Rev Left Radio - Food Politics & Environmentalism: Climate Change, Hunger, & Veganism

Episode Date: March 20, 2018

Mexie joins Brett to discuss Veganism, Climate Change, artificial scarcity, hunger, and much much more! Mexie's YouTube channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCepkun0sH16b-mqxBN22ogA/featured Mexie's other platforms: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5385111 Twitter: https://twitter.com/mexieYT Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mexieYT Mexie's Podcast, Vegan Vanguard, can be found here: https://www.veganvanguardpodcast.com Outro Music: "Blood // Water" by Grandson Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Anne Comrade, Brett O'Shea. And today we have on Mexie to talk about climate change, food politics, and other related issues. Mexie, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background for people who don't know who you are? Sure. So my name is Mexie. and I guess I just finished a Ph.D. in human geography. So I look mostly at political economy and environmental issues,

and I have a YouTube channel and a podcast, and yeah, it's basically me. I know we're going to probably plug it at the end, but you want to just up front tell the name of your YouTube channel and your podcast for people? Okay, my YouTube channel is Mexie, M-E-X-E, and my podcast is a vegan vanguard. Awesome. the vegan vanguard.

Yeah, and I think I found out about you through Twitter and through your YouTube page. And I, in preparation for this interview, I went through a lot of your videos. And, I mean, it's really, really awesome. I think that the left is sort of underrepresented on YouTube on that platform generally. So it's really nice to see a really articulate and engaging voice of the left on YouTube. So good work on that. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah.

I think we are underrepresented. Absolutely. So let's just go ahead and begin. I guess one of the questions I usually ask guests is how do you identify politically? How do you think about your own politics and do you attach certain labels to it or anything like that? I really don't like, you know, particular labels. So I don't know, I'm just leftist, anti-capitalist, socialist, Marxist, like whatever you want to call it. But I'm pretty non-sectarian. Absolutely. That's something that we try to avoid as much as possible on this program as well,

because I think it serves us all to sort of learn from one another and draw from the broad revolutionary left tradition generally. Yeah, absolutely. So I appreciate that on your show. Thank you. All right, let's go ahead and get into it. We have a lot of stuff to cover. Like I said, we're going to talk about food politics.

We're going to talk about climate change. And we're going to talk about veganism. This is something that we haven't talked about on this show yet, but it is important. And a lot of my friends are either vegetarians or vegans. And it seems to be gaining some momentum in the culture generally. So why did you decide to become a vegan? And why do you feel that a non-meat diet? diet is better than a meat diet?

Well, I actually went, I went vegetarian when I was like 18. It was quite a long time ago now. But I learned, basically, I was in my undergrad and I was taking environmental studies and I learned about the environmental impacts of meat production and just how wildly unsustainable it was. And so I was like, wow, okay. So I pretty much went vegetarian right away. And then about 10 years later, I went vegan for health reasons.

And yeah, I mean, I can show some links to people if people want to know. about, you know, some of the health benefits of going vegan. But, you know, once I kind of got into, I guess, the vegan sphere and started to learn more about it, I started to actually, you know, delve into the ethics of it and learn a lot more about what actually happens to animals. And so now I would consider myself, you know, also an ethical vegan. All three reasons, health, environmentalism and ethics kind of brought me to veganism. I mean, in the rest of this podcast, we're going to get into the environmental implications more of meat eating. So I would obviously think that a non-meat diet is better environmentally. And also, I would argue that it is better

ethically. In our first podcast episode of The Vegan Vanguard called Why Leftists Should Be Vegan, we go over, you know, what actually happens to animals in a lot of these industries, which is just absolutely appalling. And, you know, for socialists and anarchists who are against oppression in all forms, surely we should be against oppressing non-human animals who are also sentient beings who are being, you know, confined and tortured and killed. And, you know, I tend to view them as our allies because they have a stake in capitalism ending as well. Like they do not have a stake in capitalism continuing. Like all of non-human nature actually has a stake in overthrowing capitalism. So I think we should kind of broaden our idea of oppression.

I suppose, and who's being oppressed? For sure. Yeah, I recently, so for a long time, I've engaged with the argument, and I've had periods of my life where I've went vegetarian, but recently we actually did an episode on this show where we analyzed the film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original, and there's actually a really robust vegetarian reading of that movie that we discussed in that episode,

and all the other three guests on the episode, it got brought up that they were all vegetarians, and it kind of felt for the first time, like, wow, being a meat eater is actually being the minority in this room is an interesting sort of paradigm shift for me and that was like my last sort of like push like okay let's really let's really do this let's put like you know your values and your ideas into individual practice and so ever since that episode i have been maintaining a vegetarian diet but clearly and this is really important and this is something that we always have to talk about

clearly there are aspects of privilege that go into being able to eat vegan or vegetarian as we all know and individual lifestyle choices while often laudable do not change anything systematically or institutionally. So can you talk about these concerns and how we should think about vegetarianism and veganism in this broader context? Yeah, I mean, 100% everything in this capitalist society, you know, if you want to participate in like a lot of movements, you have to have capital to some extent, right? So it is, it can be exclusionary. So we like to, when I say we, I mean, me and my co-host who is a privileged vegan, who is also on YouTube and is amazing. So you guys should check her out also.

