California Free Press

The Time Is Now for a Just Transition From Factory Farming

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by Grace Hussein, Sentient Media, from Truthdig, October 17, 2023

A new report suggests reinventing the industrial food system to tackle climate change.

Ahead of COP28, global leaders are increasingly turning to food systems to tackle climate pollution. Now, experts from Stockholm Environment Institute have released a new policy report with recommendations for reinventing the food system. The common thread — a shift away from factory farms. 

The experts specifically call out the harms of industrial meat, as producing beef and dairy products along with other meats is one of the largest contributors to climate change, using vast amounts of water and land while belching a significant amount of greenhouse gasses. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Because food production doesn’t exist in a vacuum, eliminating meat — or even just reducing it — is no small task. In much of the world, animal products continue to play a key role in health and nutrition, the authors write, especially for “pregnant and lactating women, young children and people on low incomes with little access to alternatives.” 

Yet it’s precisely because animal products continue to play a pivotal cultural, social, economic and nutritional role that a just transition away from them is necessary in order to ensure the best outcomes for people, animals and the environment. 

Health and Justice Require Food System Change

The report argues for a “One Health” strategy for solving these problems — what the CDC defines as an approach that recognizes the ties between humans, animals and the planet. Instead of focusing on one of these issues — for example just animal welfare — One Health solutions also take into account the impacts to human health and the environment. 

Industrial agriculture’s high disease risk demonstrates how human, animal and environmental well-being are all interconnected, and, the researchers argue, how all three of these are intrinsically linked to food production. 

“…Even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately,” the authors write, “emissions from food systems alone, particularly from animal product production, would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to limit warming to 2°C.” 

Part of the problem is that raising animals on factory farms by the billions is driving the destruction of forests and an overreliance on antibiotics. In a worrying turn of events, the number of new pathogens discovered yearly has jumped from three to five in just one decade, a trend scientists believe is due in large part to deforestation. About 40 percent of deforestation is attributable solely to beef production. 

The authors also argue that social justice plays an equally important role in food systems transformation. Enter just transition. 

Originated by unions in the United States, just transition principles were created to protect the interests of workers and communities as emerging environmental regulations began to shift economies away from dependence on polluting industries. The framework has been employed heavily in the fields of energy and fuel, but has only recently made its way into discussions surrounding food systems transformation. 

What makes food systems change especially unique are the stakeholders— workers, communities, but also livestock, according to the research. Farm animals “are sentient beings,” the authors acknowledge, which means they too “will be directly affected by the policies that governments adopt to transform the meat sector.” Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

Just Transition Is More Than Financial

The researchers recommend a number of shifts, including phasing out subsidies and other government support for factory farms, while at the same time boosting support for alternatives such as plant-based and alternative proteins, as well as policies that support equitable access to food. 

Some of the measures they suggest phasing out are so-called “ag-gag laws,” which protect producers from undercover investigators and government-funded campaigns to increase meat consumption. 

Meanwhile, the researchers caution against blanket support for meat alternative products, to avoid perpetuating the same inequalities represented within industrial meat production. Instead, they also suggest support for policies and programs that encourage a deeper shift to eating whole-food, plant based products as a means for boosting public health. 

The experts also call on policymakers to ensure that the transition planning process is inclusive of all stakeholders, highlighting “truly inclusive, transparent processes that enable stakeholders to participate meaningfully.” 

Any and all solutions, they argue, should “reduce, rather than increase, suffering.” 

To do this, policymakers must take active steps to combat the underlying prejudices and socioeconomic inequalities fueling injustices within the food system. Racism and other forms of marginalization run deep. For example, within the U.S., only a small percentage of farmers are Black, a trend that originated with the country’s legacy of slavery and became entrenched after the decades of tenancy, rather than ownership, that followed.

Instead of fixing the problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture made things worse by systematically denying Black farmers the support they offered white farmers. Addressing these injustices requires an understanding of this history, as well as exploring paths for more fair land ownership, according to the authors. 

The researchers also recommend that direct support be provided to the stakeholders most heavily impacted by the transition away from meat. Part of that includes “social safety nets and compensation for the disruptions caused,” but also  “addressing “the physical and mental impacts” of a changing food system. The authors note that ranching and pastoralism are core to identity in many communities, and a shift away from something so culturally entrenched requires addressing losses that are personal as well as financial.  

Ultimately, it’s not just meatpacking workers, the authors remind us. They recommend involving “stakeholders beyond the meat sector itself,” including seasonal farmworkers and small scale farmers, as well as workers and communities of color. While a just transition in the food sector presents challenges that are different from coal or energy communities, the authors urge “time is short and there is a great deal at stake,” as biodiversity and the health of the planet — along with its inhabitants — depend on it.

Green Tinted Glasses

The Green Growth Delusion Advocates of “Green Growth” promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future. But what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?

by Christopher Ketchum, Truthdig

A tree is surrounded by solar panels in Los Arcos, Spain, on Feb. 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos, File)

In the annals of industrial civilization, the Green New Deal counts as one of the more ambitious projects. Its scale is vast, promising to reform every aspect of how we power our machines, light our homes and fuel our cars. At this late hour of ecological and climate crisis, the Green New Deal is also an act of desperation. Our energy-ravenous culture cannot continue producing carbon without destroying the systems that are the basis of any advanced civilization, not to mention life itself. Something must be done, and quickly, to moderate the pressure on the atmospheric sink while powering the economic machine.

