environment. The fact that methane levels also only seem to start rising after about 1850 or so leads me to suspect that these rises in methane levels are ultimately a product of the rising levels of CO2 and not the expansion of animal agriculture.

The melting of permafrost is an enormous potential source of methane that most of us have heard about, as are glaciers; I think it's more likely that this increase in methane would be caused by these sources since they represent variables with a sensitivity to variation determined by levels of atmospheric CO2; if, of course, it's true that there is a level of methane-neutrality inherent in expanding, industrializing systems of agriculture. Still, in spite of this fact, however, it may still only be the case that animal agriculture itself, as it sits within this emissions spectrum, may only be contributing to the planet's emissions spectrum insofar as it emits CO2 and not methane. Put simply, tractors might be more to blame than cows in all this, if any of it is to blame at all.

Nonetheless, you can't deny that it at least seems a tempting option to just dispense entirely with animal agriculture and we'll solve (part of) the problem of greenhouse emissions. But again the question focuses back on what would stand to replace that system and whether or not its greenhouse effect would equal, outweigh or indeed be less than the one we have at the moment. What's more, even if it does turn out to lower levels of atmospheric methane, there's no knowing what the impact of transitioning to such a paradigm would be on human populations. I think it's highly unlikely that veganism will take off as a grassroots movement to the extent that it becomes ubiquitous. The alternative is top-down state intervention and a restructuring of the economy driven by political will as opposed to market forces. Here we'd be venturing entirely into the unknown, and as it stands, our calorific intake globally is heavily-dependent on animal sources of protein and fat; any move away from this paradigm must be mediated by political intervention. The system will not change unless it's forced to do so. The problem is that, prior to attempting this, there must be nothing less than absolute certainty that the replacement system will feed everyone, prior to this issue of its impact on levels of atmospheric methane.

There's an additional wrinkle here also, and it's this; in the system of animal agriculture specifically, given that it's, generally speaking, more localized than the plant-based alternatives which may provide an equivalent nutritional profile to our meat, egg and dairy-based diets, there's a contradiction implied here in the putative environmental benefits of veganism against the potential negative health impacts of a vegan diet which do not mimic the nutritional profile of an omnivorous one. To be an environmentally-conscious vegan, one would need to consume a plant-based diet consisting of only those plants grown within a locality equivalent to that producing animal products. To do otherwise is to expect further reliance on infrastructure, i.e. planes, trucks and cargo ships to transport vegan protein and fat replacements from the, often, tropical regions where they're grown. This may seem flippant, but it is actually a serious consideration and a serious flaw with their argument. There would be a trade-off between potential reductions in domestic methane emission versus potential increases in CO2 from infrastructural sources employed in getting those vital nutrients within the area that's undergone a transition such as this. If this were to not happen, and a country, say a western European country, were to suddenly give up animal agriculture, it could not suddenly begin producing chickpeas, edamame and lentils at rates sufficient to feed the population; perhaps it could after a period of time used to transition and heavily adapt the agricultural means of production to producing these plants, but initially, it would have to import these products in vast quantities, entailing vast increases in the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere from the infrastructural sources of those emissions. That would also be in the interim of any transitional period.

Additionally, one might argue that vegans, given the contents of their diets, are responsible for slightly higher levels of carbon emissions, yet ostensibly, or actually, they are responsible for lower methane emissions. On this point, it may seem that veganism could be zero-sum, or even more polluting than an omnivorous diet. There is also the additional fact that they're responsible for cutting down the rainforest to produce palm oil; this is responsible for greater CO2 emissions, however, it would lead to a reduction in the methane emitted by tropical rainforests. Hence, it may reduce the planet's greenhouse effect, or worsen it, or be zero-sum. The implications of this for veganism is that it has to justify, for example, it's use of soy products using a justification of cutting down tropical rainforests, supported by the fact that doing so reduces levels of atmospheric methane, but then having to simultaneously justify higher infrastructural CO2 emissions. Having said this, all people are equally responsible for the destruction of the rainforests, but at least we don't all go around thinking we're somehow less responsible than others because of our diet.

A possible counter-argument may be that the vegan government proposing the transition would also begin implementing other measures to reduce our CO2 and methane emissions, such as using less coal, oil and natural gas, and compensating for the jet fuel used to fly chickpeas to Britain by banning us from going abroad. They'd also have to do this to prevent us from importing meat and selling it on a black market. We may even have to, for the following reason, and this comes back largely to what ought to be done with the vast tracts of now heavily-depopulated farmland previously used for animal agriculture. We'd have to replace it with vegetable production, otherwise a lot of it would turn into swampland and marshes and hence emit methane.

In most (if not all) cases, farmers decide to use their land for raising livestock as opposed to arable farming based on the soil type of their land. Loamy soils are the soils most arable crops are grown in, with clay soils being of little use for growing most crops, except possibly sprouts, cabbages and broccoli. These also lack an element of mechanization in the way that they're gathered, meaning that if we were to seriously transition to a vegan economy growing crops in clay soil, we'd also have to dramatically increase the population of agricultural workers picking cabbages, sprouts and broccoli, becoming a population fed largely by these sources instead of meat, dairy and eggs. A possible route out of this is via means that actually appeal to me quite a lot, and that's a sort of "back to the land" ethic whereby more and more people, and perhaps the government is involved also, take on small farms following the gradual breakup of the larger farms we have at the moment. But this would amount to neo-medievalism and a return to an agrarian society where most people in it are subsistence agriculturalists. The problem here is, of course, that not everyone would be able to have such a small farm, not everyone would want one, and obviously that this system would need to produce exactly as much food/calories as the system it replaces and do so by only growing plants. Whether or not it's possible to do so hasn't yet been determined.