But we like to think about veganism as a political stance and not as simply a consumption list. So, like, as a political stance that seeks to end the commodification of animals and is against speciesism. So part of that would be participating in their commodification as little as possible. And then part of that would also be taking aim at the broader systems like capitalism that really exaggerate all of these problems. Because if you think about your veganism as a consumption list, I mean, first of all, you know, like guaranteed, you're not going to have all products that are vegan, you know, all soaps, all everything, like everything that you're getting is not vegan. Or maybe you're buying from a vegan company, but that company is owned by another company that's not vegan. So

if you try and think about it as like purely a consumption list, it's, it becomes like an identity instead of something that you're actually, you know, doing politically or, you know, trying to make change. So obviously, if we're just thinking about individual consumption, it's not going to you know, radically change anything. Also, you could be a vegan and buy vegan products, but maybe you're buying something with chocolate that was made by like child slave labor or something, or maybe you're buying palm oil or something that is completely devastating to the environment and to animals and to humans. So that's where, you know, obviously individual consumption falls flat and it's not going to solve the problem. However, while it's clear that capitalism exaggerates these problems,

all of that, you know, like factory farms basically turn live bodies into commodities and then they breed them specifically for certain traits. Like they breed broiler chickens to have these huge chests so that they can't even walk anymore, right? So like all of that is exacerbated by capitalism and the profit motive. But I would argue that overthrowing capitalism is also, not enough to solve the problem. Like we need we need more than just doing that because like very conceivably if people don't have these issues top of mind then there's no reason for me to think that the day after we overthrow capitalism then people will all of a sudden wake up and be like, huh, I don't think I want to eat animals anymore. I don't think I want to wear them or exploit them or

whatever, right? Like we could democratize factory farms or we could you know we could like socialize farming. But unless there's actually a correlated effort to dismantle the whole industry and dismantle speciesism, it's not going to happen. So that's why I advocate for animal liberation right now alongside activism against the system, because there's really no reason to wait. Like, there's no reason to continue doing this and supporting this horrible industry that is really destroying the world and animals. And like frankly, in terms of the environment, if we want to have a future for the revolution to be successful in, then we really do have to act now. And even though, like, individual action is not going to create systemic change,

in terms of your carbon footprint, reducing your animal product consumption is the easiest and best way to cut your carbon footprint, like, immediately. Like, going vegan cuts your carbon footprint by, like, 50%, right? So if you're going to do something, like, it's important. to do this. So yeah, so basically I feel like we have to change people's minds about the sustainability and the ethics of meat and get them to think about doing that now, because I feel like if they're not willing to think about it and do anything now, then I don't really have any good reason to believe that they'll be willing to do it magically, like when socialism

is ushered in. Right. Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think sometimes, and this is not always true, but, you know, I have noticed it. In fact, I think I've probably engaged in it in the past where you sort of give yourself an individual out by saying, my individual lifestyle choices, it will never actually change anything systematically. So therefore, I don't need to engage ethically as an individual with certain, with the world around me necessarily. I don't need to take this action because it's not going to do anything anyway. And I think that is sort of a way that we give ourselves an out. And we don't have to face, you know, our own individual contributions to systems of domination, exploitation, and straight up brutality.

I really liked what you said about slave labor and child labor, or just labor generally all over the planet. You know, all commodities and all forms of consumption are ultimately rooted in exploitation and living inside the system, we can't totally disconnect from that. But marrying the outlooks of like changing your individual behavior, changing your psychology, trying to change the psychology of people around you while you work on this collective effort against the systems that keep that sort of brutality in place. I mean, why not work on all fronts? So I appreciate that approach that you really articulate in a really,

you know, engaging and interesting and moving way. Thank you. Yeah. No, I totally agree. And even if you think about, you know, anarchists who are really into prefigitive politics, that that is a case for doing things individually because you want to prefigure that world that you want to see. So that really it wouldn't make sense to continue engaging in things that don't support your ethics or your values and that you wouldn't want to see after the revolution, right? Absolutely. All right, let's move on to food politics. In your video on YouTube entitled Radical Food Politics, Hunger is Political,

you argue that how we understand problems frames the way in which we approach solutions for those problems. So how does our capitalist society understand the problem of hunger, for example, And what solutions does that understanding generally tend to lead towards? Well, like most things in our capitalist society, the way that we understand hunger or scarcity is completely disconnected from any analysis of the capitalist system itself and the way that hunger is actually produced structurally. So basically we understand hunger as just a lack of calories, or we understand famine as just something natural, like there's just not enough food or something happens naturally.

and it's really nobody's fault. So we think about these things as if they're just basically totally apolitical. At worst, we might actually think that poor people can't access food just because they lack personal responsibility or they make poor choices. So in that context, our solutions basically revolve around charity or food banks or even things like developing GMOs or trying to increase yields, etc., They're just trying to make more food, produce more food, and get more food to more people in the short term.

