By Juliet Eilperin,
Updated: November 25, 2013
Former
U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks during the Skybridge Alternatives
(SALT) Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada May, 9, 2012. SALT brings
together public policy officials, capital allocators, and hedge fund
managers to discuss financial markets. (REUTERS/Steve Marcus)
Maybe it was something about what they served in the White House mess
in the 1990s. Or perhaps it's what happens to baby boomer Democrats
more than a decade after leaving office. For whatever the reason former
vice president Al Gore has gone vegan, just like the president with whom he once served.
Gore's recent decision to forgo animal products surfaced as an offhand reference in a Forbes magazine piece about Hampton
Creek Foods, an upscale vegan product line carried in Whole Foods. Ryan
Mac's article, which posted Saturday, chronicled how wealthy investors
including Bill Gates, Tom Steyer
and Vinod Khosla have poured money into the company, which hopes to
take down the U.S. egg industry with offerings such as a plant-base
mayonnaise.
"Newly turned vegan Al Gore is also circling," Mac writes.
An individual familiar with Gore's decision, who asked not to be
identified because it involved a personal matter, confirmed that Gore
opted a couple of months ago to become vegan. Gore's office did not
immediately respond to a request for comment.
It is unclear why Gore, one of the nation's most visible climate activists,
has given up dairy, poultry and meat products. People usually become
vegan for environmental, health or ethical reasons, or a combination of
these three factors.
Bill Clinton explained in a 2011 interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta that he adopted a vegan diet primarily for health considerations. Known for consuming a high-fat cuisine while in office,
Clinton -- who was 65 at the time -- said he realized he had “played
Russian roulette” with his health for too long, and that since making
the switch, “I feel good, and I also have, believe it or not, more
energy.”
The Humane Society of the United States food policy director Matthew
Prescott noted in an e-mail that industrial farm operations are major
sources of nutrient pollution, and contribute significantly to the
nation's greenhouse gas emissions.
"Overconsumption and overproduction of meat has given rise to the
factory farm, which has put huge threats on the planet and our health,"
Prescott wrote. "Whether it’s the whole Clinton/Gore ticket being vegan
now, Oprah promoting meat-free eating, Bill Gates backing plant-based
foods or the rise of Meatless Mondays, it’s clear that the way we farm
and eat is shifting toward a better model."
Al Gore is a vegan now — and we think we know why
By
Ben Adler 27 Nov, 2013
World Economic Forum
Republican caricatures of Al Gore notwithstanding,
the former vice president was never a stereotypical woolly
environmentalist. A practicing Southern Baptist, Gore attended divinity
school and, though he opposed the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the
military rather than protesting it. Gore rose in the 1980s as a moderate
“New Democrat,” who was friendly to business, hawkish on foreign policy
and, yes, excited about the possibilities of technological innovation.
As vice president, he set about the earnest work of “reinventing
government” to make it more efficient.
Gore’s attraction to environmentalism, much like that of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s, is that of a serious wonk, not a dirty hippie who finds water conservation a convenient excuse not to bathe.
And so it is actually quite remarkable that, as Forbes reported in this week’s issue and The Washington Post confirmed with a source close to Gore on Monday, he has gone vegan. Forbes
merely tossed in a throwaway line referring to Gore as “newly vegan,”
in a story about investors looking at ways of replacing eggs with
plant-based formulas. The Post was unable to get any further details beyond confirmation from an unnamed Gore associate.
Perhaps, as the Post’s Juliet Eilperin suggests, Gore was
worried about his health. Former President Bill Clinton, who was
famously fond of McDonald’s, became a vegan in 2011. (He had a quadruple
bypass in 2004.) Gore, as conservatives never tire of pointing out, put
on a few pounds after leaving office.
But it seems likely that concerns about the environment, especially
his top cause of climate change, played a role in Gore’s thinking.
Industrial animal agriculture is bad for local water quality, as it
spreads around manure and antibiotics. But it is also bad for greenhouse
gas emissions. Animals, especially pigs and even more so cows, produce
methane as a byproduct of digestion. As anyone who eats too many
Brussels sprouts this Thanksgiving will find out, gas can’t stay inside
an animal forever: it comes out in burps, farts, and mostly in manure.
As greenhouse gases go, methane that escapes into the atmosphere without
being burned is 21 times more potent per pound than CO2.
Raising livestock contributes to climate change and environmental
degradation in other ways as well: it takes far more grain and land to
produce a calorie of food for humans by feeding grains to animals than
directly to people. That means more destruction of grasslands and
forests for farming, more tractors burning fuel, and more pesticides
seeping into the groundwater. Back in 2006, a United Nations report
found that livestock accounts for 18 percent of all global greenhouse
gas emissions.
And now, a new report from the National Academy of Sciences suggests
that we have been vastly underestimating livestock’s contribution to the
U.S.’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In the past, the Environmental Protection Agency has said that meat
production accounted for only around 3.75 percent of U.S. emissions. But
the estimate failed to factor in the grain fed to livestock and the
transportation of grain and livestock. The new NAS study
corrects that error, finding that in 2008, the U.S. released 49 million
tons of methane, rather than the 32 million tons estimated by the EPA.
As the Associated Press notes,
that means America’s methane might contribute as much to climate change
as its entire transportation sector. Some of that comes from byproducts
of fossil fuel extraction, such as fracking, but most of it comes from animals.
This is a growing problem, as meat consumption has risen steadily in
rich countries and now developing nations are catching up. As I reported
in my deep dive on this issue for The American Prospect in 2008:
The average American eats 200 pounds of meat, poultry,
and fish per capita per year, 50 pounds more than Americans did in the
1950s. Between 1970 and 2002 the average person in a developing country
went from consuming 24 pounds to 65 pounds of meat annually. In all, the
world’s total meat consumption in 2007 was estimated to be 284 million
tons, compared to 71 million tons in 1961. It is expected to double by
2050.
Environmental groups and high-profile environmentalists have been
reluctant to suggest that people cut back on their meat eating, or
switch to less greenhouse gas-intensive meats such as chicken, never
mind pushing for comprehensive policy solutions. When I wrote that piece
in 2008, Gore himself had never mentioned meat as a cause of climate
change.
Meat consumption is a tough issue for environmentalists to tackle.
The environmental movement has long battled its reputation
self-righteous schoolmarmishness. Nothing could be more potentially
off-putting to regular American dudes than telling them to give up
steaks and hamburgers. Moreover, ranchers and hunters can be useful
allies to environmental groups in land conservation battles out West.
Still, the awareness of the basic science behind meat consumption has become more widespread since 2008. Gore himself began talking about the emissions of meat production in 2011. And while he is often condemned for being polarizing, Gore demonstrated with An Inconvenient Truth
that he is capable of focusing national attention on climate change.
Hopefully he’ll decide to talk publicly about why he went vegan. It
might help spark another much-needed conversation.
Ben Adler covers climate change policy for Grist. When he
isn't contemplating the world's end, he writes about cities, politics,
architecture, and media. You can follow him on Twitter.
Source:
grist.org