Are We All Fucked?
But don’t worry… we probably deserved it.
Unless we all go vegan with immediate effect, the planet will soon be unliveable. That’s the startling claim of Dr Peter Carter, a top climate scientist who claims that not only are we all fucked unless we abolish animal agriculture, but we are all fucked unless we abolish it starting, basically, from today.
The guy must be a crackpot, right?
Wrong. Peter Carter is one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, with more than 50 years’ experience studying the causes and effects of global warming. He is a Director of the Climate Emergency Institute and expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The IPCC is recognised as the authoritative voice on the science of climate change. Their entire purpose is to collate and examine all the evidence available in order to assess the scientific basis of the current climate emergency, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.
We are standing on a precipice, with so much at stake, and the situation is unbelievably urgent. Carter calls the imminent climate disaster, “the greatest, worst challenge we have ever faced in the whole history of the human species.”
Yet, collectively, we are still doing almost nothing about it. In fact, he claims , not only are we making no progress in terms of climate change, we have actually made ‘reverse progress’.
For many years, governments around the world have been touting a 2°C target for global warming. After studying all the data, the IPCC announced that a rise in global temperature of 2°C would be absolutely catastrophic and that 1.5°C must be the absolute upper limit.
Yet global temperatures continue to rise, with no sign that they will stop at 1.5 degrees.
The rising global temperatures, of course, are the result of greenhouse gas emissions. There are three main greenhouse gasses, responsible for global warming. Theses are:
- carbon dioxide
- methane
- nitrous oxide
The first, carbon dioxide, is mainly produced by the fossil fuel industry. The other two, methane and nitrous oxide, are produced primarily by animal agriculture, through animal waste and fertiliser.
Both these industries are being subsidized by government, to the extent that we are not only failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with the global targets necessary for our own survival, but they are actually being emitted faster than ever before.
As a result, we are on track for an ‘unliveable planet’. That’s no small claim. The IPCC have stated that to avoid total climate catastrophe, emissions of all three greenhouse gasses must be dropped to nearly zero.
“Mitigation for climate change, says Carter, “is all or nothing, and it has to be everything. It cannot be less than every single source of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Mitigation for climate change, says Carter, “is all or nothing, and it has to be everything. It cannot be less than every single source of greenhouse gas emissions
Governments have to act. They must be urgently lobbied on an unprecedented scale to ensure they do everything necessary. But we, as individuals also need to act with urgency.
Carter has explained that even if we replaced all our fossil fuels with renewable energy, thus reducing carbon dioxide emissions to ‘nearly zero’, we would still be doomed if methane production remained even at current levels. He claims that subsidising the meat and dairy industry is ‘criminally insane’ and that by doing so, we are effectively committing mass suicide.
We must, all of us, on an immediate basis, switch to a plant-based diet. Switching immediately to a plant-based (vegan) diet, says Carter, “is certainly the easiest, most readily available, most immediately effective lifestyle change that individuals and families can make.”
[Going vegan] is certainly the easiest, most readily available, most immediately effective lifestyle change that individuals and families can make
Yet meat production is going up. For decades, we have been educating people about not only the environmental impacts of animal agriculture but the moral and ethical problems associated with exploiting other sentient beings. We’ve been showing people the extreme, unimaginable suffering, on an immense global scale, being perpetrated on other animals who have feelings just as we do.
Despite a significant rise in the number of vegans over recent decades, it’s not anywhere near enough. On the whole, the animal agriculture industry continues to grow and more animals continue to be killed because people don’t care enough about other animals to change their eating habits.
People make the excuse that being vegan is too hard, yet I stand in the queue at my local bakery and I see other customers, time after time, choosing meat-based products when there are virtually identical plant-based alternatives literally inches away, often at a lower price. The stubbornness of people’s refusal to make the switch dumfounds me.
People make the excuse that our ancestors ate meat in order to survive, yet our own continued survival as a species now rests on us NOT eating meat. Will people make the necessary change? Personally, I suspect not.
My own opinion is that human beings, as a whole, are far too greedy and stupid to get out of their own way. We are literally being the authors of our own destruction and people choose to condemn those who are trying to wake them up to this fact, rather than change their own habits.
People will literally riot for the right to carry on down their path of self-destruction when they should be rioting for immediate global change.
I have nothing but contempt for this mindset and very little faith in humanity to do the right thing. It would be fantastic to be proven wrong on this, but I think that civilisation has bought a one-way ticket to annihilation and we are determined to get our money’s worth at all costs.
I think that by the time most of us realise we’re all fucked, it will be too late. My only consolation is that, as a species, we probably deserved it.