But these approaches don't really ever get at the root of the problem because people aren't hungry because there isn't enough food around. There's actually more than enough food around that could feed everybody. They're hungry because food is a commodity and it's cost prohibitive and they're hungry because they're living in poverty because we don't understand food as a social right. we've allowed it to be considered a commodity. And they're living in poverty and kept in poverty through neoliberal capitalist policies that roll back the welfare state, roll back social provisioning,

coutail to corporate interests, privatize and commodify food access, and basically just leave people waiting for handouts from, you know, quote-unquote, benevolent, wealthy saviors who are kind enough to donate. So we're never actually, like, hitting at why people are unable to access that food or why they're vulnerable to hunger in the first place. And further, accepting this charity model also furthers the neoliberal agenda because then it allows the state to roll back even more and just wash its hands of the whole problem.

So our governments really aren't expected to ensure the well-being of their citizens. They're not held accountable. It's all just considered a problem for private charities. And, you know, like food banks and private charities, like I know people who helped organize and distribute food. to people and that's great. I mean, in our current system, unfortunately, people need that because they can't access food because it is a commodity and not a social right. So, you know, it helps to alleviate the problem in the short term, but they don't actually challenge the

capitalist structures that leave people in desperate states to begin with. And they also don't challenge the understanding of food as a commodity and not a social rate. I always find it like, well, I guess you guys are in America and you don't consider health care a human right there. Right, right. But I find it funny that in Canada, it's like, yeah, okay, we've gotten to the point where we understand that health care is a human right. Everyone should have health care. But food is not a human right.

Like food is something that you should have to buy or you starve. But then again, I really think that hunger is what drives the entire heppelus system. Like, our hunger is what allows capitalism to reproduce itself. Like, the threat of hunger has long been used to discipline labor because if food is a commodity, then you need money to buy it. Then you have to engage in wage labor in order to get that money in order to buy it. But, of course, and especially under neoliberalism, like, you can work 16 hours a day and still not necessarily make enough money to access healthy food.

So, yeah, it's just such a wild thing to... think about, but that's really capitalism gotcha is the threat of hunger. And yeah, as I said, you know, relying on well-off people to donate, even though, like, I know that it's not always just super wealthy people who donate. A lot of times people who donate to food banks and charities are, you know, maybe they're slightly better off than the people who actually need the charity, but, you know, things like philanthropy or big wealthy donors, like it makes it seem like the elite are the ones who are solving the problem and not actually producing or exasperating the problem through their own capitalist accumulation.

So it really depoliticizes and individualizes the problem. And I think it also diminishes our ability to think of alternatives and think of different ways of organizing society and decommodifying food access and social rights. Absolutely. I love what you said about depoliticizing and individualizing the problem because I actually had, as you were talking, I was writing my notes and I wrote those words down because we're conditioned with like an individualist ideology that you know constantly confronts us with these notions of personal responsibility and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the insidious sort of effect that that has sort of inculcates in the minds of people that you know the poor person

that is hungry or sleeping under a bridge is there because of their own personal failures and what that does is as you say it it depoliticizes the problem oh this is not a problem with how we produce and distribute goods, this is a problem with individuals being too lazy to pull themselves up by them bootstraps and get a job, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the same shit we've heard a million times. And then there's also this notion that sort of springs out of that, that capitalism is natural, that capitalism is atemporal, that there, that there is no like alternatives really to capitalism. That's sort of the conditioning that we receive in our society broadly. And then so the natural extension of that is that poverty is natural, that there's nothing we can do to solve poverty,

because, hey, this is just the way it is. Capitalism is the best system on offer, and there's still poverty. Oh, well, like, we just kind of have to deal with it. And let's try to use the charity model to address it where we can. Maybe some welfare state reforms, like food stamps or something might help, but that more or less we can't do anything about it. And that's really insidious and that's really dangerous. But, you know, kind of bouncing off that question,

and you touched on it a little bit, but many of us know that we are able, as a civilization, to produce enough food to feed everyone in the world. But that clearly doesn't happen. Can you talk about food production generally, how it's related to meat production with regards to feeding and watering livestock, and where all the food we produce actually goes? Yeah, as I said, we overproduce food right now. So we actually produce 1.5 times as much food as we would need to feed everyone on the planet.

But it's just simply not being distributed as needed. Interestingly, I was reading a foodie's guide to capitalism, which is really great. great, so I'd recommend that book. But in it, the author says that actually a great deal of the world's food is still being produced by small holders around the world. So people are still actively engaged in subsistence farming or just like smallholder farming where they will sell to local markets and things like that. However, increasingly, they're being proletarianized because either they can't compete with big agribusiness or big agribusiness kicks them off their land through massive land grabs that are occurring across the global south all the time.

