[Speaker 2]

Welcome to the Unchained TV podcast with me, your host, Jane Velez Mitchell. We have breaking news for you. Now we all know the planet is in crisis.

 

Don’t need me to tell you that. Global warming is creating so many problems. There’s climate anxiety and that climate crisis is closer and closer.

 

We hear all the time about fossil fuels, how terrible fossil fuels are. But now there is a new paper suggesting fossil fuels are not the main culprit, that animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change. Now, this is an extraordinary development because it essentially means that everything that’s being done with the COP UN conferences is missing the point and that we are not putting the real culprit of climate change on trial.

 

We have the scientist who has just published this paper with us today, Dr. Gerard Wedderburn-Bishop, and he says he has the climate solution. Now, I wanna put up the paper. This looks very wonky.

 

Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy, a just published research paper. But what if we told you that this is the key to saving the planet? What if I told you the gentleman you are about to hear from has the real solution to climate change because he is documenting the real cause, the leading cause of climate change, which is being denied by the powers that be.

 

Dr. Wedderburn-Bishop, give us, in plain English, your thesis. What are you saying, sir?

 

[Speaker 1]

Thank you, Jane. Yes, and I thought I’d actually do something different today and tell you the origin story about how this came to be. And I think it, well, I just realized really, it probably explains better the concepts that we’ve worked through to come up with this result, that animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change.

 

Over 10 years- Go ahead. Yes, okay. Thank you.

 

And thank you for your work, Jane. You do amazing work and greatly admire what you do. So thank you.

 

And thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, so over 10 years ago, I left work. My job was to map deforestation for one of the state governments in Australia, Queensland.

 

And we were watching as 2,500 acres of bushland was being cleared every day. And over 90% of that was for grass-fed industries. So I sort of, this had been building in me to watching this, and the destruction is unbelievable.

 

You know, the noise of the big dozers, the clanking of the chain, they literally pull, you know, 60 foot, 100 foot trees. They pull them out of the ground, literally with this chain. It’s so destructive, so efficient at converting from forest to grazing land.

 

And so this gets to you after a while. It gets to your soul. It makes you realise we can’t keep doing this.

 

So I left work after decades in government, federal and state. I then was headhunted by a group called Beyond Zero Emissions. And their job was to look at Australia’s emissions of agriculture and land use, and see how they could come down to zero.

 

And we did a plan. We did a plan that was published in 2014. And that is the origin story of these papers that have just been published.

 

So I’ll tell you the discoveries that we made that led to these papers. So first of all, my job was to delve into Australia’s greenhouse accounts. Okay, every country does an analysis, an assessment of their emissions, and which gases and what causes.

 

And they submit that to the United Nations each year. Now, these inventory rules were devised decades ago, and they have controlled, and they actually heavily influence how we think about climate change. And they control, in other words, our policy response, what we do about it.

 

We know there’s this much climate change, this much emissions going in the atmosphere. So what do we do about it? So my job was to delve into the dark arts, if you like, of greenhouse gas accounting, and to look at Australia’s national emissions and our inventory.

 

So this struck me. Now, tell me what you think of this. When we burn fossil fuels, gas, oil, coal, we produce carbon dioxide, right?

 

Now, when we cut down forests, we do the same thing. In Australia, they bulldoze the trees together, they call it stick raking. They push them together, then they burn it, and they burn it, and they burn it, until it’s all gone, it’s all ash.

 

So either burning fossil fuels or burning forests produces carbon dioxide. Now, everyone knows that, that’s no surprise. But the interesting thing was this, was that the people doing the deforestation, like the industries driving that, the grass-fed industries, basically, they were being gifted offsets off their emissions to the order of a discount of 2 3rds of their emissions.

 

Now, deforestation releases an awful lot of carbon dioxide, but they were gifted this discount of 2 3rds. Now, it turns out that that’s the way we count it. We count fossil fuels fully, and we count deforestation only a third or so of the emissions.

 

[Speaker 2]

Okay, I’m gonna jump in, because we gotta break it down. So you’re saying a new study finds that agriculture has caused three times more warning than fossil fuels, and then you say that animal agriculture causes more climate change than any other human activity. Now, you have done a video on this that is also on Unchained TV.

 

Let’s play the clip. If you wanna simplify it, which is what we’re trying to do today, it’s that they’re accounting it wrong, bad accounting. You know how people get in trouble for doing bad accounting when it comes to money?

 

Well, this is bad accounting when it comes to climate change. Let’s listen, and then we’ll discuss on the other side. All right.

 

[Speaker 1]

Agriculture and climate change. This video explores the three developments in climate accounting and climate science that upend our understanding of which human activities cause climate change. The first is consistent carbon accounting, the subject of a 2024 paper.

