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Protests, such as this one on Wall Street Tuesday, are only part of the climate activism. Addressing animal agriculture is equally crucial.

(Bryan Thomas/Getty)

By Wayne Pacelle

World leaders gathered Tuesday in New York to identify global climate change solutions, as part of Climate Week. But will these luminaries and political leaders ignore the elephant—or in this instance, the chicken, cow, and pig—in the room?

Given the preponderance of evidence that greenhouse gases are contributing to climate change, these leaders must not ignore the emissions caused by animal agriculture.

Raising and slaughtering tens of billions of animals across the globe for food each year is right up there with coal-fired power plants in pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

Yet animal agriculture hits close to home for all of us, because it requires every nation to think about food policy and every person to think about what we eat.

Few would dispute that animal agriculture has taken a harsh turn in the last half century. We have industrialized the production of animals for food, putting them wing to wing and shoulder to shoulder in factory farms. We confine animals in small cages and crates; mutilate them by cutting off their tails or beaks without painkillers; slaughter them when they’re too sick or injured to walk; and cause them immense chronic pain and disease through unhealthy breeding practices that swell their size and unnaturally accelerate their reproduction.

Factory farming not only overlooks our moral obligation to treat these animals decently, but also expends extraordinary amounts of energy in the process. A large portion of the global grain and soybean harvest goes to meat, egg, and milk production, and we waste huge volumes of water, energy, and chemicals to produce almost half a billion tons of meat and other animal products.

And of course, what goes in must come out. In the United States alone, cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and other animals raised on factory farms generate hundreds of millions of tons of manure—a volume that greatly exceeds the amount of land available to absorb it, making manure an often hazardous waste product that pollutes groundwater and putrefies the air. And then there’s the methane—one of the most potent heat-trapping gases—that comes out of cows from both ends.

According to the Smithsonian Institution, we bulldoze seven football fields’ worth of Brazilian rainforest every minute to make way for cattle grazing. This destroys natural habitats for countless wild species, and it transforms forests that take carbon dioxide out of the air into cow pastures that pump more of the stuff back into the atmosphere—with a huge net negative effect on the greenhouse gas equation.

If we are serious about addressing global climate change, we must look to our plates. Fortunately, millions of people are already doing just that. According to one recent Mintel study, while about 22 million Americans eat vegetarian or vegan all the time, another 113 million Americans regularly choose meat-free meals.

We can start with small steps, like avoiding meat produced from the worst factory farming systems. We can go meat-free on Mondays, or do what food writer Mark Bittman recommends: eat vegan before 6 p.m. each day. In short, we can embrace more well-rounded, healthier, and more sustainable diets that are better for us and for the planet. The solution does not just rest in some far-off place, but often right on the plate in front of us.

Wayne Pacelle is president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States.