And this is what Marx would call an example of primitive accumulation because it takes all these people who had access to the means of production and it removes that access. And so basically they must now turn to wage labor. So it's just driving people into urban slums, urban centers, desperate for work so that they can buy food because we have to buy food under. capitalism. And then, you know, we have companies like Monsanto who have like a stranglehold on our seeds, which is terrifying. And they basically lock farmers into contractual servitude. And they ruin farmers who refuse to buy their GMO seeds. And if you actually use their seeds, you can't

save seeds, like you can't save them and then replant them for your crops the next year. You have to buy all new seeds every year, which is obviously a great business model for Monson. Santo, but it's a very terrible and terrifying way that capitalism is destroying, you know, the centuries of intimate knowledge that we have with crops and seeds and plant diversity and really turning everything into monocrops, which actually threatens the long-term sustainability over our food system. So meat production, how that relates. I'm going to get into the environmental impacts of meat production, I think, later on, but because when we, like, when we eat meat, we're the secondary consumer,

meaning like the animals eat their own food, and then we eat those animals. So it's incredibly inefficient and wasteful of the food and water resources that we have. For example, 70% of the grain grown in the U.S. is fed to livestock. Wow. 50% of U.S. land is used for agriculture, and only 1% is for crops that people actually eat.

eat. So cows today, I mean, they're supposed to be eating grass, first of all, which they're not. A lot of them have never even been outside at all, so of course they can't eat grass, but they're being fed corn, soy, and grains, which if we did not feed those to the cows, we would have such an incredible overabundance of food, not that it would actually be distributed equally if we're still living under capitalism, but the whole idea that capitalism is the most efficient system because we're living in a state of scarcity and it's the most efficient way to deal with scarcity is just totally fabricated. I mean, capitalism itself creates false scarcity and meat production contributes hugely to this because, as I said, we're diverting all of this food

and all of this water, this fresh water into this ridiculously inefficient and unsustainable system. So I just have some stats here. So one third of the world's land space is used. for animal agriculture, and on 1.5 acres of land, you could either grow about 17,000 kilograms of plant food or 170 kilograms of meat. So it's just ridiculous. A meat eater needs 18 times more land space than a vegan. And in terms of water, the meat and dairy industry use one third of the planet's freshwater to make one hamburger. It takes 3,000 liters of water, which is the equivalent of showering for two months. So, yeah, I don't think people actually really think about these things or understand just how inefficient it is and how unsustainable it is, especially since,

you know, people in North America eat so much more meat than people anywhere around the world. And a lot of that has to do with, you know, the commercialization of our food and these big corporations like McDonald's and whatever. But, you know, like all of these companies and all of these big agribusiness companies that are going around and buying up land in the global south, often poor people in the global south who actually help to grow the grain and soy, et cetera, they're struggling to access food while all of this is being fed to livestock for consumption by wealthy Westerners. So, you know, obviously the mega corporations are benefiting, but we're also benefiting in the global north as well because, you know, we

we demand like cheap food, right? Like we expect to go to the grocery store and just find really cheap meat or we expect to go to McDonald's and find like super cheap meals that just really externalize all of the social and environmental costs of making that food. And in terms of distribution, you know, leaving it in the hands of private food franchises. Basically, I mean, you hear stories about companies like Starbucks

who actually guard their dumpsters and lock their dumpsters because they would rather the food go to waste than actually go to hungry people. So actually, it's estimated that between 40 and 50% of all the food produced in the world is just simply wasted. So this is why I really, like, it just kills me when people say that capitalism is the most efficient system. Absolutely. And so much of that is rooted, you know, in imperialism, in irrationality, in global racism.

Ultimately, it's just so profoundly, as you say, inefficient and absurd and ultimately violent, I think. When we see what the consequences are, you're talking about the externalities of the way that food is produced and distributed and where it goes and where it doesn't go. I mean, that's a system of violence. But having all of that in mind, what are some organizations and movements that operate now or have operated in the recent past that we can learn from when it comes to radical approaches to food politics inside the current confines of capital? Well, I shouted out a few organizations in that radical food politics video. So the first one is La Via Campesina, which is an incredible international peasant movement. It grew out of Latin America, but it now operates all around the world. And it coordinates peasant organizations and agricultural workers and women and indigenous communities.

It's really trying to forge an alternative to this colonial capitalist system. it's really trying to fight global land grabs and, you know, free trade and transnational agribusiness and companies like Monsanto that would just come in and, you know, usurp everyone's land rights and basically turn them into proletariat. So, yeah, they really fight against that. They fight for land and agrarian reform, peasants' rights, women's and indigenous people's rights, and they really rally against capitalism and free trade. imperialist agricultural system. Food not bombs, I think people have probably heard of food not bombs.