 

By IPCC convention, we measure the full carbon dioxide emission from fossil fuels, but only about a third the emissions from land clearing. This is inconsistent because all carbon emissions are equally absorbed by growing vegetation and the oceans, with the remainder staying in the atmosphere. The airborne fraction affects our climate.

 

But emissions from both of them behave the same way in the real world. So why account for them differently? Using consistent accounting, we find that land clearing has emitted more carbon than fossil fuels.

 

Extensive land users, therefore, become heavy emitters.

 

[Speaker 2]

And the most extensive land users are animal agriculture. So basically what you’re saying, sir, is that the powers that be, including the United Nations, are doing bad accounting when it comes to the causes of climate change, under-reporting animal agriculture because they’re under-reporting forest destruction as opposed to fossil fuels. And now it’s very interesting that you should say that because there have been articles that have questioned the policies of the IPCC.

 

I will play those in a second, but tell us in people terms, why on earth, given that our earth is in crisis, would they do bad accounting when it comes to what’s causing climate change?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, thanks, Jane. There are actually good reasons for doing what they did early on. You see, when the rules, when the conventions were developed over three decades ago, they knew that most of the emission of carbon from any source was actually drawn down by other growing vegetation.

 

So nature has been doing an amazing job at sucking down our CO2. And so what they reasoned was this, that they reasoned that what’s left in the atmosphere is the part of that emission that actually influences climate. What’s drawn down by vegetation is locked up.

 

Therefore, it does no longer influence climate. And there is logic in that, except that exactly that same process happens to fossil fuel carbon dioxide. When we burn fossil fuel carbon dioxide, most of it is drawn down into vegetation, but we count it differently.

 

So as you said, you hit the nail on the head. It’s just due to dodgy accounting and it’s accounting rules are hidden. Most of us don’t delve into that level of how we add up, how we look at our emissions, but that’s the problem.

 

[Speaker 2]

Okay, so let me go to an article that I wanna highlight. The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet. A leaked draft revealed how the meat industry is obstructing efforts to curb climate change.

 

So, you’re saying, well, this was done in good faith. They did this because they thought it made sense at the time but that article implies that they know full well, the IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It’s the UN’s leading climate change agency.

 

They have those infamous COP conferences where they get together all over the world and nothing much is accomplished. Climate change is just getting worse. Now, if they were so right and you were so wrong, climate change would be getting better because they keep having these climate conferences, but it’s just getting worse.

 

And even mainstream media is starting to describe these COP conferences as a bit of a joke. Now, you’re saying, well, you know, they were good-hearted and they’re blah, blah, blah, but this article implies that there may be financial motives or industry pressure at work to suggest strongly to the UN, no, do not recommend a plant-based diet. I can tell you that organizations like the Plant-Based Treaty have been fighting like crazy to get just plant-based meals served at these COP conferences.

 

And we’ve had a reporter at the Glasgow COP conference go in and be hard-pressed to find there were a couple of measly vegan items. They’re serving meat. So is it a question of meat eaters don’t wanna change their habits?

 

Is it a question of the meat industry putting pressure on the United Nations? Not to make a switch and say animal agriculture is the leading cause. I would guess it’s a combination of those factors.

 

What do you say, Doctor?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yeah, I think you’re dead right, Jane. The industries know full well what’s really going on, and they’ve known it for a long time. And they’ve hidden behind the rules, if you like, the conventions.

 

In fact, they try to double down on pulling the wool over our eyes. But you may have noticed that, well, in Australia, at least, the green beef and the climate-neutral beef claims that they were making just a few years ago, they’ve realized that this is just not quite the case. So they’ve silently withdrawn those claims.

 

But they still push ahead with the disinformation, and they still push hard. You see, the government, the United Nations body that looks after climate is a really interesting combination of two faces. You see, there’s dozens, in fact, hundreds of scientists who work together on climate science.

 

And they’ve put out these big reports on climate science, what is the science, what’s happening, and trying to get a better understanding of what’s going on. And that science is solid. However, from that science, they produce policy documents and guidelines, which are what we’re talking about here, the guidelines on how to count emissions.

 

And those documents are actually policy documents. They’re political documents. So that’s where the lobbying and the influence comes in.

 

You know, the meat and dairy industries lobbies, in fact, outnumber the fossil fuel lobbies at some of these climate conferences. So they know that truth will come out eventually, but they’re increasingly trying hard to keep a lid on it. But that’s the problem.

