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Environment
Dragged Kicking and Screaming Down the Path of Righteousness
Fact-Weariness and How to Live With It
Posted December 10, 2015
I get the impression we live in a rather fact-weary world. This is a world where little things like truth or facts may be regarded as nothing more than minor inconveniences. There are, presumably, various reasons for this. The vast proliferation of pseudo-facts – alleged facts that turn out to be no such thing – doesn’t help. This proliferation is evident in any area of human inquiry – science included. ‘A study has shown …’ we might be told; but, of course, it shows no such thing. What the research allegedly shows is as much a matter of its funding source as objective validity. And, of course, intellectual humility is hardly a cardinal virtue of our time: too many people think – often, sincerely believe – they know more than they really do. And today’s orthodoxy quickly becomes tomorrow’s fallacy.
Perhaps even more important is the peculiarly short attention span of large swathes of contemporary humankind. Even if someone actually notices a given fact, it’s hardly likely to detain him or her for too long. Inconvenient facts can be ridden out – like a scandal. If a fact is inconvenient, first deny it is a fact. If that doesn’t work (or even if it does) cast aspersions on the character of the fact’s professor, and/or cast doubt on the way in which the fact is disseminated, and so on. These delaying tactics are, in the vast majority of cases, successful. Soon it is tomorrow, and everyone is talking about something else.
The upshot: it’s not a great time for facts. They’ve seen better days. There is no obvious reason why facts should get in the way of a person living the life he or she wants to live.
Here’s a question: how does one reason, how does one argue, and how does one convince, in a fact-weary world such as this?
It was my recent viewing of Cowspiracy that steered my thoughts in this direction.
One of the most jarring of the (asserted) facts in this excellent documentary was this: 10,000 years ago 99% of the planet’s zoomass was made up of non-domesticated animals. Today 98% of Earth’s zoomass is made up of humans and the animals we eat.
If this is true it’s about as damning an indictment of the inability of Homo sapiens as it is possible to imagine. We are completely incapable of co-existing with any other animal species – except the ones we keep alive long enough to eat, of course.
Is it a fact? I don’t know. I’ve not done the calculations, but they seem relatively straightforward, assuming you have reliable figures with which to work. But suppose they were off a bit. Suppose it was only 75% of the planet’s current zoomass that was made up of humans and our edible compatriots. Wouldn’t that be bad enough? If it was only 50%, that’s still pretty ghastly when you think about it.
18% of all climate change emissions stem from the animal husbandry industry – so calculated a United Nations sponsored report (‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’). That is more than all forms of transport combined – planes, trains, automobiles and ships, which collectively weigh in at 13%. Just the news vegan Hummer drivers were waiting for. The estimate was later revised the estimate downwards – 14.5%. A cause for celebration in certain quarters, undoubtedly. But, let’s face it, if your defense of practice X consists in the claim that it does only a little more harm to the environment than the entire transport sector combined, you really ought to rethink your commitment to X. Other estimates, by the way, range as high as 51%.
Animal agriculture is responsible for up to 91% of deforestation. Is that right? I don’t know. But suppose it were only half of that? Wouldn’t that be bad? 1-2 acres of rain forest cleared every second. True? Well suppose it was only 1 acre every 2-3 seconds. That would still be very bad, wouldn’t it?
To produce one pound of beef, 2500 gallons water will be required. True? Well, estimates vary – from anywhere between 440 gallons to 8000 gallons. So 2,500 gallons is towards the conservative end. But suppose we in an even more conservative mood 500 gallons, say. Wouldn’t that be bad enough?
Hosepipe bans – very popular out west. Not that it will do much good: only 5% or so of water consumption in the US is by private homes. Animal agriculture, on the other hand: estimates range from 55% to 80-90% – and the latter was from the USDA, not exactly a hotbed of bunny-hugging vegans.
The moral of this story – the answer to the question with which I began – is that if you want to argue, even convince others, in this age of fact-weariness, it doesn’t hurt at all if the case you want to defend is so overwhelmingly strong that it can survive substantial downgrading of the facts. Even if the facts you cite turn out to be stunningly over-exaggerated – even if they are off by several orders of magnitude – they are still good enough to clinch your case.
Converting the world to non-carbon forms of energy is going to take more than – and without a serious amount of will, much more than – 20 years. Even then, CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for over 100 years. The effects on climate of CO2 are locked in for at least that length of time. The effects of methane, on the other hand, are much more ephemeral: roughly 25 years. Methane has 86 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 20-year time frame. Nitrous Oxide – livestock are responsible for 65% of all human related climate emissions – has a global warming potential of 296 times that of CO2 over the same time frame. Climate emissions due to agriculture are calculated to increase by 80% by 2050. Those due to energy will be far less (20% on some calculations).
Even if you are as cynical about facts as I am, even if you substantially downgrade the figures involved, everything still points unequivocally in the same direction: giving up eating meat is something that (i) can be done, (ii) more quickly than converting the world the world to non-carbon energy production, and (iii) will have much more immediate effects than (ii).
We may be weary of facts, and we may be cynical. But in the end, the facts – the real ones – won’t go away. One way or another they are going to drag us kicking and screaming into doing the right thing. Not because we want to, or even because we understand it is the right thing, but because in the end we are going to have no choice.
