An Inconvenient Omission

Posted by Freddie on July 1, 2007 under Uncategorized | 12 Comments to Read

I was impressed by the response to our former Senator’s recent documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, but that doesn’t mean I was particularly excited about seeing it. I honestly didn’t expect to get much out of it since I’ve been an environmental advocate for almost the entirety of my adult life and have thought that the ends of each minor change were important regardless of newfound evidence of their collective impact when unaddressed. Well after the release, a DVD edition was given to me as a gift, and I finally made a point of watching it on Earth Day this year. My interest was more in its apparent singular power of persuasion than in the issues at the heart of its message. Friends of mine whom I had long thought were de facto environmentalists were talking to me in more passionate terms than ever before about changes they were making in their own lives as a result of having seen this movie. One friend excitedly used MTA’s Night Owl service with me one night after the symphony.

So I watched, and I was impressed. An Inconvenient Truth is not an incendiary film. Mr. Gore is a dispassionate presenter of the best information available to him as a lay person speaking on behalf of thousands of the world’s climate scientists, who would probably never have been able to have the same impact without a spokesperson the caliber of Mr. Gore.

Until recently, my relatively minor criticisms of the movie were shared with another friend of mine. They include the following items:

• Mr. Gore flies quite a bit, despite air travel being one of the most polluting forms of transportation per person mile.
• Mr. Gore drives around in his sedan quite a bit. I’d be curious to know whether it was even a hybrid, but I rather doubt it, or I suspect he would’ve called attention to it.
• The only concrete suggestions for individual empowerment appear during the closing credits rather than as an integral part of the conclusion of the movie.

But now I have some new information, and my criticism of Gore’s campaign has actually stepped up a notch. While vacationing this summer at a wonderful little bed and breakfast called The White Pig nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I was reading the May+June issue of VegNews they had in the common room and came across an article entitled “Can Vegetarianism Save the Planet?”. That’s a more strident title than I would’ve used had I been the author, but the information in the article is no less striking, regardless. Here is the kicker:

The remarkable 400-page report Livestock’s Long Shadow, recently published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), reveals that animal agriculture contributes an estimated 18 percent to global warming, surpassing even transportation emissions as the primary cause.

Yes, you read that right: animal agriculture is actually the leading cause of global warming. The author of another report cited in the article reveals that methane actually has 23 times the impact of CO2.

So let me get this straight. The current champion of the fight against global warming who simultaneously laments the decline of evidence-based reasoning in modern policy discussions leaves out the single leading cause of global warming as determined by one of the world’s leading providers of evidence?

Some companies are actually including this evidence in their quest for greenness. Yahoo!, for example, recently encouraged its employees to be more conscious of their meat intake.

I remain hopeful that Mr. Gore might make mention of this evidence at some point, but today’s op-ed in the New York Times does not give me much hope. I also remain hopeful that his careful omission is not an indicator of his desire to take extreme political care when addressing the complicated issue of climate change. I.e., that taking on the world’s agribusiness lobby is not seen by this particular political actor as too risky, especially if he is still considering a presidential bid. Is it really that much easier to ask people to change light bulb technology than to ask them to eat more healthfully and conscientiously?

At the end of the day, I applaud Mr. Gore for bringing the world to attention to what is, truly, a shared problem. He is clearly an effective agent of change on the issue of global warming and climate change. But at the end of the same day, I find it a bit inconsistent that the man who subsequently penned a book called The Assault on Reason said absolutely nothing about the contributions of animal agriculture to the problem of climate change.

Update: Our friend Joe at the Vanderbilt Scoop Shop informs us that Ben & Jerry’s is hard at work on this issue.