A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Apocalypse Soon has published a lot of pieces about meat lately. In July, Jan Dutkiewicz explored what it might take to convince people to reduce meat consumption, given that food and diet are intensely personal issues encompassing individual preference, tradition, identity, and more. Earlier this month, Eleni Vlachos wrote about the strengths and limitations of Meatless Mondays, a campaign to get people to eat plant-based meals at least one day a week as a starting point. And last week, Jan and his frequent collaborator Gabriel Rosenberg penned a longer feature about so-called regenerative ranching, which many once hoped would offer a way to make meat more environmentally friendly.
Not all readers love this content. Meat is an incredibly divisive topic. It’s divisive even among people well aware of the beef industry’s monumental contributions to climate change via both deforestation (most notoriously in the Brazilian Amazon) and the animals’ own methane emissions. In fact, a lot of climate activists prefer to sidestep the meat issue altogether, Jan wrote in his first piece for The New Republic last summer. |
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So why is TNR publishing on this topic so frequently? It’d be easy to say that, well, it just makes for interesting reading—people click, they read, they have opinions, whether good or bad. It’s nice to see from our analytics that readers are spending a decent amount of time really engaging with a piece, not just scanning. It’s nice to see people tweeting about them, whether approvingly or critically.
But we’re not just trying to troll people. There are other reasons we’re publishing this stuff. One is that this is a particularly interesting time in the history of human meat-eating. A few decades ago, most of the debate around the ethics of meat focused on animal welfare. Today, beef consumption comes with large-scale questions of global sustainability.
Recent years have also seen significant advances in meat replacements—both plant-based meat substitutes and what is increasingly known as “cellular agriculture,” i.e., meat that is grown in a lab, which can be harvested without ever killing an animal. That, too, makes questions of dietary ethics particularly germane right now.
Kate Aronoff traveled to California to talk to the companies preparing lab meat for market for TNR’s October issue (which landed in subscribers’ mailboxes last week). Will lab meat lead to “a new class of green-tinted corporate overlords peddling dubious slabs of meat spawned behind closed doors with fossil-fueled power”? Or will lab meat represent a breakthrough in “democratizing hedonism,” making it possible to eat the foods we like and associate with long traditions while reducing animal suffering and fighting climate change? Kate’s piece offers a look at both the potential and the potential pitfalls of the new technology.
There’s another reason TNR has been publishing a lot about meat recently—a reason that has to do with another one of our favorite topics over here at Apocalypse Soon: how to engage with climate change without feeling overwhelmed. I’ll say more about that in next week’s newsletter. As you’ll see below in today’s “Stat of the week” and “Bad news,” there’s certainly a lot to feel overwhelmed by right now. And increasingly, experts think one of the better ways to deal with that might be to identify small, concrete actions that individuals can take even in the absence of broader, governmental action—actions that can build toward wider societal change and policy shifts. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Children right now will live through 36 times as many heat waves as their grandparents did, according to a new study in Science. That’s in addition to experiencing twice as many wildfires and almost three times as many crop failures and river floods. |
On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule to cap the use of hydrofluorocarbons—potent greenhouse gases—through 2023, and lower it further after that, eventually amounting to an 85 percent reduction over the next 15 years. |
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Evidence is mounting that climate change is already damaging crops and will do further harm in the coming years. A new study suggests corn and soy production could fall 5 percent globally and decline particularly quickly in Missouri, Kansas, the Carolinas, and Oklahoma. In South America, The Washington Post reported last week, crop failures are already here. |
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Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
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—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
People living near the town of Manchester, Vermont, have taken issue with a planned solar array, arguing it ruins their views and property values. Bill McKibben took the opportunity to pen a beautiful and thoughtful essay about the true nature of aesthetics. When we look at wind turbines and solar panels, we should see not just lines of metal but the hope they represent and the things they can help save, he writes in his newsletter: |
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Vermonters, like Americans everywhere, run up large carbon totals driving cars and heating their homes with oil and gas; these all need to be converted to electricity this decade to meet the state’s carbon goals. By [solar power developer Thomas] Hand’s estimate, it’s a thousand gallons of fossil fuel per Vermonter. So we need more electricity—a lot more. Some can come from rooftops, and some can come from gravel pits, and some is going to need to come from where we can see it. In cornfields, say, which cover much of the Champlain Valley north of Manchester. If you think about it, a field of corn is just another form of solar collector, in this case converting sunlight into grain to feed dairy cows, who produce a commodity—milk—that we have in enormous oversupply. (Oh and this kind of solar collector requires that you dump nitrogen on the fields to make it grow, nitrogen then washes into Lake Champlain, turning it green with algae.) Electrons, by contrast, are a crop we need more of, and now.…
Building clean energy is the project of our era on earth. And at some level it really is an aesthetic issue. When we look at a solar panel or a wind turbine, we need to be able to see—and our leaders need to help us see, because that’s what leadership involves—that there’s something beautiful reflected back out of that silicon: people finally taking responsibility for the impact our lives have on the world and the people around us. |
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