First of all, there is only one way to prevent global warming from endlessly increasing - and that is to stop burning fossil fuels, period. Saving forests in the tropics will also help out a bit, but not if you don't stop pulling hundred-million-year-old carbon molecules out of the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere.

Not eating factory-farmed industrial meat products is a good idea for many reasons, including the energy and water issues (water might be a more critical one), as well as health and basic ethical issues (for a shocker, see the Rolling Stone article Boss Hog: Pork's Dirty Secret) - but if you're eating fruits and vegetables that have been flown in from Ecuador and Indonesia, that's not really solving the problem either.

*The Boss Hog article is a must-read...
"Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

There are a whole host of issues that swirl around global warming - disproportionate effects on poor communities and developing countries (who lives in the flood zones?), energy efficiency, food choices, and so on - but we can't afford to ignore the principle issue: fossil fuel combustion causes global warming.

Thus, if you want to stop global warming, there's only one possibility: halt the use of fossil fuel combustion for energy production - and not just in the United States, but in China, in India, in Russia, in the Middle East - everywhere.

Of course, you will need replacement energy sources - and those will be sunlight, wind and plant photosynthesis. Energy from those sources will have to be stored for use as needed - meaning a lot of infrastructure needs to be built - meaning lots of jobs and economic opportunities (setting up wind turbines beats working in the hog slaughterhouse, I think).

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OK, I get it. Vegans are great, everyone who eats meat is a depraved maniac intent upon ruining the world and if we would all just become VEGANS all of the problems of the world would be solved.

Please, Alternet, just replace the current banner ad at the top of the page with an ad promoting Veganism and stop printing variations on the VEGANISM is the best theme every week.

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Kudos, Bruce, for this very important message discussing the "inconvenient truth" that a major shift toward vegan diets is an essential part of what is needed to shift the world from the unprecedented catastrophe toward which it is rapidly heading due to global warming and other environmental threats. Because the issues are so urgent, I have helped produce a movie A SACRED DUTY: APPLYING JEWISH VALUES TO HELP HEAL THE WORLD. It has a universal message and has been very positively received by people of many faiths and none (www/ASacredDuty.com). It can be viewed at You Tube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9RxmTGHZgE
If you would like a complimentary copy to help promote the movie or possibly arrange a showing, please contact me at president@JewishVeg.com.
For informaation about connections between Judaism and vegetarianism, please visit
JewishVeg.com/schwartz, where I have over 130 articles.

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Did I miss something? Are we/ Is he not allowed to say "beef"?

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I'm a vegetarian not only for the Earth, but for the animals. I don't want animals to suffer and die just so I can eat caloric, high-fat, high-cholesterol food. Vegetarian foods taste great and they are better for the planet, the animals, and our health.

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How factory farming impacts the environment is important information. As scientists, leaders of the environmental movement, and other knowledgeable, action-oriented people already know, all of us can help stop global warming (or, as many scientists now refer to it, global heating) by eating a plant-based diet. As a former meat-eater, I know there is a side benefit: you'll feel great and be healthier.

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Thanks to Bruce for this article. It's great to hear that such an important meeting of the environmental minds was strictly vegan--as it should be.

With so much evidence that factory farming (and therefore, consuming meat) is harmful to the environment and spurring global warming, I really have to wonder if Al Gore is going to align his lifestyle with his chosen cause and stop eating meat (for more than just the duration of a conference). We've heard it from so many groups that you can't be a meat-eating environmentalist, and it is time for Gore to practice what he preaches.

So how about it, Al? I've been vegetarian for 11 years and vegan for 4. Dinner at our place this weekend?

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What activists veggies and vegans don't know about human psychology is amazing. The average person still hasn't replace a single light bulb, or walk vs drive/public transportation for short errands. Nagging them to give up meat is way too threatnening, and will cause people to go into denial about global warming. (Especially since there is a recession on!) It is usually easier to get people to make a small non threatnening change, like a light bulb, then go from there. Small changes can redefine a person's self image encourage more dramatic changes. There are countless social psychology studies to back this up!