 

[Speaker 2]

If the truth comes out eventually, it may be too late. Now, according to Sir David Attenborough, who has a great documentary called Breaking Boundaries, there’s only something like nine boundaries. Like once we destroy the ice caps, we can’t call amazon.com or go on our phones and order new ice caps. Once species are extinct, aside from some crazy scientists trying to play God with the wolves, we’re not gonna be able to get these species back. These boundaries are being broken at lightning speed. So it’s not a question of the truth will come out.

 

The truth has to come out soon. There are some who say we’re already past the point of no return. And part of the problem is the mainstream media is not covering this issue.

 

I wanna give you an example. There was an incredible article in the New York Times in 2023. So now just about two years ago, and it says, save the planet, put down that hamburger.

 

Researchers examined the diets of 55,500 people and found that vegans are responsible for 75% less in greenhouse gases than meat eaters. This was a Oxford University study. So not some little side thing or some irrelevant group.

 

This is Oxford University, one of the greatest institutions, educational institutions in the world. Now, nobody picked up on this article. And this article wasn’t like the top.

 

Listen, this is essentially the solution to climate change. If everybody reduced their greenhouse gas emissions footprint by 75%, then collectively we would reduce human induced greenhouse gas emissions by 75%. You’d think this would be on the front, right at the very top.

 

Hey, we’ve got a solution. You’d think that CNN and NBC and CBS and ABC and all these places would cover it. No, not one pickup.

 

See, advertiser-based mainstream media, which is why I started Unchained TV. I started Unchained TV because I was in the mainstream media for 30 years. You don’t have to have somebody knock on your door and say, hey, don’t talk about this.

 

All you see is the advertisers. The advertisers tell you who’s keeping the lights on at the news media, okay? And it’s mostly fast food and pharmaceuticals.

 

And they are one in the same because people wouldn’t need all those drugs if they weren’t eating all the bad food that’s giving them high cholesterol, heart disease, obesity, cancer. Nobody talks, nobody in the media talks about the fact that processed meat is officially declared cancer causing by the World Health Organization. Nobody, they never mention it.

 

I mean, you really have to dig hard to find that. So when we say, oh, you know, there’s these accounting errors, are we underplaying it? Is this, I don’t wanna be conspiratorial, but is this a conspiracy to keep the truth about climate change from us at our own expense?

 

Because everybody’s gonna suffer eventually, even the executives at the meat industry. If the planet becomes unhabitable for humans because it’s just too damn hot, they will be affected too. I mean, is this mass slow suicide?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, you’re dead right, Jane. The planetary boundaries that we’ve busted through that we know we’ve way overstepped, six of the nine planetary boundaries, we’re already over the limit. And the greatest driver in at least five of those is actually agriculture, the greatest driver.

 

That’s well-recognized. But as you say, it’s just not coming out. Everyone targets fossil fuels.

 

If you stop someone in the street and said, what’s causing climate change? They would say carbon dioxide and fossil fuels. But the fact is, it’s cutting down the three trillion trees that we have on planet Earth.

 

It’s releasing all that methane that we have, methane that in the short term is the biggest lever we have actually of controlling climate. But the methane just, it paused for a while just after the turn of the century. The methane in the atmosphere paused for a while and everyone was saying, oh, this is wonderful.

 

We don’t have to worry about methane anymore. But the trouble, after a few years, it just kept going up. And now it’s going up more steeply than ever.

 

And the interesting thing is that they don’t know exactly, they can’t put their finger on where this methane’s coming from. But there was a report came out in one of the Australian universities just last year that said that they looked at slaughterhouses across Australia and they looked at numbers of animals. Australia has tight regulations.

 

They have an agency that counts all the agricultural statistics. And they were saying there’s so many cattle in Australia, so many sheep, et cetera. But this study looked at how much meat is being produced and all of the stats about the animals.

 

And they found that the number of animals could be under, of beef cattle could be undercounted by 70%. And that’s Australia, one of the most regulated countries in the world. So you, and it’s because the farmers were hiding their numbers.

 

They didn’t, they pay taxes based on the number of cattle. So they don’t want to declare the full number of cattle. And if that’s happening in Australia, it’s got to be happening in many other countries.

 

So all this methane and all the trees and carbon dioxide emitted there. And yet, as you say, we’re still being told, look away. Look away.

 

This is a real problem. And we’re only, and papers like these that have come out recently. And mind you, my two papers are getting a lot of traction, which I’m very pleased to see in science circles, because that’s where it starts.

 

It’s got to start in the science for the group think to change. And I think it might be getting that traction. So these are interesting times.

 

We’re starting to open our eyes to the true effect of what we’re doing. What influences climate change? And biodiversity, as you say, and nutrient pollution and deforestation and water cycles and ocean dead zones and water pollution.

