Meat and fossil fuels have more in common than you think
We rarely stop to consider the harm done by burning fossil fuels — or eating meat.
In his excellent book No Good Alternative, William T. Vollmann apologizes to the future for the carbon-heavy actions of his generation.
Through dark humor and wit, Vollmann echoes millions of people worldwide, especially in America, who justify the use of coal and other fossil fuels to maintain a certain lifestyle.
“So kindly refrain from pretending that all we did with coal was burn it,” writes Vollmann, tongue-in-cheek. “It served us so delightfully as to leave us no good alternative.”
Vollmann was writing about coal, gas, and oil, but the same can be applied to the meat industry. Even when presented with alternatives, in this case plants or faux meat, we largely refuse to ditch our beloved burgers. In the last 60 years, individual meat consumption for Americans rose 40%.
That trend, like our reliance on fossil fuels, is largely to the detriment of our health and the Planet’s. In favor of profits and indulgence, we rarely stop to consider the harm done by the continual extraction, refining, and burning of fossil fuels — or the pollution, land degradation, and emissions caused by raising animals to eat.
Animal agriculture’s footprint is well documented, but in short, it accounts for at least 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 44% of global methane emissions, an extremely potent greenhouse gas.
So, what can we do? We’d like to think there are shortcuts — there are, of course, differences between the carbon footprint of meats (beef and mutton are the worst emitters, chicken and seafood are slightly better).
But switching from one meat to another is much like switching from coal to oil or gas — not a good alternative, given the short timeframe we have to hit our climate targets and avoid a catastrophe.
A recent study outlines this problem: The five-fold increase of chicken over the last half-century has done little to move the needle on beef. And between 2019 and 2020 alone, American beef consumption jumped nearly 25%.
Put another way, unlike natural gas, which has steadily replaced coal power over the last several decades, lower-emitting meat doesn’t easily replace beef.
Then there’s the cultural problem, which complicates everything. The recent outrage over Biden’s meat ban (a ban that doesn’t exist), shows how people are willing to defend the industry, which makes up not just what we eat, but also our culture of profits, waste, and excess.
And, like burning fossil fuels, which have national and communal roots, eating meat is even more intimate (think Thanksgiving, family dinners, summer barbeques) and, therefore, tougher to shake.
“We eat to satisfy primitive cravings, to forge and express ourselves, to realize community,” writes Jonathan Safran Foer in We Are the Weather. “We eat with mouths and stomachs, but also with our minds and hearts.”
The problem, in both fossil fuels and meat, is that these very lifestyles we so cherish are threatened by the sources that make those lifestyles possible. Or as Foer puts it, “We cannot keep the kinds of meals we have known and keep the planet we have known.”
In No Good Alternative, Vollmann acknowledges that he is part of the problem. His book serves as an apology to the future, a concession that we could’ve done something different, but there was no good alternative.
Of course, as Vollmann knows, there are many alternatives — we just rather ignore them. After all, why make it harder on ourselves when future generations will foot the bill?