I agree with the first poster that they are just using global warming to exploit their cause. Although I have never cared for meat, reading these types of articles makes me want to get a hamburger; in the same way that listening to fundamentalist Christians makes me want to send a few bucks to the atheists.

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Read the book DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET. The author points out that the best way to convert grass lands to something edible is NOT by growing corn but to raise grass-eating animals.

It's the factory farms that are causing the problem and not the beef. The prairie should never have been plowed up to grow grains.

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Even though I follow a vegetarian diet and agree with the articles' content, this is not the way to go about making change.

It would be more effective to push for cutting back on consumption than to hound people to death for not cutting it completely. There would be significant changes if we had campaigns to cut meat & dairy intake down to once a day than trying to make the masses feel guilty for eating it at all.

People become indignant then defiant and stop listening to the facts when all they hear are attacks against one of the very common ways of westernized life. Show people instead that they can make big differences with little changes.

We're not in a perfect world here so we have to accept the fact that no one will get the entire population to stop consuming animal products but what we can do, is compromise.

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say there are too many people, ARE YOU PART OF THE PROBLEM OR PART OF THE SOLUTION?

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Thank you Alternet.org for posting this article, and thank you Bruce Friedrich for writing this excellent fact filled article. We need more of the same in the mainstream media. Our meat eating habits have wreacked havoc on animals, the planet and our health. It's about time those practices were abolished. After all child labor and slavery were abolished, women finally got the right to vote in the US in only the early 20th century, so it's about time we gave rights to animals. In the Netherlands, they even have an Animal Party in their government. Granted we still have child labor and slavery and women's rights violated in mass quantities all over the world, but it doesn't make it right. The same goes with our inhumane and vicious treatment of animals for the purpose of eating them and using them in other ways. Those practices must be condemned and abolished. We will still have enough on our hands to put a stop to them once animal rights have finally been recognized.

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Refute that.

The typical American vegan drives a car fueled with petroleum, uses electricity produced from coal consumption, and wears clothes shipped from China on container ships that burn dirty, sulfur-laden fuel oil, and eats organic produce shipped into the U.S. from Mexico in the back of diesel trucks (which, thanks to NAFTA, are exempt from U.S. clean air laws) - and yet the American vegan claims moral supremacy and believes he/she is acting to slow global warming.

The Ethiopian goatherd, by comparison, eats meat, gets around by foot (or by bicycle), barely has any spare clothing, has hardly any access to electricity (if available, electricity is reserved for pumping water from wells), and yet is criticized by the American vegan for being a beastly meat-eater!

Odd, isn't it? Perhaps it's just a product of the unfortunately insular American outlook - many people in the U.S. seem to think that the world ends at the borders of the country.

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There is no question that meat eating in America and abroad has caused massive pollution, destruction of land, and is bad for one's health. We are not talking about a small goat herder in Ethiopia here. We are talking about farm factories and regular farms that work with farm factories to perpetuate much suffering and destruction. As the first comment posted, there is an excellent example of the destruction caused by the "average American meat eater" lifestyle in the article: "Boss Hog" published by Rolling Stone Magazine and dated 12/14/06. If you search this on the internet you will find it.
Choosing a Vegan lifestyle is not about being a moral supremacist or self-righteous, it is about wanting to do good and respecting life in all its forms, and about looking for new solutions. Certainly animal rights, human rights and the environment are all connected, and some of us will favor one issue over the other, but in the end they are intertwined and need to be addressed as a whole and by continuing to promote meat eating we are causing irreparable damage to all animals and the planet, and dragging human rights and the environment along into a downward spiral.

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Livestock agriculture and killing other animals for food often drives many other species into extinction.

