Street Roots • July 28-August 3, 2017
RAO, from page 4
go above 1.5 degrees Celsius.” You would be
saying, “Hey, I want the fever to be
reversed! I want the lump to go away!” But
that’s not how our world leaders are talking
about climate change. They are not looking
at the cancer; they are only trying to
address the fever while the cancer keeps
growing.
E .G .: You began your book
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“Carbon Yoga” with the idea that
our stories are failing us. What
stories, and how are they failing us?
S .R .: Happiness comes from
consumption. That is a story that
is clearly failing us. Because
societies that have the most
consumption, like the United
States, have almost half the people
on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety
medications or illegal drugs on a
daily basis. That’s not the pursuit
of happiness when you have to pop
pills just to get through the day.
The story of growth is failing us.
SAILESH RAO
We have been told, if we just keep
growing the economy, then
everybody will prosper, right? If
we are growing the economy to the point
where it is 60 percent larger than what the
planet can support, and we still have 18
million people starving every day, so how
much more can we do this? How long can
we keep doing this, expecting that we are
going to one day solve the problem?
E.G.: D o you think capitalism is the
problem?
S .R . It is not capitalism per se, because if
I look at capitalism versus socialism or
communism, the idea there is: Who is in
charge of production?
Is it private enterprise that is in charge of
production, or is it a public government that
is in charge of production? Capitalism has
won that argument. Because private
enterprise clearly does a better job of
assigning resources, of doing the right
thing, and five-year plans by governments
are not going to solve the problem. So I
don’t see that as the main issue. The main
issue is the currency system that is
dependent on growth. It gets associated
with capitalism. I really think we can be
private enterprise without requiring growth.
E .G .: You’ve said that even i f we eradicate
fossil fuels, because the aerosols that are
released when we burn fossil fuels actually cool
the Earth, we would still have a problem.
Before we talk about solutions, can you briefly
explain this little-discussed side effect of
cutting down on fossil fuels?
S .R .: When we burn fossil fuels like coal,
oil and gas, it isn’t just carbon that’s in the
fossil fuel; there are lots of other
compounds. We try to refine it, but you still
have all kinds of things that get emitted
along with the CO2, and aerosols are one of
those things, like sulfur dioxide comes
mainly from coal-fired power plants. They
put scrubbers (systems for removing sulfur
dioxide from exhaust before it’s emitted) in
the U .S . because it was causing acid rain in
the Catskills in the ’70s, but other countries
don’t do that. Or, the sulfur that’s in the oil,
we refine it out and use refined gasoline in
our cars, but we take the rest, the crud
that’s left behind, and we let ships burn it
out in the ocean because there is no
Page 5
News
regulation out in the ocean. Eventually, it
gets up in the air and then it stays up there,
and the aerosols are masking some of the
effect of greenhouse gas emissions.
Editor’s note: According to N A S A ’s Web
page on aerosols, “human-made sulfate
aerosols are thought to outweigh the naturally
produced sulfate aerosols. The concentration of
aerosols is highest in the northern hemisphere
where industrial activity is centered. The
sulfate aerosols absorb no sunlight but they
reflect it, thereby reducing the amount of
sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.”
If you think about it, there’s CO2, the
greenhouse gas, then there’s other
greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous
oxide, and then the third category is
aerosols. All three of these are roughly the
same size. The CO2 is causing a whole
bunch of heating to happen, the other
greenhouse gases are causing the same
amount of heating to happen, and then the
aerosols are doing the same amount of
cooling. So if you are going to stop burning
fossil fuels, you suddenly won’t get the
aerosols going up in the air because you are
not burning the aerosols as well, so the
other greenhouse gases become the major
issue. I say to people, if suddenly today, we
all switched to solar, our temperature will
go up, not down, by 1 degree Fahrenheit,
almost within a year.
E .G .: Let’s talk about your climate
solutions.
S .R .: I’m a systems engineer, so I look at
things from a systems perspective. If you
look at environmental problems from a
systems perspective, there are lots of them.
It’s not just climate change. We have to deal
with diversity loss and ecosystems collapse,
ocean dead zones, ocean acidification. We
have to deal with toxic chemical pollution,
and if you ask any scientist who has studied
this, a systems scientist, what is the one
thing you can do to address all of these
problems simultaneously? It is to go on a
vegan diet. Immediately, compassion is a
solution for all our problems. Compassion,
not just for human beings, but compassion
for all creatures.
E .G .: How does going vegan solve the
climate problem?
R .S .: If you look at Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment
Report, Working Group 3, Chapter 11, you
will see a block diagram on land use - how
much land is being used for different
purposes. You will notice that 35 percent of
the land area of the planet is used just to
graze the animals that we raise for food.
Ten percent of the land is used for crop
production. Half of the crop we eat directly;
the other half we feed animals. So we feed
animals from our cropland; we also feed
animals from all the grassland. The total
amount of food that the animals eat is five
times the amount of food that we eat. And
out of that, we get a little bit of animal foods
that we consume.
If we replace those animal foods with
plant foods, you can release 35 percent of
the land back to nature. So we ask the
question: If we just take the grassland and
replace it with the original forests that were
there in 1800, how much carbon is
sequestered in the recovering forests? And
it’s a very simple calculation because we are
just replacing grasslands with native forests
P H O T O BY A R K A D Y B R O W N
THE TRUE COST OF GAHLE
In Oregon, livestock is the greatest source of methane, a
greenhouse gas with 86 times the global warming potential of
carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Read Street Roots’
investigation into the environmental impact of Oregon’s
1.3 million cattle: news.streetroots.org/costofcattle
when calculating the numbers - so you
cannot dispute it. You total it up. On 41
percent of the land that used to be forest in
1800, you can sequester 265 gigatons of
carbon, which is more than the 240 gigatons
of carbon that we’ve added to the
atmosphere since 1750. We can literally
reverse climate change just by bringing back
the forests, the original forests that used to
be there.
E .G .: Do you see this
going hand in hand with a
reduction in fossil fuels, or
do you think going vegan
alone will reverse climate
change?
S .R .: It goes hand in
hand with reduction in
fossil fuels. We have to do
both because ultimately,
you can’t keep pumping
toxins into the air. It’s not
just fossil fuels. Every
industrial process that’s
dumping toxins into the
environment has to be
changed, so there is a huge
amount of research we
need to do as to how are
we going to make
everything nontoxic.
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E .G .: Many climate scientists are saying
that i f we just cut down on our meat
consumption, we can reduce the impact of
global warming, but you are suggesting a 100
percent vegan lifestyle. I know a lot of people
who are progressive, who understand the
science, who would probably never go
vegetarian, let alone vegan. Diet is such a
tricky thing. Why not push for a more
attainable goal, such as reduced meat
consumption, or going vegetarian?
S .R .: I have faith in people. And when
you ask people to do the right thing, they
usually come through - they will eventually
come through because this is a dire problem
we face today.
Between 1970 and 2010, 52 percent of all
wildlife has been destroyed, and we are
destroying them at an exponentially growing
rate. If you do the calculations and you see,
how many years do we need before we wipe
See RAO, page 10
SAILESH ©A©