The consensus on the need for scaling up renewable energy is rarely disturbed by a disquieting possibility: What if techno-industrial society as currently conceived — based on ever-increasing GDP, global trade and travel, and complex global production and distribution chains designed to satisfy the rich world’s unquenchable appetite for bigger, faster, more of everything — what if that simply cannot function without energy-dense fossil fuels? What if, despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods?

This possibility is not mentioned thanks to the dominance of “green growth.” This is the idea that the organizing principle of our civilization — endless growth of economies and populations — can be decarbonized swiftly in a way that will involve no material disruption.  Green Growth holds out the promise of transitioning from fossil fuels directly into something like an earth-friendly utopia without a hitch and without meaningful sacrifice. This is the sales pitch offered by Green New Deal proselytes such as Ezra Klein, The New York Times columnist and podcaster who brings a relentless optimism to the belief — the faith — that renewables can underwrite business-as-usual.

Wind turbines at the Saint-Nazaire offshore wind farm, off the coast of France, on Sept. 22, 2022. (Stephane Mahe/Pool photo via AP, File)

In a 2019 episode of his podcast titled “How to solve climate change and make life more awesome,” Klein laments that “conversations about climate change are pretty depressing [but] decarbonizing doesn’t mean accepting a future of less — it can mean a more awesome, humane, technologically rich, and socially inspiring future for us all.” His guest, Saul Griffith, inventor and clean-energy advocate, agreed that “[o]ur cars could be just as big, only electric. The American Dream could be better than ever.”

Undergirding this vision of a bigger, greened American Dream is the work of a Stanford professor of civil engineering named Mark Z. Jacobson. In a series of major journal articles and studies, Jacobson has sought to demonstrate that the current world economy can be made to run entirely on a combination of wind, water, solar and geothermal energy. He has received plaudits and rousing applause from, among others, Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-sponsor of the 2019 Green New Deal resolution in Congress, who has anchored her proposals with Jacobson’s “roadmaps“ to a zero emissions society. New York state senators, meanwhile, have proffered a bill for renewables transition that explicitly “builds upon the Jacobson wind, water and solar study.” In 2016, climate action guru Bill McKibben said, “I’m convinced by the careful work of Mark Jacobson and others that [100% renewables] is possible.” More recently, in a March 2023 issue of The New Yorker, McKibben enthused about the ongoing “good news” from Jacobson and like-minded green-tech experts. “We have the technology necessary to rapidly ditch fossil fuels,” promised McKibben.

Less likely to appear in the pages of leading magazines are those with a more skeptical view of Jacobson’s assurances about building carbon free societies within a few decades. But these are far from marginal voices. When a group of scientists writing for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took a close look at Jacobson’s wind-water-solar plan in 2017, they found it was based on “errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions.” 

Curious as to whether renewables could “power the future,” professors in design and mechanical and aerospace engineering at Monash University in Australia concluded in a 2016 study that estimates for the technical potential of renewable energy were all over the map. The academics, Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery, argued that “values at the lower end of the range [of technical potential] must be seriously considered… future [renewable energy] output could be far below present energy use.”

Moriarty and Honnery revisited the subject of renewable energy potential in a 2020 report published in the journal Energies, reiterating that “a future world entirely fueled” by renewables could end up being “a lower-energy one.” Moriarty then teamed up with seven co-authors — climate scientists, sustainability experts and engineers — to look at “energy descent as a post-carbon transition scenario.” The team concluded that “[d]eep uncertainties remain about whether renewables can maintain, let alone grow, the range and scale of energy services presently provided by fossil fuels.” As Moriarty and Honnery put it in their 2016 paper, the “prudent course” in a renewables-only future “would involve major energy reductions…we will likely [need] to re-evaluate all energy-consuming tasks, discarding those that are less important.”  

How much demand would we have to shed in a post-carbon energy descent where renewables power civilization?  “At a rough guess,” Moriarty told me in an email, “I would say 50% or more.” He approached the issue with the practical mindset instilled from decades as a civil engineer. If half of current energy use must be cut to reach true sustainability, Moriarty suggests a good start is ending global transport and trade as we know it. In other words, he said, “globalization will have to end.”

Ted Trainer, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and founder of The Simplicity Institute, has reached a similar conclusion. “The limits to renewable energy have been almost totally ignored as a topic of study,” he writes. Elsewhere, Trainer notes that this topic is ignored with special fervor among the “technically sophisticated…participants in green and left energy camps.” The Ezra Kleins of the world adhere to what Trainer calls the “tech-fix faith,” which is marked by the assumption that there’s “no need to shift from…present energy and resource intensive lifestyles and systems, or from an economy driven by market forces, the profit motive and growth.”

Then there is the legendary energy and systems theorist Vaclav Smil. An emeritus at the University of Manitoba and author of more than 40 books on energy, environment and industry, Smil has declared the “rapid-speed transformation narratives” in the renewables field to be so full of “magic prescriptions” that they are “the academic equivalents of science fiction.” 

“Heavy doses of wishful thinking are commingled with a few solid facts,” Smil writes in his 2022 book “How the World Really Works.” 

To understand this mismatch, it is necessary to look closely at how we use our prodigious amounts of energy. The picture is very different from the one found in Green New Deal presentations full of high-speed rail projects and windmills.