The Steller's sea cow once inhabited the coastal waters of the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea. Russian Sealers, who were the first to record the existence of these creatures in 1741, estimated the entire population to be about 5,000. Their meat was considered a delicacy by Russian sealers, who decimated the entire species by 1768.

The Labrador duck has been extinct since 1875. This species formerly inhabited the coastal regions of northeastern Canada. The extinction of the passenger pigeon was caused by the American westward expansion in the second half of the 19th century. As passenger pigeons became a popular food item, the numbers of this species rapidly diminished. Millions were slaughtered each year and shipped by railway cars to be sold in city markets. Another bird to become extinct because of its use as food was the heath hen, which became extinct about 1932.

The pacific sardine lives along the coasts of North America from Alaska to southern California. Sardines, once a major part of the California fishing industry, are now considered to be "commercially extinct." Another species classified as "commercially extinct" is the New England haddock. Ecologists have also been concerned about the significant reduction in finfish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, Lake Erie cisco, and blackfins that inhabit Lakes Huron and Michigan.

Over 200,000 porpoises are killed every year by fishermen seeking tuna in the Pacific. Sea turtles are similarly killed in Caribbean shrimp operations. Some animals are killed because, as natural carnivores, they compete with the human "predator" for the right to kill other animals for food, including wild game and domesticated species raised by livestock ranchers. Alaskan hunters are eager to reduce the wolf population in their state because this animal is a predator of moose.

Cougars, coyotes and wolves are considered a menace to the cattle and sheep industries, and livestock ranchers have engaged in a large-scale campaign to exterminate them. Two species of wolves are now endangered, and very few wolves can be found in the United States except in Alaska and northeastern Minnesota. The relatively small number of eagles in the U.S. is largely due to the destruction of this species by livestock ranchers, particularly those in the sheep business.

Herbivorous animals that inhabit rangeland areas are also killed by the livestock industry because they compete with cattle arid sheep for food. Large numbers of kangaroos are being exterminated in Australia, while in the United States livestock ranchers seek to destroy wild horses, wild burros, deer, elk, antelope and prairie dogs.

An ever-increasing amount of beef eaten in the United States is imported from Central and South America. To provide pasture for cattle, these countries have been clearing their priceless tropical rainforests. In 1960, when the U. S. first began to import beef, Central America was blessed with 130,000 square miles of rainforest. But now, less than 80,000 square miles remain. At this rate, the entire tropical rainforests of Central America will be gone in another forty years.

These tropical rainforests are among the world's most precious natural resources. Amounting to only 30 percent of the world's forests, the rainforests contain 80 percent of the earth's land vegetation, and account for a substantial percentage of the earth's oxygen supplies. These forests are the oldest ecosystems on earth and have developed extreme ecological richness. Half of all species on earth live in the moist tropical rainforests. But these jewels of nature are being rapidly destroyed to provide land on which cattle can be grazed for the American fast-food market.

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Half the water consumed in the U. S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. In fact, U. S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause ten times more water pollution than does the U. S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.

Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a thousand-pound steer could float a destroyer. It takes twenty-five gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but twenty-five hundred gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!

The burden of subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.

Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and eighty-five percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U. S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.

One-third of all raw materials in the U. S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes three times as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."

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"Global hunger could be directly attributed to meat-eating." ---Chrissie Hynde

Half the world's population does not get enough to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.

The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people--nearly double the entire human population of the planet. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.

In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.

Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."

Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:

"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before.

"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."

"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished.

"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."

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The meat-promoting naysayers have run out of arguments, and all they can say is, "but I find giving up meat HARD."

So what? It also takes an effort to stop driving everywhere, use birth control every time you have sex with the opposite gender, avoid giving your children too many material objects, etc. ALL of these things are difficult for some people. The fact that eating less meat, eggs and dairy products may be difficult for some people does not negate its usefulness.

Making such dramatic lifestyle changes takes time. In and of itself, that is not a good excuse for refusing to take the first step.