They operate pretty much everywhere. They have over 500 chapters around the world and it's a direct action social movement that works to decommodify food and challenge the charity model. So each chapter is unique, but basically they glean produce from wherever they can get it. So maybe if local stores are throwing it away or they can go dumpster diving or just, you know, different ways of acquiring food that are outside of commodity chains, so they're not actually like paying for it. And then they have a group of activists who will cook the food and then set it up and share it with the public.

And then they also will like share pamphlets and information about like political economy and mutual aid. They try to break the charity model by inviting people who eat the food to, join them and then contribute to gleaning and cooking and logistics. And so like truly creating mutuality and then growing the movement, you know, more and more and getting more people kind of turned on to dedicating themselves to decommodifying food access. And most of the food that they produce is vegan, which is very cool. But obviously if they get something, because they just try to get all their food for free. So if they get something that's not vegan, they're obviously

going to serve it. Same with Freganism that's kind of a movement that's similar. So Freganes will either dumpster dive or grow their own food or, again, just try to glean food any other way. Instead of paying for it, they also try to acquire just other goods like Toiletries, clothes, et cetera. Whatever they're able to acquire, they share freely with whoever wants or needs any. I'm less familiar with this movement, but there is a really interesting documentary on it, which I can link in the show notes for anyone who's interested. And then the Black Panther Party obviously had an incredible free lunch program for school children that was really part of their whole revolutionary praxis.

So they, you know, I actually listened to your episode on the Black Panther Party, which is amazing. Thank you. And I loved how they were talking about how the Black Panthers really, they were so successful because they listened to the community. They were of the community. They were part of the community. And they really listened to the community's needs.

And so they understood that obviously a major need in the community was access to food for children. Inadequate access to food in black communities was keeping them down. And children that go to school hungry don't perform very well, right? So that was part of, you know, empowering their community as part of their revolutionary practice. Yeah, awesome. So those are just some ways that organizers that listen to the show can kind of think about

with regards to this issue, you know, we always like to try to leave people with not just problems, but possible solutions, possible ways that we can go out in the terrible world we currently have and try to push it in a positive direction and try to push back against some of these problems. But now I want to shift the focus to climate change. I know something this is something you care about. This is something you study. This is something that affects us all and is extremely important.

And one of the weird things about climate change, because it's such a big issue that is like, it happens over a century, people seem to like go in and out of their concern about it. It kind of comes and goes in the media and people's focus comes and goes with regards to it. And that's a problem because every second of every day, it's escalating and it's getting worse. So just as sort of a primer into this segment about climate change, can you please flesh out where we currently are as a civilization in 2018 with regards to climate change and explain the concepts of latent warming effect and positive feedback loops? Sure.

Well, currently as a civilization in 2018, we're not looking so good in terms of climate change. You've probably heard, if you're kind of like, you know, tuned into the news on climate change that there's a global consensus that we need to keep our global warming below two degrees Celsius, I mean two degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels by 2100. So the Paris Accord, every year basically there's a conference of parties, which is a global conference of all the nations. They try to come to global agreements on climate. So anyway, the Paris Accord and In 2015, I believe, they actually said, okay, we have to do better than 2 degrees Celsius. We have to limit our warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels.

And so, and actually Canada's environmental minister was at the forefront of that movement to change it to 1.5 degrees Celsius, actually, which is ridiculous because we're not doing anything. And we have the tar sands, which are just so polluting. But anyway, so we're trying to stay below this 2 degrees Celsius. However, I've been reading reports now that there's actually only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. And there's a 1% chance that we would limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius warming. So we're already at like 1.4.

So the concept of latent warming relates to this because basically late in warming is just the idea that, all of the CO2 and everything that we've pumped up there already, we won't actually feel the full warming of all of that for quite some time. Like there's a time lag between when you pump up the CO2 and when you start to really feel the warming. So that's why it's, it's, the science is unclear because it's hard to make predictions when you're not exactly sure how much, you know, what we've already put up there is going to warm us in the future. Like, in terms of late and warming, the stuff that we've already pumped up there might already push us past two degrees Celsius. So it's just a reason why we have to really act as soon as possible because obviously

we need to, you know, air on the side of caution here. Another very dangerous part of this is the potential to set off what's called a runaway climate effect with a number of positive feedback loops. So positive feedback loops are basically loops that once you get them going, it's very hard to stop them. They become self-propelling. So an example of this would be the melting of the ice caps. So ice, because it's white, like anything that's really light in color has a high albedo. And what that means is that it reflects a lot of the sun's rays back up into the atmosphere. So, you know, the sun's rays come down and something with the high albedo like the ice caps will reflect that radiation back into the atmosphere. So less of it is trapped down at the

earth service. So less of it is warming the earth. However, when you melt those ice caps, then you lose that albedo effect. And so more of the sun's rays are, remaining down near the earth and warming the earth, contributing to more warming, which then contributes to more melting of the ice caps, which you can see that's just a self-propelling loop after that. It just keeps itself moving faster and faster. Another one of these loops is the methane and the permafrost. So it's similar in that if there's more warming, then more methane is released from the permafrost as it thaws. and methane is actually a 25 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

