"NYC: Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” That’s what a large sign behind Mayor de Blasio said when, on Wednesday, he announced two separate measures against fossil-fuel companies. One is to call on the boards of five city pension funds to withdraw their investments from Big Oil. The other is to sue five oil companies for billions of dollars that the city has to spend to cope with the effects of climate change, such as the damage inflicted by Superstorm Sandy.
New York is not alone in the fight. Several California cities and counties are also suing the oil companies. And last month, Gov. Cuomo announced that New York State is developing plans for its pension funds to divest from oil companies.
All this is good news. Climate change is real, and is bound to make storms like Sandy more frequent. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was the most intense on record, with an estimated cost of $224 billion. More wildfires like those in the West, and the tragic mudslides which followed them, are also in the cards.
The overwhelming consensus of scientists in the relevant fields is that climate change is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. Yes, there is a small — tiny, I’d say — chance that they are wrong. But taking that risk is like playing Russian roulette with bullets in five of the six chambers. We know what we can do to protect ourselves. If the scientists are right, the costs of doing so are in no way comparable to the costs of taking no action.
The problem is, of course, that President Trump is winding back President Obama’s initiatives to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. No surprise there — while campaigning, he suggested that climate change is a hoax fostered by the Chinese (who, as it happens, are doing much more to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions than the United States).
So it is up to every other level of government, as well as corporations and individuals, to do what they can to make up for the lack of leadership shown by the Trump administration and by the Republican-controlled Congress.
Yet the initiatives announced by de Blasio and Cuomo are overlooking the elephant in the room — or rather, the cow in the room, or, more precisely still, the steak on the dinner plate.
Cattle produce methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more potent than the carbon dioxide produced from burning fossil fuel. True, they don’t produce as much of it, but it is enough to contribute substantially to climate change — more, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, than the entire transport sector: all the cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains on Earth.
Moreover, the quantity of meat we consume is bad for our health. To cap it all, it is much easier to avoid eating meat than it is to stop using fossil fuels.
Last year, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food estimated that a vegetarian diet cuts greenhouse-gas emissions from food by 63%; a vegan diet cuts them by 70%. The study also calculated that these diets would cut healthcare costs, worldwide, by between $700 billion and a trillion dollars.
In 2009, I argued, in these pages, for a tax on meat, so that the real costs of eating it — costs on the planet and on human health — would be priced into the product. Last year, the Danish Ethics Council, a government body, joined the call, and the Danish government said that it would consider the proposal. Then the UN’s International Resource Panel made a similar recommendation.
De Blasio knows all this. In October, he joined Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to announce that this spring, 15 Brooklyn schools will participate in Meatless Mondays, serving all-vegetarian breakfasts and lunches on those days. This will, the mayor said, “help make our city healthier and our planet stronger.”
So why is New York City leading the fight against only one aspect of human activities that cause climate change? Where is the divestment from the four big corporations that produce 85% of all the beef in the United States — Tyson, JBS, Cargill and Smithfield? And where is the lawsuit against them for the damage they are knowingly doing to the planet?
Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of, most recently, “Ethics in the Real World.”