Career contrarian Bjorn Lomborg is at it again. This time, he’s got an op-ed in USA Today that claims the climate benefits from going vegetarian are overblown and should be ignored.
You know what should be ignored? Everything Lomborg says and writes. This president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (which, incidentally, isn’t located in Denmark and has nothing to do with consensus) has a long history of cherry-picking data to come up with bogus arguments against climate solutions like choosing an electric vehicle or cutting fossil fuel use to appease their conservative funders.
In this recent piece, Lomborg argues that emissions from food are a small part of a person’s carbon footprint. So, he asserts, going vegetarian will only reduce an individual’s emissions by an average of 4.3 percent. (We would link to Lomborg’s citations for this stat, but his links are either broken or make no sense. How convenient.) Lomborg handwaves that since vegetarians spend less on food than omnivores, those savings will be spent on other things that will “cause more carbon dioxide emissions, cancelling about half the saved carbon emissions from going vegetarian.”
Putting aside the wealth of evidence that eating less meat is better for the environment and your waistline, there are several quarter-pound-burger-sized holes in Lomborg’s argument.
First, for those of us who don’t make $775k per year like Lomborg, saving money on food doesn’t mean that those savings go immediately to, say, ordering a 6,700 pound lathe that is emissions-intensive to ship. That money could go to school, daycare, health expenses, or a savings account where it doesn’t create any additional emissions. For Lomborg, who has long been a self-appointed champion of protecting the bank accounts of the poor from climate policies, to turn around and argue against people saving money might cause one to question his integrity. If, you know, he had any.
Still though, a reduction of 4.3 percent is still a reduction. These sort of de minimus arguments make no sense: sure, cutting down on meat isn’t going to be sufficient to keep the climate safe, but it is necessary.
“If it means so little then why do it” is an argument that could be used against voting, cutting candy from your diet, or taking any step to reduce your emissions. Here, Lomborg fails to think in the aggregate. For example, if you replace the light bulbs in your house with more efficient ones, your carbon footprint will shrink by an infinitesimal amount. But if we all choose to replace our lights, then we can make a huge impact in our collective emissions. The same logic applies to eating less meat.
So throw some shrimp on the barbie this weekend, but do remember that what we all eat does matter for the climate and for our health.