So it's incredibly important because even releasing a little bit of it will have an enormous effect. So anyway, so when the permafrost melts and that methane is released, then obviously that contributes to more warming, which then contributes to more melting of the permafrost and more methane release, which is, again, just another self-repelling cycle. So all that said, we don't really know exactly, you know, when we're going to get to a point where we've just hit on so many of these positive feedback loops that were in like a runaway effect. And we also don't quite know, like with the latent warming effect, we don't quite know the consequences of everything that we've already done so far. Right.

Yeah, so that's all incredibly fucking horrifying. And then on top of that, like on top of that horrifying just reality, it's worth noting that the U.S. is the only major country with an entire political party and president who denies everything that you've just said and that the listeners just heard. Everything about climate change, that it exists, how these mechanisms work, that the world is warming, that every other country agrees we need to do something about it. The U.S. stands alone as having a major political party and a leader of that country say, bullshit. Everything is not true. It's all a hoax. It's all bullshit. It's all liberal or leftist

propaganda to fight, you know, corporations or whatever the hell. So that just, that just adds to that this absurdity. It's a hoax produced by China. Right. Yeah, exactly. An actual quote from the president of the United States of America. I mean, you have to laugh to stop from fucking crying. It's true. Man. But connecting that up to sort of like the meat issues that we were talking about earlier, What role does meat production specifically playing climate change? What's the relationship there? Well, the animal agriculture industry is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gases that we emit, such as methane and nitrous oxide.

And I've said that methane is a 25 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, and nitrous oxide is actually a 265 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. So that 18% is actually more than all of the cars and trucks and transportation systems in the world. It's also responsible for an alarming amount of deforestation. 91% of Amazon destruction is related to animal agriculture. So the reason why it's so, it has such an impact is because not only do you raise the rainforest for these, you know, mega factory farms, you also have to raise the rainforests. you also have to raise the rainforest to create space to grow all of the crops that you are going to feed those land animals.

And so that's why it's, it contributes so much to climate change because, you know, forests are a carbon sink. So, you know, we emit CO2 or greenhouse gases, well, CO2 mainly. And then CO2 is absorbed by the trees and absorbed by the ocean. they act as carbon sinks to kind of, you know, work against that trend of us pumping things up there. So when you get rid of carbon sinks and you're, you know, emitting methane, methane is emitted by the animals, by the way, when they fart or like produce waste. They're emitting a ton of methane. Actually, 65% of our methane emissions are related to animal agriculture. And this is slated to grow a lot in years to come, which is incredibly terrifying because methane is so powerful.

But anyway, so you're emitting all of that methane and also, you know, fossil fuels and everything in the production of the crops. And you've eliminated all of your carbon sinks. And so now the CO2 is just sitting up there and not being reabsorbed back into the system. And so, yeah, it's really a terrible industry in terms of climate change. And it has really far-reaching implications. And it's also destroying the health of our oceans. Because as I said, oceans are also carbon sink but when they absorb too much CO2 they acidify and then it creates dead zones it affects the sea life and the state of our oceans also affects you know the state of our above ocean environment as well so it's just bad all around basically for sure and you know

these problems they're deeply tied to capitalism but they're also civilizational in the same way that if we overthrew capitalism tomorrow you know racism and patriarchy wouldn't go away would take more work to deal with those things. You know, the sort of relationship that we as human beings have to nature is not going to be magically, you know, overthrown the second capitalism collapses. These are long-term projects that we have to think about. It's not, I mean, overthrowing capitalism is already an incredibly difficult task, but that's just the beginning.

That just clears the way to work on these other problems. Like these problems cannot be addressed while capitalism is still in place for all the reasons we've already mentioned, but you just have to, when capitalism goes away, that's just the, that's just the beginning of the race. That's just, okay, now we've, we've, we've cleared the deck and we can actually get to work on these other problems, that now that the main thing that sort of benefits from it and holds those forms, those forms of, you know, oppression in place is gone, we can work on that stuff. So it's just something to think about. I mean, it's, it's, it's sort of overwhelming, but at the same time, it's also an, like an urgent call to action.

