A 20-year phase out would reduce fossil employment by about 8,500 positions per year—as many as Canada usually creates every 10 days. The industry already shed twice that number of jobs in 2020 due to poor oil prices and pandemic-induced recession."
I am an amateur observer when it comes to this kind of systemic change in the face of converging global crises, but this language is familiar enough from my training as a volunteer in Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. It is an exciting moment when the "green option" becomes the one that makes the best business sense -- even before carbon taxes, which would apply external costs to the extraction of a resource. In exchange for my free training into the Climate Reality Leadership Corps I had pledged 10 presentations "to my community" (in this case, the animal rights/vegan activist community in Toronto). For the first several presentations* I had crowed in all the right places -- "approaching PARITY with coal and gas-powered energy by 2016..."; "creating more jobs than coal..."; "leapfrogging dirty fuel technologies in developing nations..." The same month I joined "the Corps" I even marched with Bill McKibben, David Suzuki and Jane Fonda in the 350.org organized "March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate" -- anyone who didn't already know why "Jobs" had top billing over "Climate" certainly got the answer, "No climate solution is considered unless it can grow the economy more than the alternative." This march being the first outing of "Climate Vegan" (now Climate Save Movement) it gave us a lot to think about, especially after getting no clear parallels for mitigating emissions from the meat industries when we "politely cornered" anti-capitalist Naomi Klein in the park after the march.
Given the wealth of insight gathered in the book Meatonomics (and the website of the same name) by David Robinson Simon, the externalities forgiven of animal agriculture are immense, and not just from a climate perspective. The recent praise earned by Doughnut Economics to balance solutions of shortfall to humanity (many mapped to SDGs) with overshoot of the 7 planetary boundaries is a promising development in the recognition of agricultural externalities.
To wrap around to my excerpted quotation, what can we anticipate for an equivalent phase-out of animal agriculture? I am wildly aware that while we have accomplished environmental progress to the point where a politician can forecast the end of the fossil fuel industry we have neither the imagination nor the political appetite to challenge the interests of the Cattlemen's Association, but the evidence remains that we can't meet our targets and preserve a biosphere that sustains us (let alone create a thriving world) without a systemic overhaul of both the food system in developed nations and the appetite it has advertised to the emerging global middle class.
The answer may be generational. I have lost fascination in how the Boomer world view is so anchored in what Dr. Melanie Joy calls Carnism: the unspoken universal understanding that we eat meat because...we eat meat. The headline "Undeniable: Meat and Dairy Industries will Disappear" will arise parallel to the fossil fuel timeline -- though accelerated, as it awaits no government cooperation.
* Certainly before I presented for Climate Reality/Climate Vegan for the Durham VegFest, where we met after your presentation of "Your Water Footprint," by which time my scorn for Climate Reality's muteness on agricultural policy was openly in contempt.
"Undeniable: fossil fuels will disappear
A 20-year phase out would reduce fossil employment by about 8,500 positions per year—as many as Canada usually creates every 10 days. The industry already shed twice that number of jobs in 2020 due to poor oil prices and pandemic-induced recession."
I am an amateur observer when it comes to this kind of systemic change in the face of converging global crises, but this language is familiar enough from my training as a volunteer in Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. It is an exciting moment when the "green option" becomes the one that makes the best business sense -- even before carbon taxes, which would apply external costs to the extraction of a resource. In exchange for my free training into the Climate Reality Leadership Corps I had pledged 10 presentations "to my community" (in this case, the animal rights/vegan activist community in Toronto). For the first several presentations* I had crowed in all the right places -- "approaching PARITY with coal and gas-powered energy by 2016..."; "creating more jobs than coal..."; "leapfrogging dirty fuel technologies in developing nations..." The same month I joined "the Corps" I even marched with Bill McKibben, David Suzuki and Jane Fonda in the 350.org organized "March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate" -- anyone who didn't already know why "Jobs" had top billing over "Climate" certainly got the answer, "No climate solution is considered unless it can grow the economy more than the alternative." This march being the first outing of "Climate Vegan" (now Climate Save Movement) it gave us a lot to think about, especially after getting no clear parallels for mitigating emissions from the meat industries when we "politely cornered" anti-capitalist Naomi Klein in the park after the march.
Given the wealth of insight gathered in the book Meatonomics (and the website of the same name) by David Robinson Simon, the externalities forgiven of animal agriculture are immense, and not just from a climate perspective. The recent praise earned by Doughnut Economics to balance solutions of shortfall to humanity (many mapped to SDGs) with overshoot of the 7 planetary boundaries is a promising development in the recognition of agricultural externalities.
To wrap around to my excerpted quotation, what can we anticipate for an equivalent phase-out of animal agriculture? I am wildly aware that while we have accomplished environmental progress to the point where a politician can forecast the end of the fossil fuel industry we have neither the imagination nor the political appetite to challenge the interests of the Cattlemen's Association, but the evidence remains that we can't meet our targets and preserve a biosphere that sustains us (let alone create a thriving world) without a systemic overhaul of both the food system in developed nations and the appetite it has advertised to the emerging global middle class.
The answer may be generational. I have lost fascination in how the Boomer world view is so anchored in what Dr. Melanie Joy calls Carnism: the unspoken universal understanding that we eat meat because...we eat meat. The headline "Undeniable: Meat and Dairy Industries will Disappear" will arise parallel to the fossil fuel timeline -- though accelerated, as it awaits no government cooperation.
* Certainly before I presented for Climate Reality/Climate Vegan for the Durham VegFest, where we met after your presentation of "Your Water Footprint," by which time my scorn for Climate Reality's muteness on agricultural policy was openly in contempt.