Is there a convincing case for climate veganism?
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Is there a convincing case for climate veganism? Teea Kortetmäki1,2 · Markku Oksanen3 Accepted: 21 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument(s) for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. The arguments about the high emissions of animal-based food, and a resulting moral obligation to abstain from eating such products, are an addition to the prior forms of argument for principled veganism grounded on the moral standing of, and concern for, nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine whether the climatic argument for veganism is convincing. We propose a formulation for the amended version of the argument and discuss its implications and differences compared to the moral obligations of principled veganism. We also reflect upon the implications of our findings on agricultural and food ethics more generally. Keywords Climate ethics · Food ethics · Low-carbon diets · Ethical eating · Food waste · Animal ethics
Introduction Our dietary choices matter greatly for climate change related ethical considerations. Food production, processing, and consumption activities contribute approximately to 30% of human-caused climate emissions and aggravate other environmental problems like freshwater withdrawal, nutrient pollution, and biodiversity degradation (Clark et al. 2019). This makes food systems a significant issue for climate mitigation.1 Particular attention has been paid to cattle, who are estimated to cause approximately half of the food related climate emissions due to land use impacts and methane produced by ruminating animals. The overall average difference between the climate impacts of animal-based and * Teea Kortetmäki [email protected] Markku Oksanen [email protected] 1
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyvaskyla, PO Box 35, 40014 Jyvaskyla, Finland
2
School of Resource Wisdom, University of Jyvaskyla, PO Box 35, 40014 Jyvaskyla, Finland
3
Department of Social Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, PO Box 1627, 70211 Kuopio, Finland
plant-based food is perceived to be significant and the difference in emissions between ruminant meat and plant-based food may even be 100-fold (Poore and Nemecek 2018; Clark and Tilman 2017).2 Henceforth, both activist and research voices call for cutting down meat and dairy consumption by means of policy measures such as a meat tax (Wirsenius et al. 2011) and dietary approaches like a ‘planetary health diet’ (Willett et al. 2019). Joseph Poore, the lead author of a much cited Science article on the matter (Poore and Nemecek 2018), pointed out th
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