 

All of those things, the biggest cause of those things is animal agriculture. It’s well known.

 

[Speaker 2]

We’re talking to Dr. Gerard Wedderburn-Bissup, who has published this paper. And, you know, it looks sort of innocuous and not very dramatic, but it literally could be the key to saving our planet, saving the human race and all the other species on this planet. And it simply says increased transparency and accounting conventions could benefit climate policy.

 

And these papers are written just because they’re scientific papers in a very wonky fashion. I mean, if I were writing the headline as somebody who worked in news, even tabloid at times, I would say, hey, wake up human race. We’ve put the wrong culprit on trial for the climate crisis.

 

And the real killer is sitting in the gallery laughing, but we can’t do that. So we’re trying to break it down for you and tell you why this paper is so absolutely extraordinary. And the three reasons are, well, first, we’ve already covered one, bad accounting.

 

And that’s sort of the overarching reason. They’re not counting the burning of trees and the destroying of forests. And correct me if I’m wrong, I’m no scientist, but the bottom line is trees absorb carbon.

 

If you destroy all the trees and you give planet earth a buzz cut, there is not gonna be the ability to absorb that carbon. That is a lost opportunity. So I wanna ask you about that.

 

Is part of the problem that it’s like, if it doesn’t exist, we don’t count it. The opportunity cost, we have destroyed, well, you can tell me what percentage of planet earth’s forests for cattle grazing and to grow food to feed 92 billion animals we kill every year. And unfortunately, the number of animals being killed continues to rise to mind boggling levels.

 

So is that part of the accounting problem that we’ve destroyed all these forests over thousands of years, really, but accelerating right in the last 200 years, certainly. And because those forests aren’t there, they’re not absorbing carbon, which is not allowing… If you can’t absorb carbon, then the carbon remains in the atmosphere.

 

But does that make it trickier to calculate that?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, the climate science is actually going ahead in leaps and bounds at the moment. We’ve got these new measures to measure the impact of each gas, which I’ve used in the paper, rather than the old measures that look at the time of emission. We’ve got a lot better understanding of atmospheric chemistry.

 

So we know that when we release methane, we produce all these downstream gases and further warming. But at the same time, we’re still using the outdated accounting. There are two other factors apart from the dodgy accounting of trees.

 

[Speaker 2]

We’re gonna get to that in a second. Let me get to this. Gene just got here.

 

So the industrial development and A plus billion using fossil fuels has no negative effect on the atmosphere. Am I understanding what he is saying? Essentially, I think Gene is challenging you, saying, hey, fossil fuels, all that smoke going out.

 

I don’t think he’s saying that. He’s saying it’s certainly got problems, but it is not the leading cause is what he’s saying. Can you clarify and answer her challenge, doctor?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes. Yeah, Gene, you’re dead right. This is what most of us think.

 

And the reason for that is because we follow the government line. Now, the other interesting part, the third factor in this paper that we just looked at, the third factor that makes a huge difference as to what has caused the climate change we’re now experiencing is another dodgy accounting. And that is that we, up until now, we haven’t, well, when we burn fossil fuels, we create carbon dioxide, which warms the planet, but we also release aerosols.

 

If you’ve ever been to a big industrial city, particularly in Asia, Europe’s cleaned up their act. They had these gray skies that were causing acid rain. North America’s cleaned up their act.

 

They’re cleaning their skies. But in the big industrial cities in Asia, you might see this white smog or gray smog that just hangs over the city. It irritates your sinuses and your eyes.

 

And it’s aerosols, and it’s produced from burning fossil fuels, like mostly things like coal and dirty diesel, which the shipping uses. But these are really interesting, and they’re just uncounted. They’re off the books.

 

The aerosols are cooling emissions. They reflect the sun’s rays. So the aerosols cause cooling.

 

And they’re incredibly efficient and effective. And they have prevented, they have masked, if you like, three quarters of the warming from fossil fuels. So yes, we’ve produced an awful lot of fossil fuel emissions, which is in the atmosphere, still, some of it.

 

But we’ve also produced a lot of masking that has cooled nearly a degree of warming.

 

[Speaker 2]

Let me jump in and clarify this, because this is really complicated. So you’re saying as part of fossil fuels, as part of fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are released, all the smoke, right? Oh, it’s burning our eyes.

 

There’s also a cooling element within that fossil fuels that goes out, and that cooling element is called aerosols?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, exactly right. And up until now, we just have not counted those aerosols.

 

[Speaker 2]

Okay, now I wanna jump in and play your clip on that in your video, and then we’re gonna discuss it more. Pay attention. This is like an SAT test, all right, people?

