Pat Brown: A Critique of Vegan Optimism.

there's this thing that drives me nuts which is that people talk about like the food system is a climate problem you know the food system has a role in the biodiversity collapse that's kind of like saying you know instead of uh calling out you know the oil industry it's like liquids are you know a climate problem it's all about animal egg every other part of the food system is just a total grounding error in terms of environmental impact we should forget about saying it's the food system it's the animal ag system it's livestock that's the problem that's a topic for a video [Applause] so um it's very weird to me that i'm here sort of as a representative of the food industry a little over 10 years ago i was a research scientist and professor at stanford and i was trying to decide what was the most impactful thing i could do next and as i did my research i realized that number one and i'll explain some of why this is true that i i hadn't realized it but the most destructive technology on earth and the most destructive technology i think in human history is the use of animals to make food to turn plants into meat and fish and dairy foods um it's worse than the fossil fuel industry and i'm happy to get into that debate and nobody was serious not only was nobody seriously working on it but no one was really much talking about it we're here in glasgow to talk about climate change i think it's worth saying that there's another issue that's very intertwined with this and obviously landscape forum is very well aware of this which is that we're also in in the late stages of a global collapse of biodiversity that is is still progressing has wiped out more than two-thirds of the wild animals that were living on earth 50 years ago and shows no sign of stopping and it's almost entirely that is almost entirely due to our use of animals as a food technology the land footprint of animal agriculture which is about 40 of ours when you talk about global landscapes basically the human impact on global landscapes is animal agriculture and that's almost full stop all the cities on earth fit on less than one percent of rice land area the the crops that we grow to consume directly as food fit on about five percent of this land area and then analog is forty percent of worst land area the climate uh the greenhouse gases that are emitted by the fossil fuel industry or by the the use of fossil fuels as an energy system is essentially irreversible i mean you're not going to be able to turn the carbon dioxide that came from burning oil and fossil and and coal back into oil and coal if you did it the energy it would take to do that would create its own climate problems it's just not going to happen but animal agriculture is completely different it's almost completely reversible as a cause of climate change why is it reversible because basically the the the biggest cause of co2 emissions from virtually the only cause of co2 emissions from animal ag historically is that forty percent of earth's land area was cleared of its pre-existing biomass to make room for mostly cows and sheep and grazing animals as well as feed crops okay and in that process the um the amount of biomass that was converted into co2 to clear the land this the the carbon content was equivalent to 22 years worth of fossil fuel emissions at the current rate you can't turn co2 back into coal but you can turn it back into biomass okay you can literally reverse the process and what it requires is clearing the livestock and feed crops off the land and allowing the native ecosystems to recover or allowing or actually facilitating the process of recovery which is the biggest step you can take not only to address climate change but also the the biodiversity collapse okay it's reversible there's also methane and nitrous oxide which are powerful greenhouse gases um animal agriculture is overwhelmingly the responsible for nitrous oxide it's about 90 plus of nitrous oxide emissions come from animal agriculture and about half of methane emissions come from that in the agriculture two minutes okay i can do this in two minutes um the way we're approaching the problem is basically when i found the company i said look we're not going to solve this by waiting for government or cop or the un or anyone to solve it i mean we see how well that works right this is something that requires individual action and to be frank it requires radical action because the the the babble that's going on there is basically because nobody wants things to change much they want do things that don't ruffle any feathers they don't you know everybody comes out no one gets you know disrupted or anything like that yet somehow with no disruption this radical thing will somehow magically happen that's not going to be true that what we're what we're trying to do on possible foods is the least radical thing we could do it's entirely market-based and i think it creates a great outcome for for uh farmers it has to be individual action and the only way and that it's absolutely critical argue with me we have to get rid of animal agriculture full stop as fast as possible a quick remark so the government was mentioned a few times uh in this whole thing even though it's obviously from a individual and private perspective mostly but i think what is looming large is the kind of political philosophical perspective that that you know governments and uh people that are politically involved um you know engage in it it would include something like uh uh how we view subsidies and what what the what they're there for for example uh in geneva on the border on in geneva you would have subsidy because switzerland is one of the most subsidizing countries on the on the earth and so you you would have uh agriculture in geneva where right on the other side in france you have none because it's not really um effective in that way so i guess i would like to know what you what your views or your thoughts are on that uh the political philosophical perspective uh that would um uh that would coincide and that would go well with your approaches i think the problem is to be honest it's a big problem at cop is that the policy making um is dominated by the wealthy and powerful and the victims are not this is something that requires individual action and to be frank it requires radical action because the the the babel that's going on there is basically because nobody wants things to change much well i think if you have a market-based approach um it doesn't