But now catastrophes related to climate change are already, beginning to manifest all over the world. We've seen them in this country over the past several years and, you know, all over the world as well. So can you talk about which parts of the world have already suffered the most from climate change and what the consequences are for the people who live there? Yeah, a lot of places. It's mostly places in the global south, but also people in the Arctic are also suffering a great deal. So, you know, like in northern Canada, for example, there's a great documentary about indigenous knowledge and climate change, and they're really documenting how their environments are changing. Globally, our temperature might have only risen

1.4 degrees as a global average, but what we're seeing is that actually by the poles, the warming is happening incredibly fast, and so people there are obviously unable to hunt because the ice isn't frozen, they're unable to fish, and a lot of the fish that they're catching are often sick. So they're just, they're having a lot of problems making their livelihoods. There are small island states like Tuvalu and the Maldives, which are already being flooded and soon they will be completely submerged in water. So that's going to have a whole host of implications, like, you know, where do they go? Are they still a country if they're going to be all housed within a

another country, like, how are we going to start dealing with environmental refugees when we have entire countries that are refugees at that point, right? And so it's very heartbreaking, actually. Like, the president of Tuvalu has been pleading with the international community, basically with the West, to take action and to stop what we're doing and, you know, obviously to no avail. And then obviously you have people across sub-Saharan Africa who are going to be experiencing intense droughts and will similarly face problems in making their livelihoods, people in the tropics. So, you know, it's a lot of people who have contributed next to nothing to the climate problem that are going to be experiencing the worst consequences, you know, very soon.

And you also have places like New Orleans and Puerto Rico who are, suffering from a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and climate change, and, you know, the racist ways that we're responding to those disasters. So yeah, it's not looking good for a lot of people already. Yeah. And as you said, it's just like in a cruel irony that those who contribute to the problem the least are the most affected and those who contribute to the problem the most are the least affected, not only because of their geographical areas, but also because they have their resources to sort of deal with the differing sort of patterns in the overall climate, whereas some of these poor nations don't have those resources. And even inside

the U.S., like you said Katrina, when poor places are hit inside the West, they're treated a different way than if rich places are hit. And so it's like this class politic comes into play here all the time. And then the last thing I'd say on the subject, when you're talking about refugees, you're talking about mass migration that's only going to pick up. And as we've seen over the past few years with the Syrian Civil War, when you have mass migration from some parts of the world into western parts of the world, it gives rise to fascist backlash. So if you think the Syrian Civil War and refugees flooding into Europe, creating all these horrific fascist movements and those countries are bad, wait until climate change picks up and pushes 10 times that amount of

people into other areas and the sort of brutality and racism and fascism that we're that we're seeing right now coming to the rise are just going to be on steroids that that is a horrifying prospect and that's why i mean anti-fascism is connected to the struggle against climate change i mean all of these things are linked together that's you can't separate them yeah Canada is actually poised to be the place where you know most people are going to have to come because we're actually not going to be like a lot of our landmass is not going to be underwater and already we have such a huge landmass and like hardly any population so the canadian government i know is already thinking of scenarios of how are we going to deal with all these refugees but i see it being just completely

dystopian and people being held in like really inhumane ways and i just i really hope that we act globally before anything like that starts to happen and at the at the risk of just adding despair on to despair. I'm going to ask this question and it's scary, but it's worth asking because if we're going to solve these problems, we have to have a clear vision of what they are and what the possible consequences are. There's that old saying socialism or barbarism and climate change puts a whole new spin on that saying. So looking into the future, what are the range of climate change scenarios that we are facing? What will the world look like in 2100, assuming no radical action on climate change is taken in the next few decades?

Well, as I said, we're trying to keep our warming below two degrees Celsius. Two degrees Celsius was basically decided upon by the global scientific community as a safe level for us to remain at and still be able to, you know, have most places in the world still living well. And some people were saying that two degrees might be the cash. cap that we should aim for if we don't want to trigger too many of these positive feedback loops and contribute to a runaway effect. So as I said, there's right now a 5% chance that we will avoid warming by at least 2 degrees Celsius coming end of the century. So that basically looks

like more intense storms, more intense natural disasters, you know, the disruption of our water table. So we'll have desertification in some areas. So some areas will have no water, and then we'll have massive flooding in other areas. We'll have increased droughts. We'll have more deadly heat waves. There will be places in Australia and in Africa that'll just be too hot for people to live, really. The other two scenarios we're looking at, like we're looking at a moderate scenario where we have around 4 degrees Celsius warming. That seems to be more plausible.

I mean, it's unclear, like, what the world would look like with a four-degree Celsius warming. It would really just be a much more extreme, you know, much more extreme of everything that I just mentioned. In terms of sea level, though, I mean, I think that even a two-degree Celsius might sink places like Tuvalu. Certainly a four-degree Celsius increase would completely sink places like Tuvalu in the Maldives. and then the last scenario would be a six degree or like if we don't do anything it's looking like six degree or more than that and I personally think that would be like uninhabitable and the level of environmental refugees would just be so much to deal with that yeah it's I think that's a very scary prospect and we also again like I said we don't know exactly when we might trigger a runaway

climate effect or trigger a lot of these positive feedback loops so I I feel like six degrees is way too much. That's what we're looking at. Yeah, I mean, yeah, anything above four degrees just seems like total collapse. I mean, collapse of political systems, collapse of economies, collapse of environmental sustainability. I mean, it's just, it's going to be some mad-max shit if it goes in that direction. Absolutely.

