Australia endured wild weather this summer, which the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) named Australia’s second warmest since 1910. Cyclone Alfred also battered the east coast while heat waves scorched every state and bushfires burned. The worst may be over, but don’t pack away the fan just yet— it will be an unusually hot autumn.

So, what’s driving climate change? Well, our appetite for flesh, for starters, which is why PETA placed two giant ice sculptures—a cow and a sheep—in Bourke Street Mall, where they melted in front of a banner proclaiming, “Meat = Heat. Animal Agriculture Causes Climate Change. Go Vegan.”

What’s Meat Got to Do with Climate Change?

The Earth naturally experiences warming and cooling patterns, during which the planet radiates heat back out into the atmosphere to cool. But, thanks to human activities, which fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that trap heat close to the planet, it doesn’t get a chance to cool, meaning Earth now warms far more quickly and stays hot.

While fossil fuels are often portrayed as the biggest villains, new research has found that animal agriculture has the biggest negative impact on the environment.

Think of it as having a blanket on your bed on a warm night— and sharing your bed with the world’s 1.5 billion farting cows!

“We must change our diet. The planet can’t support billions of meat-eaters.”
~ Sir David Attenborough

Gas Isn’t the Only Issue

While we can’t sustain the huge levels of methane our meat-heavy diets produce, other aspects of animal agriculture damage the planet, too. Natural habitats are cut down to make room for grazing animals, removing thousands of acres of trees (carbon sinks) daily.

Meat also uses enormous amounts of water to hydrate animals and to clean blood from farms and slaughterhouses, which runs off and pollutes water sources further. Add to this the immense amount of food we divert to feed farmed animals instead of hungry humans, and you’ve got a food system that makes about as much sense as a screen door on a submarine!

What Does Science Say?

A new analysis from Australian climate scientist Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop warns that meat and dairy farming alone is the leading cause of climate warming, accounting for 53% of agriculture’s considerable impact.

It’s far from the first study to point the finger at flesh. A study from Oxford University experts concluded that going vegan is the “single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.”

Another analysis found that animal-free diets result in 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution, and land use than those containing 100g of daily meat. Vegan diets also reduce wildlife destruction by 66% and reduce water use by 54%.

“If we have enough determination, we can actually cool the planet in the coming decades just by reducing the methane emissions, and, of course, the biggest one is animal agriculture.”
~ Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop, Climate Scientist

You Can’t Be a Meat-Eating Environmentalist…

Buying an EV, switching to solar, and recycling are all wonderful deeds for the planet, but if we don’t move beyond animal agriculture, we’re really just fiddling around the edges while the world burns.

The great news is that while animal-borne methane is warming the atmosphere, it’s also a relatively short-lived gas. We’ll benefit from reducing methane levels far more quickly than reducing CO2, meaning the sooner we stop farming animals, the sooner global cooling can commence!

Not Just Heat, Suffering Too

Aside from generating immense climate-warming emissions, animal agriculture is incredibly cruel, condemning more than 700 million Australian land animals each year to miserable lives on dark and dirty factory farms and painful, terrifying deaths.

In Australia, over 2/3 of meat comes from factory farming, which sees animals trapped in sheds, standing in their own faeces without so much as a ray of sunlight. When they’re as young as just 6 months old, they’re shoved onto transport trucks and sent to abattoirs where they are gassed, electrocuted, beheaded, and dismembered.

Meat might arrive in the shops in a neat little package, but turning a living, feeling individual into a chunk of meat is bloody awful.

Climate Change is Deadly, But Diet Change is Easy!

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