 

I’m no scientist. But if you think, if we can simplify it so that the general public can understand it, that’s the first step. Because right now, this is all going over everybody’s head and nobody’s paying attention while we are getting to the point of no return in the climate crisis, all right?

 

This is extremely important that we focus on the fact that within the fossil fuels, there’s something called aerosols that also cools. So it’s kind of like reducing the impact of the fossil fuels. Correct me if I’m wrong, okay?

 

But that’s not counted. So all that’s counted is the negative part of fossil fuels, whereas the aerosols are not counted. Therefore, that continues to exaggerate fossil fuels’ impact on climate change.

 

Now, with that little background, watch this, and then we’re gonna discuss it on the other side.

 

[Speaker 1]

The third change is inclusive accounting, including both heating and cooling emissions. The paper that explores these last two developments was published in February, 2025. So let’s take a closer look at these two.

 

The IPCC has published effective radiative forcing of 11 gases that show warming caused by each gas from 1750 until 2020. The aviation industry routinely uses ERFs because it’s similar to agriculture, a combination of long and short-lived emissions and other atmospheric interactions. We can see the warming from each gas in the IPCC diagram.

 

This is carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, halocarbons, and others, including cooling aerosols. ERF boosts the relative warming from methane by a factor of three. Cooling aerosols are emitted when we burn fossil fuels.

 

Their impact is strong. They have prevented nearly a degree centigrade, masking three quarters of all fossil fuels’ warming. Emissions of each gas are then allocated to sectors, and we can see in this graphic how each gas contributes to each sector’s warming or cooling.

 

Above the line is heating, and below the line is cooling. The combined warming caused by each sector is the black dot. This is fossil fuels, which is responsible for 18% of warming up to 2020.

 

This is agriculture, making up 60% of global warming, and within the agriculture sector, animal agriculture is responsible for 53% of global warming. Animal agriculture is therefore the leading cause of climate change.

 

[Speaker 2]

This is, I gotta do my breaking news banner all over again. This is breaking news. This is probably the most important discussion happening on planet Earth right now because if we don’t have a planet, well, the planet will always survive us, but if we don’t have a livable planet, then nothing else matters.

 

And there’s a new paper that this doctor, scientist has put out that makes the case that the impact of fossil fuels is being exaggerated because it’s not including the aerosols that cool it down, all right? And the impact of animal agriculture is being underestimated due to accounting, whatever you wanna call it, ledger domain or whatever they say, fancy accounting. And this is as a result possibly of pressure from the meat and dairy industry.

 

And who knows, other industries that also make money from the meat and dairy industry would include, for example, the pharmaceutical industry. I’m not saying that the big pharma is putting on the pressure, but what I am saying is that there is a huge, huge, huge financial incentive for some people to keep the impact of meat and dairy minimized when it comes to climate change. Because you ask the average person on the street, well, hey, how are you counteracting fossil fuels?

 

Not everybody can go out and buy an electric car. It’s very amorphous. It’s not like I could stop my fossil fuel emissions, but I can three times a day choose to eat a plant-based diet.

 

That’s something very realistic that I can do, and I have been doing for the last 28 years. So the point is that this is shocking. It is shocking.

 

And I know that there has been some controversy in terms of why is this reporting happening, but it hasn’t gotten into the mainstream. When I find articles on this kind of issue, it’s usually on some not big network. So here we have Green Queen reporting that World Bank bats for alternative proteins, calls for shift away from meat and dairy subsidies.

 

The World Bank itself, this is a World Bank website, says changes in farm and food production can cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third. And then the third headline says, World Bank tiptoes into fiery debate over meat emissions. So we’re basically having a behind the scenes battle over whether they should come out, essentially.

 

This is a coming out story. Doctor?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, absolutely. It’s been hidden for way too long. And in fact, to get back to where we started on how we measure emissions from cutting down trees, I spoke to one of the lead authors of the Global Carbon Budget.

 

This is the reference body, if you like, for emissions in carbon dioxide. And he said that he was involved with the United Nations three decades ago when they were forming those rules, those conventions. And he recommended that they use full accounting of all emissions, as I have done.

 

But it was overruled because the rules that came out were considered a policy document, the guidelines. That’s considered policy, and therefore they’re influenced by different countries’ input. So yes, we’ve been doing some tricky accounting, some creative accounting on several different things.

 

We’ve been discounting emissions from land clearing. We’ve been ignoring cooling emissions. And it works out also that when we compare methane to carbon dioxide, the warming from methane using the latest and the most accurate climate science we have, which is a measure called effective radiative forcing, forget the name, but using the best science we have, we find out that methane has caused three times more warming than we thought it had caused using our accounting rules.