Yeah. So going into this last question, collectively speaking, if we could implement socialism or if you were somehow in charge of dictating how a socialist society. would look or interact with regards to its environmental protection and sustainability, what would an ideal society do with regards to the environment? Well, we would, first of all, stop digging up fossil fuels and burning them into the air. We would harness the power of the sun and renewables. We would have solar panels and everything.

And I know that people are like, oh, those are also problematic because you have to mine the resources. and it's like, yeah, but we really have to harness the power of the sun, though, because we could have, like, free energy forever, and what we're doing now is obviously ridiculous. We would hopefully be vegetarian or vegan, or at least, you know, radically reduce animal consumption and organize agriculture around, like, agroecology, none of these, like, you know, huge monocrop mega agribusiness operations. we could use all of the saved space that we would save going vegetarian to make more plant

crops, or we could just let it regrow into forest or savannah or wherever, whatever it was. And then I would also say that we should be like getting back in touch with our food systems and getting back in touch with how we actually function within ecosystems as just one part of that ecosystem and not somehow outside of it. As a species historically, we have so much incredible knowledge of how to actually, you know, build our structures, like green structures that actually work with the natural environment instead of just put up concrete walls and block all the air out and then use electricity to pump air back in at a certain temperature and, you know, pump lights through instead of using, you know, natural lighting and everything like that. Just to actually really get back in touch with how we are part of ecosystems, I feel like that's like probably, you know, kind of a vague thing to say. But if our goal is for every human to be free of oppression, then I just, it would follow to start thinking more broadly in terms of

non-human animals, non-human nature. I'm not saying that we wouldn't actually have any domesticated animals at all or that we wouldn't have any kind of like symbiotic relationships with a number of animals. We actually talk about this in another one of our podcast episodes that I can link. We certainly would. But, yeah, certainly reimagining our relationship with the natural world. And certainly we can't do that under capitalism because capitalism exploits land and labor in order to exist. Definitely.

It reduces everything to a commodity. You know, de-alienating ourselves from nature, that's a really interesting thing. I know you just kind of mentioned that right there. The ways we go about that would be unclear. but the psychological dealienation and the psychological turn we need to make with regards to how we conceptualize our relationship to nature, I think, is something that's going to have to happen. And I expect to see, as environmental catastrophe pile up, I expect to see movements that sort of become dedicated to that process itself.

And then moreover, I think, you know, science is going to have to play an incredible role here. I mean, in some weird way, science and technology, they've lost. led to the problem, but I do not see a way out of this problem that doesn't involve science and technology. So it's kind of a catch-22. But science is open-ended nature, I think, is an important advantage that it has. There's like this company, I haven't looked up lately on where it's at, but there's a company that I read about a while back that's called Memphis Meets. And one of their ideas, and what they're actually doing is growing meat in a lab. So meat becomes, although it's sort of indecipherable from meat texture wise taste wise you know visually it's totally

separated from actual animal suffering it's not factory farmed etc so you know that might provide at least in the transition period something that that we can sort of use as as one of the tools in our toolbox moving forward what do you think about that yeah definitely a lot of vegan support that movement you know not that we would ever actually like eat that meat but But it would be, obviously, a much more environmentally conscious and more ethical way of producing it. I know there are a lot of startups and companies working on that, but I'm not sure if any of them really have, you know, a timeline of when this is going to roll out, but hopefully within the

next decade, I guess. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's just one building block, but it's something. Definitely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Before I let you go, can you tell listeners where they can find your work online and maybe some

recommendations you would offer for people who want to learn more about the issues we've discussed today? Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love your podcast, so it's great to be on. So listeners can find me on YouTube, as I said, at Mexie, M-E-X-M-E-X-E. My podcast, The Vegan Vanguard, is Vegan Vanguardpodcast.com, and I co-host that with an amazing, badass, selectist vegan babe, a privileged vegan, and she also has a YouTube channel, so you can check

her out. She does a lot about like a pro-intersectional approach to veganism. In terms of learning about the environmental impacts of meat eating, there's a documentary called Cowspiracy on Netflix. There is a documentary called Earthlings, which looks at what actually happens to animals in I guess all industries. And then as I mentioned, a Foodie's Guide to Capitalism is a great book about capitalism's relationship with our food system.

And then I guess you can just look up the movements like Levia, Campesina and everything if you're looking for inspiration on how to organize alternatives. Wonderful. Thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate it. I love your show. Keep up the great work. And let's keep in touch.

Maybe we can collaborate in the future again. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. You'll never get free. Lamb to the slaughter, what you gonna do when there's blood in the water? The place of your greed is your son and your daughter. What you're gonna do when there's blood in the water? Look me in my eyes, tell me everything's not fine. All the people ain't happy, and the river has run dry.

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