It's 2008. There are dozens of excellent vegan cookbooks out there. Why not buy one and begin by making ONE vegan dinner a week? Maybe your health will improve and that will provide greater incentive for eliminating even more animal products from your diet.

Finally, the whole grass-eating cow option is fine on its face from a purely ecological perspective. However, there are simply TOO MANY PEOPLE for this option to be available to more than a small fraction of the population.

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Has it ever occurred to the vegetarians/vegans how much they sound like Jehovah's witnesses? And, oddly enough, they tend to be a lot more annoying. When the Witnesses come to my door i tell them that i do, in fact, love Jesus...but i hate Christians (only the ones who spend their time proselytizing). Well, i love vegetables too, but there is nothing worse than a proselytizing vegetarian.

This messianic style of environmentalism is getting old really fast too. People need to wake up. Global Warming is not the disease, folks, it is a symptom of the disease. The disease is waste. It comes from our system being based on economic efficiency and economic efficiency only. We are not going to cure the disease by trying to fix the symptom. Yes, we could die from the symptom, but that does not change the fact that it is a symptom.

We go about growing our meat all wrong; it is wasteful and inefficient in every way except for getting cheap product on to the supermarket shelves. But our method of growing vegetables is just as wasteful. And before you counter with the word "organic", i suggest you do some research on how big organic farms that supply the retail outlets work. Save the cows so you can starve a Mexican? That may soothe your conscience, but not mine.

You want to save the planet? Well, you can't. You cannot destroy the planet either. We need to get over ourselves because our outsized egos are what got us into this mess in the first place.

It wasn't that long ago that 30% of America's population were farmers, and that does not count all the people who had productive kitchen gardens and chickens in the back yard. Today, 3% of America's population are farmers and a stroll through suburbia will show you that the idea of the kitchen garden barely exists.

When i hear these vegetarian/environmental arguments, i hear a lot of people wanting their cake and wanting to eat it too. Go out and grow your own, show us all how we can be self-sustaining vegetarians. As long as you're munching on out of season tomatoes, i don't want to hear about it.

My out of season tomatoes come from the room in my house where i grow them, along with the leafy greens, and my meat and eggs come from local farmers who are far more serious environmental stewards than Al Gore ever will be.

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Please read below this wonderful Bill of Rights, taken straight from www.aldf.org's website. The rest of the text below is directly quoted from their website, because I could not write it any better for our current societies (that being said, I like the idea myself of completely abolishing meat eating and if we are going to have wool it must be from animals that are pampered and loved at all times -- otherwise, we need to work continuing to improve alternative non-animal derived clothing):

The Animal Legal Defense Fund is currently involved in promoting this Bill of Rights to Congress (www.aldf.org):

Animal Bill of Rights

Animals, like all sentient beings, are entitled to basic rights in our society. Deprioved of legal protection, animals are defensless against exploitation and abuse by humans.

1. The right of animals to be free from exploitation, cruelty, neglect and abuse.

2. the right of laboratory animals to not be used in cruel or unnecessary experiments.

3. the right of farm animals to an environment that satisfies their basic physical and psychological needs.

4. The right of companion animals to a healthy diet, protective shelter, and adequate medical care.

5. The right of wildlife to a natural habitat, ecologically sufficient to a normal existance and a self-sustaining species population.

6. The right of animals to have their interests represented in court and safeguarded by the law of the land.

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These types of pieces constitute a collective slam against the unconscious of the middle class would-be progressive. Unless one embraces the all-or-nothing attitude of the author or poster, then one is part of the problem. I imagine left-wing fundamentalists feel that only through verbal and written assaults will some of their message seep through, though presumably, they made up their minds through reasoned discourse. Discourse is reserved for themselves; bashing, for everyone else.

I like the diversity of sites like Alternet, but often am made to feel as if I'm only part of the problem, and seldom part of the solution. You can only take so much bashing before you turn away, which is probably why the percentage of secularists and non denominational Christians is growing yearly.