 

So you put those three things together and it flips the script. It totally changes what our understanding is of what has caused the climate change that we now experience. What is the driver of those extreme storms, that flooding, those fires, the ice caps melting, the ocean currents changing?

 

What is the real cause of those? And we find rather than fossil fuels, it’s agriculture and mostly, 90%, animal agriculture. So this definitely flips the script.

 

It’s not new science. I’m using other people’s data, not using the best data, the global carbon budget data and other data about emissions from land clearing. And I’m using the IPCC’s own science on effective radiative forcing, but comparing gases basically.

 

So using the latest science and the latest data shows that we’ve got it wrong. We’ve had it wrong for decades because we set those rules when we did to the wrong measure. Now, the industry pressure will be to maintain those rules, to keep the rules in place.

 

But what’s gonna happen, and I’m getting good traction, good feedback from the science community, that the science will move on. The science will recognise all of these things that I’ve been saying, and it already has. I’m not the first on any of these three measures.

 

I’m not the first to publish on that. I’ve just put them together. So the science is already out there, and my paper is pulling it together.

 

It has a waffly title. It’s awful. It’s a terrible title.

 

I had a much better title to start with, but in the review process, in the peer review process, it’s very difficult to get a paper over the line. You have to tone down all the…

 

[Speaker 2]

Doctor, you’re doing more than 99.999999% of the population to get the truth out there. We applaud you. What we’re trying to do is break it down so the general public can understand, because they can’t really challenge the talking points of the establishment unless they understand it themselves.

 

I cannot go out and argue animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change unless I understand why animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change. So we have to break it down. Now, there’s so much else I wanna talk to you about.

 

The second, we jumped ahead. The second issue that you raised, you raised three issues. One, overarching bad accounting.

 

Number three, which we talked about, is aerosols not being included since they are a cooling agent that cools fossil fuels and they’re emitted by fossil fuels. Since they don’t count that, it exaggerates the impact of fossil fuels. But then there’s a heating element that is even more complicated.

 

So put your thinking caps on, people. I’m gonna concentrate. This is a very short one, but this is crucial.

 

Here’s another thing that isn’t being counted.

 

[Speaker 1]

Agriculture and climate change. The second development is to use effective radiative forcing rather than global warming potentials to compare different gases. ERF is the best climate science there is.

 

It’s not a future projection, but fitted to known measurements.

 

[Speaker 2]

Okay, effective radiation. I can’t even say it. In people terms, you’re talking to a third grader now.

 

What the heck are you talking about?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, and Jane, it’s not that easy to convey because what happens in the atmosphere is very complex. You have different chemical reactions at different heights in the atmosphere. You have methane, for example.

 

It breaks down to form a little carbon dioxide eventually. It also breaks down to form ozone. And ozone at the surface of the planet is a strong greenhouse gas.

 

[Speaker 2]

But let’s get back to the effective radiative forcing, if I said that right.

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, effective radiative forcing is a model, if you like, that combines all the impacts of all the different gases. So we’ve had other measures that compare gases, say methane to carbon dioxide, and they’re trying to fiddle that to downplay the impact of methane. But if you look at the best science there is now, which is this effective radiative forcing, you find that the impact of methane is three times more than if you were to use the measures that are now in the guidelines, in the rules.

 

So, you know, we’ve used odgy accounting. We’ve also used measures to compare gases that do a terrible job of measuring what the real warming is from methane, in particular. Methane is the big one.

 

[Speaker 2]

Here’s the thing. I thought, maybe I’m completely wrong, but I thought it was something about reflection. I don’t understand effective radiation, whatever that was.

 

Say it what it is, and then explain it as quietly as you possibly can, as simply as you can.

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, effective radiative forcing is a, it’s a measure of our emissions, what our emissions do to the temperature on the surface of the planet. How much warming do they cause? The radiative forcing is a measure of watts per square metre.

 

In other words, if you were to shine a light bulb above your head, you would receive a certain amount of warming from that light bulb, from that heat source, if you like, on your head. Mine in particular. But that warming depends on the strength of the light bulb, right?

 

Now, in climate science, each of the gases traps heat, like carbon dioxide traps heat, and it vibrates. Methane traps heat, and those molecules vibrate, and they emit warming. So the energy that’s being taken from the sun’s rays and then hits these gases and then warms the planet.

 

If we didn’t have these gases, by the way, we’d live on a frozen planet. So we need some of it, but we don’t need as much as what we have now. And so the effective radiative forcing is a measure of how much warming do we feel on the surface of the planet from that amount of gas in the atmosphere.

