Peter Singer
speaker
866 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard 20 Apr
Peter Singer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So it's a wide range of people who've led rich and fulfilling lives in many, many ways.
You're right.
It's called Lives Well Lived.
You can find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, including, of course, Mindscape.
Thanks a lot, Sean.
It's been great talking to you.
We're talking about an estimated 200 billion animals raised for food each year. Animal raising industry clearly contributes to climate change. It's greater than the emissions of all the cars that are being driven around the world. It's very substantial.
Animals are sentient beings. They have interests in living a decent life, not suffering pain. And we violate their interests all the time. Chickens and pigs and dairy cows and laying hens. Maybe to a somewhat lesser extent the beef cows. Their lives are really bad. We are inflicting suffering on them.
Thanks very much, Lynn. I'm happy to be with you.
We're talking about an estimated 200 billion animals raised for food each year. And I'm not including in that wild-caught fish, who would make the number go several times that. I'm just talking about the animals we actually raise from birth to death, and the death, of course, we cause.
And the largest proportion of those are chickens and fish, but there are very large numbers of all of those animals you mentioned.
Well, there are multiple impacts on the environment. We're all concerned now about climate change, and that is one really important impact. The animal raising industry clearly contributes to climate change. Estimates vary. Something like 15% is a reasonable estimate. Particularly when you take into account the power of methane, which the ruminant animals in particular emit.
And it's especially over a short time period, like a 20-year period, it's perhaps 80 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. And people often don't factor into it that we really need to talk about the next 20 years, because if we don't, we've lost the whole game. And they have put a lower value on methane because it does break down faster than carbon dioxide. but not fast enough.
So that's one difference. Another important impact it has on the environment is that it's a huge waste of food to raise animals in confinement and then have to grow food to feed them. Because the animals just to live and move around, and at least in the case of the birds and mammals, keep their bodies warm, have to use a lot of the food value just to do that.
And of course, also to form bones and other things that we don't even eat. So we're wasting a lot of the good agricultural land. We don't really need as much agricultural cleared land as we have, except for the fact that we're feeding a lot of this grain and soybeans to animals. So we could leave a lot more land to grow trees and absorb more carbon again.
We would also have a lot less manure, of course, concentrated manure, which gets into rivers and pollutes rivers. And if any of your listeners happen to live near these places, they will know that it pollutes the air very badly. Factory farms simply stink.
Well, it's greater than the emissions of all the cars that are being driven around the world. And of course, most of these cars are still fossil fuel driven. It's very substantial. It's something that is also easier for us to end because we can end it just by switching to a plant-based diet, which is an entirely healthy diet that people can live on.
Or even if they just reduce significantly the amount of animal products they're eating, that's going to make a big help. Whereas some of the other things that we need to cut out require new technologies that we don't necessarily have to guarantee that we have a secure and constant supply of electricity. People are thinking about how best to do that, and I hope they get there.
But this is something that we can do immediately and that will make a big difference to slowing climate change.
Well, it will vary with each of those species. Chicken is the most efficient converter. And we're talking about something still even there, like three pounds of grain for one pound of chicken. And in fact, if we're talking about protein, we can talk about protein because the grain is actually way dry and the chicken, of course, is not way dry.
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