Climate Change, Animal Agriculture, and Ethics

ABSTRACT The industrial animal‐agriculture sector is a significant source of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation. It produces greenhouse gas emissions (at least) on a par with the entire global transportation sector and is a leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, and freshwater scarcity. Given these outsized impacts, we might expect animal agriculture to feature centrally both in international and domestic climate policy, and in the expansive academic literatures on climate and animal ethics. This, however, is not the case. Rather, with few exceptions, the animal‐climate nexus has been as absent from international treaties as it has been from academic treatises. This article aims at identifying and addressing this oversight, particularly as it exists in the fields of climate and animal ethics. We show that, while climate ethicists occasionally identify animal agriculture as a leading source of emissions, they rarely afford it the attention they devote to the energy and transport sectors. On the other hand, to the extent most animal ethicists discuss climate change, they tend to focus narrowly on the vulnerabilities it creates for wild animals, while overlooking the extent (or implications) of farmed animals' contributions to global heating and environmental decline. In both cases, the result is a problematically restricted view of the nature and extent of the crisis, as well as the ethical stakes involved in addressing it—for human and nonhuman life alike. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change