 

And it is the best science we have right now. These are the best models. They’re not forward projections, they’re fitted to data.

 

[Speaker 2]

But you’re saying it’s being miscalculated.

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, using the measure that we use now, which is a thing called global warming potential, it actually miscounts the warming from the non-carbon dioxide gases, particularly methane. Methane’s the biggie. Methane is really interesting because even though it’s here for only 10 years or so, methane has caused, since 1750, methane has caused half of the current global warming we are now experiencing.

 

So methane has been responsible for 0.6 of a degree of global warming. Now, you don’t hear that very often either. That’s hidden away.

 

[Speaker 2]

Let me jump in and ask a question because this is so important and so informative. But when people talk about methane and animal agriculture, they generally make a joke, oh, cow burps and cow farts. Now, why is that a ridiculous to reduce it to that when it’s so much more?

 

And how would you characterize animal agriculture’s contribution to methane gas?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, well, it’s well known that methane, the largest source of methane is animal agriculture. It comes from them digesting their food, their grass and burping and et cetera, as you said. It also comes from the waste that’s washed out.

 

It also comes from, in piggeries, for example, all their waste is washed into lagoons, which you don’t wanna go anywhere near and they produce an enormous amount of methane. And not only that, it’s also when these foods, when animals are eaten, the waste that is then produced from us and in landfill, it also produces methane. So methane is by far the biggest, by far the biggest source of methane is animal agriculture.

 

There’s no question of that, that’s known science. Close behind that is methane from fracking, from coal seam gas. And that comes from coal mines and comes from natural gas exploration, leaks in both of those.

 

So, yes.

 

[Speaker 2]

Okay, so I wanna get back to a couple of things while we have a few minutes left. One is that, again, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m no scientist, but my understanding is back in 2006, the United Nations published a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow, which is still online. You can just Google livestock’s long shadow and it comes up.

 

And essentially it says that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation combined. And when people think of fossil fuels, a lot of times they think of transportation. There’s giant factories, but again, they have no control over that, they have control over what they drive.

 

So when the United Nations said that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions in all transportation combined, that was a big thing. Again, not getting the kind of coverage, but then my understanding is they began backtracking on that. And according to some reports, there was industry influence and then it somehow went down to 18% and then it went down to like 14.5%, which is what a lot of news media cover. No wonder they don’t think it’s worth covering when it’s only listed as 14.5%. But that can’t really be true if what you’re saying is right, it’s the leading cause. So do you know anything about the politics of why the United Nations in 2006 essentially admitted sort of what you’re saying, that animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation combined, and then proceeded to backtrack on that for decades?

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, yes. That report was a seminal report, it was brilliant at the time and well needed. It didn’t count everything, of course, but what happened to the guys who were the authors of that report is that they were hounded out.

 

See, that organisation that produced the report was the Food and Agricultural Organisation. And that United Nations body is dominated by industry. And of course, the biggest of those is the one with the most money is the meat and dairy sectors.

 

So they hounded out these authors. Some of them left the agency, some of them retired. Some of them wouldn’t speak to media after that.

 

It was a terrible travesty. And then they got industry involved and they downgraded the 18% to 14.5%. But of course, they didn’t count things properly which is what this work does. So yes, for so long, the emissions from meat and dairy have been downplayed.

 

And there’s lots of pressure now, right now, to change the metrics that we have to measure methane. And from this work, we know that methane is under-reported, but what they wanna do is further reduce, pardon me, further reduce the influence of methane. So they’re coming up with all sorts of new metrics called Global Warming GWP Star, which is a model which says that, okay, a constant number of cattle, constant emissions won’t produce any more warming.

 

The problem with that is that it’s not constant. The emissions are going up, they’re skyrocketing in the atmosphere. And also their constant level is disastrous for the planet.

 

And the interesting thing about this research is that their research also shows that if you reduce methane, it actually causes cooling. So they’re arguing that a constant level of methane is fine. But methane is like, we’ve got two big levers to control the climate.

 

One of them is carbon dioxide, and that’s a big lever that takes a long time to move. And one of them is methane, which is also a big lever, but it can move very quickly. Now we have this methane lever and we can move it very quickly.

 

We can move it by going away from meat and dairy production very quickly. And that can actually cool the planet. In fact, it’s the only gas.

 

Methane is the only gas that can cool the planet in the near term, in decades, not centuries. So it’s a farce what they’ve done. They’re trying to minimize the so-called impact of methane, but it’s actually much stronger than they recognize even now.

 

[Speaker 2]

We are speaking with a scientist who says he has the climate change solution, Dr. Gerard Wedderburn-Bissup. And he has just published this paper, which sounds a little milquetoast, increased transparency and accounting conventions could benefit climate policy, but its impact is revolutionary. Summarize it, sir.