compel those farmers to do anything if they're if if if it's their own food security to have a cow or a pig or something like that or it's something in the local economy it it won't be threatened by um you know plant-based products that might be healthier and more expensive and and stuff like that if they're not accessible to those farmers their communities it's it's it's not going to take away what they're doing right no one's going to go and steal their cow or pig i would never advocate for that the way we approach the problem is first of all we are not trying to build something new in addition to the incumbent industry the company was founded seriously not because he wanted to be a big food company but because we wanted to collapse the animal ag industry in the in in the best possible way which is just take away their customers by making a better product with a much more sustainable technology but also make something that better serves their needs as they define them and frankly every time we sell a product i'm vegan so i love vegans but my wife's vegan but every time we sell a product to a vegan i consider it to be a pretty much a waste because it didn't it didn't steal a customer from the meat industry and i think that's just an interesting thing about food people don't buy food because um of the philosophical sure you know principles they buy it because they like how it tastes and it's nutritional and it's affordable [Applause] in politics we live with we vie with we compete against more than one model of utopian thinking and the different modes of utopian thinking have to be challenged have to be debunked have to be overturned in different ways smoking do you think in the next 20 years we're going to eliminate cigarette smoking and if so how do you think that simply because people have access to healthier better alternatives to smoking that they're just gonna stop you think that the free market left to its own devices in the next 20 years is going to achieve a cigarette free world or a marijuana free world and if you do believe that why do you think that would happen in the next 20 years why do you think it didn't happen in the last 20 years when people already knew that cigarettes caused cancer that cigarettes shorten your lifespan that cigarettes reduced your ability to just walk up a flight of stairs or even enjoy the taste of your food everyone's known for the last 20 years the terrible harm that cigarettes and smoking of any kind including smoking marijuana they've known the terrible direct harm it will do in their own lives when i would take the train in france every station the train stopped at you would see people scuttling out to smoke a cigarette on the platform and then scuttling back in again some of them were rich and some of them were poor they were from all walks of life you got to see a great cross of the nicotine addicts of our society i used to live near a hospital and walk past the front of the hospital every day and you'd see people standing in front of the standing in a specially designated place next to an ashtray several meters in front of the hospital you'd see them standing there and smoking wasn't just patients doctors nurses highly educated people people who don't just know about the health consequences but people who suffer a certain level of stigma and shame and ridicule at their workplace every day they're not working at a nightclub they're working at a hospital and they gotta go stand in front of the front door to smoke cigarettes but that pressure that level of coercion isn't enough for them to make the change and then you scale it up and you think of all of france and you look at the percentage of people in france who still smoke cigarettes oh and it gets worse you look at the russians you look at the ukrainians you look at southern china you take a look around the world when we think about utopianism and the dangers of utopian thinking we tend to imagine left-wing ideologues we tend to imagine people who subscribe to a coercive state-centered model of society people who think that having better laws a better constitution better authoritarian system of government will create a utopia despite human nature from the top down but it is just as dangerous to believe in this libertarian fiction this free market fiction that these fundamental problems in our society whether it be smoking cigarettes eating meat dairy yogurt the wearing of leather it is just as dangerous for us to live with the delusion and propound the delusion that these massive problems on such a staggering scale can be solved or will be solved within the next 20 years just through public education making a healthier option a healthier alternative available given them giving them freedom of choice on the free market there was a stand-up comedy routine from chris rock i don't think he delivered the line very well maybe there's more than one version of it that exists on tape today but he he said uh he's known cocaine dealers and he just can't imagine any of these guys standing there in their hotel room with a briefcase full of cocaine standing there and thinking what am i going to do with all this crack who who's going to buy it who's who's going to buy this i i just don't know how i'm going to you know what i'm gonna have to have a half price sale for how many years have people known that cocaine heroin fentanyl don't just cause brain damage cause premature death they ruin your life and then at some point they take your life away from you how would you achieve a society with zero cigarette smoking not a five percent reduction in cigarette smoking absolutely zero cigarette smoking it would take a level of coercion a level of san fran that most people in western democracies cannot imagine what would it take to lower the rate of cocaine use the rate of heroin use the rate of fentanyl use in the city of los angeles from its current levels to just being equal to the levels of hard drug use that you see in tokyo japan it's not zero but a dramatic reduction in hard drug use it would take a level of coercion it would take a level of sang-fra that i can imagine and i'm willing to commit to and i can recognize that making the transition in just 20 years from a society that worships meat to a society that despises it it's gonna involve coercion it's gonna involve commitment it's gonna involve sacrifice and if we're even just talking about it at a conference like this is it too much for me to ask for some measure of realism for some measure of sang for [Music] you