According to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, people should eat vegetarian at least one day per week in order to have a positive effect on the outcome of global warming. He also says that this is just a starting point and that people should continue to decrease their meat consumption. Pachauri suggests that meat consumption reduction is the quickest way of changing what could be a bleak future for all of us and our future generations. “In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity. Give up meat for one day initially, and decrease it from there.
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According to the UK’s Guardian, “His comments are the most controversial advice yet provided by the panel on how individuals can help tackle gobal warming.” The question we as vegans should be asking is why this is such a controversial suggestion. Environmentalists tend to take any other eco-advice as sound and quickly jump on the wagon. However, when it comes to the correlation between meat consumption and the state of this planet, these same “environmentalists” shuffle their feet like guilty children. They don’t want to acknowledge how transparent this issue is.
Unexpectedly, the meat industry is not happy with Pachauri’s comments. You see, the environmental degradation caused by the meat industry is actually our fault. From the Guardian:
“Chris Lamb, head of marketing for pig industry group BPEX, said the meat industry had been unfairly targeted and was working hard to find out which activities had the biggest environmental impact and reduce those. Some ideas were contradictory, he said – for example, one solution to emissions from livestock was to keep them indoors, but this would damage animal welfare.”
So, according to at least this representative of the meat industry (and I’m sure he’s not the only one peddling this information), we either have to choose saving our world from climate change, or we can treat animals kindly and burn on a much warmer Earth.
Or, as a third choice, we can do as Dr. Pachauri asks, and lower our meat reduction. If someone absolutely has to have meat, choose local free-range. (I know, a vegan supporting free range meat? If someone’s going to eat meat, I’d much rather it be from an animal that has at least been outside.) See Mr. Lamb, we can have both a clean planet and well-treated animals.
Ahimsa 
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