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, summarize it. There’s three things. Okay, if you were standing at a bus stop and someone says, animal agriculture, the leading cause of climate change, how can that possibly be?

 

Okay, well, there’s three things, I think, that if you can just remember these three things, this is the basis of that. Number one, we’d be using dodgy accounting to measure tree clearing. Number two, we’ve been using the wrong metric to compare gases, methane and carbon dioxide.

 

And number three, we haven’t counted at all the cooling emissions. So that’s it. It’s dodgy accounting for deforestation, it’s comparing gases and it’s cooling emissions.

 

Those three things add up to make a huge change to our understanding of what is causing current present day climate change.

 

[Speaker 2]

What needs to happen to get the United Nations and governments around the world to realize this? Because the implications of what you’re saying is essentially another way of saying that is saying, the US government is fueling the climate crisis with its subsidies to animal agriculture. Whereas animal agriculture, according to your paper, is the leading cause.

 

Whereas the US government subsidizes animal agriculture in the billions of dollars of the average fast food hamburger would cost not a couple of bucks, but maybe 30 bucks if it wasn’t subsidized by the US government. Wherefore the US government and other Western governments, but particularly the US government is funding the climate crisis. The very crisis that many in the government over time, I’m not talking about any administration here, have said they wanna solve.

 

So they’re spending a lot of money trying to solve the climate crisis that they are actually creating themselves. It’s criminal.

 

[Speaker 1]

Yes, it’s absolutely criminal, Jane. And these two papers actually go into the policy implications of this work. And the World Bank produced a report last year that looked at agricultural subsidies globally.

 

And they discovered that, this language is rather interesting, that they discovered that the agricultural subsidies are overwhelmingly harmful to the planet. And of course, most of those go to meat and dairy. So those policies are what this paper targets.

 

If we gain a new understanding of the dangers, the full impact of deforestation, that will put more money into the carbon market to stop deforestation. If we gain a new understanding of the emissions from agriculture, that puts new emphasis on policies that rein in that colossus that produces all these greenhouse gases. And subsidies are an obvious place to start.

 

The subsidies distort the market so fully that we think meat and dairy is cheap. It’s not, it’s only because of the subsidies. But also, no one is paying for the harms to the planet.

 

The climate harms and the water harms, et cetera, no one’s paying for those. So the subsidies are a start, but also the climate harms are a big part of the future. We must change those policies.

 

[Speaker 2]

I could talk to you all day long. The question is, how do we get the world to, I think some very smart people are aware of this. Bill Gates actually went on national television and said, we need to switch to synthetic meat, which was his nerdy way of saying, we need to stop subsidizing animal agriculture and pushing animal agriculture.

 

And he was laughed at, Bill Gates. So the question is, how do we make this change? How do we convince the powers that be that it is in their self-interest, which obviously it is.

 

I remember taking this history course, nothing to do with animals or anything, but this professor was talking about people on Easter Island and they’re in this remote island and they have these giant statues that they’re famous for, and they love to roll them around with trees, big logs. And they kept chopping their trees and chopping their trees and chopping their trees. At a certain point, the professor said, they had to realize if they chop down that last tree, since they’re on a remote island, they’re spelling their own death.

 

But he said, they went ahead and did it anyway. That’s where we’re at. We are committing slow suicide because we are not looking at the real causes.

 

I myself personally was told, you be quiet. When I tried to raise this issue, I would say six or seven years ago at a climate rally, I was told to shut up. People don’t wanna hear it because they don’t wanna change their behavior.

 

They love their meat. They love eating animals. So, I’m 30 years recovering as a recovering alcoholic.

 

I thought I couldn’t go a day without a drink. And guess what? I haven’t had a drink for 30 years.

 

We can wake up. We usually have to hit bottom though. But in this case, we have to collectively hit bottom and how many fires, floods and tornadoes and the media covers that.

 

I call it catastrophe porn. They’re not talking about the solution. They’re just getting ratings off of the horror.

 

We have to do something about it and we have to do something now. Excuse me. I get upset when I talk about this because we’re killing our planet.

 

Please download on Shane TV. We are the world’s only vegan streaming television network. So, it’s a vegan Netflix.

 

Okay, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. But I love Unchained TV.

 

[Speaker 1]

Unchained, Unchained TV. Your life will change, it’s just that easy. Unchained TV has all sorts of content for everybody.

 

[Speaker 2]

Unchained TV changed my life. Unchained TV is crushing it. I love Unchained TV.

 

Unchained TV is my go-to. Unchained TV. Who knew?

 

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