I used to participate in events promoting cultural diversity, and the like, but, even without saying anything, when I'm told or it's implied I'm part of the problem because I'm white, or male, or American, or a meat eater, or liberal, or whatever, I withdraw.

I eat a good amount of meat, but I'd be willing to give a lot of it up to see factory farming destroyed and to discourage food that's thrown away at the end of every supermarket and restaurant day. But I have little desire to join groups promoting these causes, because the folks who inhabit them are just dying to pounce on the less extreme.

I imagine most folks get turned off by the message bearers long before they've fully evaluated the message. It's a shame, really. But life is short, and there's no point in subjecting oneself to constant flagellation, is there?

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unfortunate distortions
instead of declaring for ecological ways of farming food including animals we eat, this just promotes the ignorance - willing or uninformed lack of information - of the people who advocate against farming animals. It is desirable and eminently possible to raise meat animals kindly and ecologically healthily. Just as we must require such for produce so must we require it for growing and killing the animals we'd eat.

Not everyone can bicycle at all.
Not everyone can bicycle all the time.
While working to do what we do locally everywhere, these must be acknowledged. The facts must be directly connected with the plans to help us care for us and Earth.

And of course the problem of inequity caused in large part by imperialist aggressions upon lands, and the reactions - reactionary governments, the constant incorporation of the huge reactionary force, 'religion', into the governments - , has to be overcome by our struggles for justice, which turn out to be socialist communist. 'Leaders/Owners of lands react to imperialist invasion by joining imperialism's programs.

For how successful our imperialists' control is look at the virtual enforcement by dint of advertising was the universal use of 'non-fat' and 'low-fat' food, a lie from the outset, using poisonous - to our overall health - so called substitutes and modifications of our healthy foods. Untreated oils and fats have nutrients in them we need.
About 90% of the nutrients of cows'/goats' milk is in the fats.
And now they've stolen and lied to us about water, so that the devastation of bottled water use you've read so much about has also, because of advertising - and mega-corporate pollution of water - stolen upon the world.

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so, this event is just another among those that want to promote the advertising to move us into buying a certain way, another capitalist ploy that works against our better understandings.

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One thing I noticed no one had talked about was hunting. I was raised on a diet made up of mostly game meat that my father got and vegetables that were grown in our garden. We lived on a working farm. I think people assume that the only meat you can eat comes from factory farming, but in most states, you can hunt game during certain seasons, or probably purchase game meat. Game meat is fresh, organic (since the animals are in their natural habitat) and there is little suffering involved. Besides that, deer meat and most fowl are also lower in fat, so it's better for you. I think it's important for people to know there are other ways to eat meat, or not eat meat, if they so choose. Also, if you go a little ways outside the suburbs, you can often find local farmers whose animals are raised in a natural environment. While I am very against factory farming and generally avoid meats that are a result of that, I also am not willing to give up meat.

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. . where animal-based foods are easy to come by and plant-based foods are hard to grow. That includes above the Arctic Circle, in the high dry mountains of South America, and certain areas in Africa. You would tell those Native peoples that they have to move? To where? That they must stop eating the foods that sustained their ancestors for eons? Why? Because their eating whatever it takes for them to survive goes against vegan morals?
Eating less meat is great! Eating meat not produced on factory farms is preferred! But not eating meat at all is not practical for many people. Many people live where either the climate or terrain precludes producing enough of the right kinds of grains and beans to combine to make a complete protein. Many areas are running low on water, making local agriculture less reliable. Topsoils are eroding world-wide, further decreasing crop production. But any place that people can live, chickens can live too, and produce eggs for protein.
When we decry eating any protein from animal sources like eggs and dairy, we must remember that factory farming and eating too much meat are the main problems, and they are problems caused by us in the 'developed' world. Subsistence farmers have to do work hard enough as it is to scrape together enough food for their families. Let's not make it any harder on them by passing moral judgements.

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