Having a smallholding is an idea I quite like, and one of my me-at-forty hypotheticals; a small house in a field with a couple of cows, chickens, maybe some pigs and some maize. In this, also, is the key to uncovering whether a system wherein we consume no animal produce may replace a system which does. We would need to compare the calorific output of an area of land prior to the transition with the output of one after the transition. To do this, we'd need to assume a roughly 50/50 division between clay and loamy soils within the country; as I understand it, that's roughly-speaking what we have. We would then find what the output of it is, and then see if it'll match the calorific output of the country as it stands. I suspect that it wouldn't; this is because of the increased labor requirement and the problems associated with processing and infrastructure. These would cause the replacement system to be highly inefficient, at least to begin with, and would also engender the collapse of large sectors within the economy that rely on meat and dairy products. Most restaurants would have to close or "transition" to serving only vegan food. Food processing plants would have to be scrapped and the companies operating them would go out of business. Supermarkets might not go out of business, but millions of people would still lose their jobs in the food services industry. This is without even considering the potential for crop failure, of which I'm certain vegans are clueless.

Furthermore, if the vegan activist community wishes to skip blithely over this issue of the use of clay-based farmland and wishes to propose that the land be used for other purposes, or even that it's not to be used at all, then they need to be armed with an understanding of what would happen to that land if it were to go to waste. Wetlands, marshes and swamps are one of the larger "naturally" occurring sources of atmospheric methane. If it, and this isn't to say that all this land would, though a sizable portion of it would, turns not back into the forests that preceded mechanized agriculture, but into wetlands (which would of course produce copious amounts of methane), then this would completely undermine their argument. They would then have to use this land for some agricultural purpose.

It would be an enormous project to change the system of mechanized agriculture that's been developing now in the west for over two-hundred years with something as vague and poorly-considered as this plan of establishing a vegan economy. Idealism separated from any degree of pragmatism is impotent, but when idealism adopts the facade of pragmatism and manages to formulate a plan that most people agree with, then it has the potential to become dangerous. Plans for top-down state intervention in agriculture have a checkered history; for examples of this, you need only consider the impacts of collectivization under Lenin, and Lysenkoism under Stalin and in Mao's China. It might be trite to say, but unfortunately, this seems to be the sort of thing that happens when the state interferes too much with agriculture.

If this vegan Great Leap Forward were to be successful, it would entail a massive cultural as well as economic upheaval; moreover, when such things have been possible in the past, it has always been under the aegis of tyrannical regimes. In Western democratic nations, I suspect it's unlikely that a party motivated by the vegan ideological position would attain power in the first place due to holding these sorts of policies, and I don't see a vegan revolution happening anywhere in the west, much less in the UK. I hate to draw comparisons with the likes of Mao and Stalin on this, but from my perspective, as someone who works in agriculture, and specifically someone who does so because of a love of animals, the vegans would have to be responsible for at least one genocide if they were to keep their environmentalist promises: the genocide of all farm animals. It would be a true genocide as well, as every species of animal would have to be eliminated to eradicate their potential for emitting methane. If we're to consider animal life on an equal footing with human life in terms of the right to life, granted this would be impossible, to do otherwise invalidates the vegan desire to eliminate a source of methane emissions, hence directly contradicting themselves.

It makes little sense that methane from agriculture is responsible in a direct sense for global warming, since atmospheric methane only began to rise above its historical baseline in the 1850s after the start of the Industrial Revolution. From a vegan perspective, it seems tempting to merely dispense with animal agriculture and, to them at least, I can only assume it seems like an easy option for cutting greenhouse emissions. However, nothing could be further from the truth. When it comes to cutting emissions, cutting them from agriculture is probably about the hardest area to remove emissions from and potentially the most dangerous part of the economy to set about modifying using top-down state intervention.

If vegans seek change within the culture, as they do at the moment, by convincing more people to adopt a vegan lifestyle on the basis of cases for any amount of supposed benefits such a lifestyle change may have, they're entitled to do so, but if the activist movement is seeking to influence the government to provoke a transition from the system of agriculture we have at the moment to a vegan one, it would be worth investigating in more depth whether or not such plans would be feasible to begin with and what their impact would be in real terms on society. In lieu of these proposals of consciously dismantling animal agriculture, I could suggest any number of other top-down changes which would be far more beneficial; greater investment in solar, wind and hydroelectric power for example. In any case, the vegans haven't given the full story so far as their carbon footprint's concerned; I doubt it's much better than ours, and it might even be worse. If you're a vegan and want to reduce your carbon footprint, the best thing to do is actually to stop reading the internet, or using your phone, or using electricity, and have a burger.

agriculture
Like

About the Creator

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.