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America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
“The 1992–1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak” sounds like a randomly generated target article for a round of the Wikipedia Game. But it goes a long way to explaining, well, me.
I was two months old when Washington State health officials informed the public about a massive E. coli contamination associated with hamburgers from Jack in the Box, and 3 months old when President Bill Clinton addressed the crisis on national television. My mom swore our family off eating red meat in response — understandably, since the outbreak largely affected, and killed, children within a few miles of our hometown in the Pacific Northwest. Her steadfastness was reinforced after my brother was born in the mid-1990s, just as another beef-borne illness was making international headlines: mad cow disease, a.k.a. the “United Kingdom BSE outbreak.”
As a result, I grew up not eating red meat, though by the time I was in middle school, this elaborate explanation for why I wasn’t touching my pepperoni pizza at a friend’s Skate King birthday party was beginning to draw odd looks (E. coli and mad cow disease long having faded from everyone else’s memories, Boston Legal fans not included). Things became much simpler to explain after I made the switch to full vegetarianism in high school, though I’d still occasionally get the disbelieving “you mean you’ve NEVER had BACON?!” response whenever someone got nosy about my dietary history and if I was abstaining “for animal cruelty reasons, or what?”
It turns out, though, that my weirdo childhood diet is now frequently touted as one of the best ways to eat for the sake of the planet (take that, Jennifer). Sometimes referred to as “pollotarianism” — which is incredibly confusing to try to pronounce if you speak any Spanish — the act of replacing red meat in your diet with poultry has been characterized by Gidon Eshel, a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College, as “the most impactful change” you can make for the climate “save going all-out vegan.”
I admit I was pleasantly surprised — okay, fine, smug — upon discovering that this would mean I’ve eaten positively for the planet my whole life (even if the aforementioned pollotarianism, and subsequent teenage conversion to vegetarianism, had nothing to do with the environment at the time). I could proselytize giving up beef as an accessible way of trying “to eat in the manner that takes note of the finality of Earth,” as Eshel so elegantly phrased it to me. After all, I’ve actually lived that chicken nugg life!
Recent climate activism has focused on pressuring big polluters and governments and moved away from the emphasis on individual responsibility, but one place you actually can feel like you’re making a meaningful difference for the planet is, in fact, in how you eat. “Somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of all emissions come from feeding ourselves,” Eshel explained. Our diets are “one of the few things where we can really take a major chunk out of our total emissions.”
And about a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions from the food industry can be attributed specifically to beef production, which requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water than other animal products like chicken, dairy, or eggs. By one frequently cited estimate, replacing beef on your plate with chicken could cut your dietary carbon footprint in half.
That’s not insignificant: To become carbon neutral by 2050, every person on the planet would need to limit their emissions to an annual 2 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents or less, Germany’s Deutsche Welle reports; meat consumption alone “accounts for [a] … staggering 4.1 carbon dioxide equivalents in North America.” Beef is so significantly worse than other protein sources that if just 20 percent of the Americans who currently eat beef switched to anything else, it would “reduce the overall carbon footprint of all U.S. diets by 9.6 percent,” according to one study. Put another way, “people eating the same number of calories and the same number of grams of protein can have a vastly different impact,” Eshel told me. “Much more so than choices of car, much more — like tenfold or more.”
Sure, we could all just become vegetarians and vegans, but judging by how many people I’ve offended by confirming no, I’ve never had bacon, that reality is a long way off. And according to Eshel, it doesn’t even have to be aspirational: “There is only one thing that I can think of where, each time you avail yourself of it, you’re doing a significant damage to your overall diet: that would be beef,” he said. “Everything else is kind of, let’s call it negotiable.”
Eat chicken to save the planet seems like a simple enough sell. But emissions notwithstanding, there’s an ethical problem with this solution.
Standing in my kitchen, visualizing the production chains, something horrible and obvious started to dawn on me. Cows are big. Chickens are small. If we replace beef with poultry, we’re only shifting the barreling, destructive forces of man onto a track aimed straight at an unthinkable number of hens.
“Oh my god,” I blurted to my husband in horror as he was making us dinner. “I think I’ve created the trolley problem, with chickens.”
Because here’s the thing: The meat from one slaughtered cow is roughly the equivalent of meat from something like 100 to 150 chickens. “Globally we slaughter 320 million cows for meat each year,” Wired U.K. has written. “If we sourced all of that meat from chicken instead, we’d be killing an extra 41 billion animals.” There are some animal activists who are so alarmed by that math that they actually urge eating anything but chicken. As Matt Ball, whose organization One Step for Animals endorses this view, explained to me over email, “The only reason to care about the climate is how it impacts sentient beings. The only ethical stance is to promote choices that lead to less suffering.”
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization anticipates 250,000 additional human deaths due to climate change between 2030 and 2050. Though most people value human life over a chicken’s — arguably, in feeding ourselves, this is what we’re actively doing — 41 billion dead animals is a lot of misery. Industrially raised birds have uniquely ghastly existences, even by factory-farmed animal standards; according to John Webster, a veterinarian and leading authority on livestock welfare, the chicken industry is “the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”
The “climate vs. animal well-being” tradeoff can be extrapolated out even further. Feedlot cows — an animal you don’t especially want to be — are fed greenhouse gas-curbing diets of grain, and thus produce up to 40 percent less methane than comparatively happy, but belchier, grass-fed cattle. Free-range chickens also have higher emissions than those that live in the hellish, windowless sheds exposed in PETA documentaries. There is no way around it: Climate-friendly omnivorous diets, and even climate-friendly vegetarian diets supplemented with eggs and dairy, often come at the expense of the increased suffering of animals.
Reeling in this existential horror, I presented the conundrum to Princeton University professor and renowned bioethicist Peter Singer, whose 1975 book Animal Liberation was foundational in the legitimizing of animal suffering and is considered a cornerstone of the modern animal welfare movement (a revised edition, Animal Liberation Now, will be out in May). The problem with my question, he pointed out, was the entire premise of an “ethical omnivore,” which — while perhaps not entirely impossible — would be very hard to realistically be, given the pervasiveness of inhumane practices in the meat industry. “It’s hard to find what are good choices, both from a humane point of view, not supporting cruelty to animals, and the climate point of view,” he agreed.
But all was not lost! “One thing that anybody can do, of course, is to reduce the consumption of meat and other animal products,” Singer suggested. That way, “you’re then reducing both your greenhouse gas contributions and your support of intensive farming and animal suffering.”
It’s a method Webster, the veterinarian, proposed to me, too. Due to the astonishing production capabilities of modern poultry farms, where hens are bred to grow at monstrous rates and reach slaughter weight around just 6 weeks old, chicken “has become a junk food ... it’s cheaper than dog food, it is grotesque,” he told me. If we’re going to be taking “food from animals, it’s got to be higher quality, less of it,” Webster went on. “And we’ve got to pay more for it, so we don’t eat so much. Which, of course, is incidentally, or coincidentally, entirely good in terms of animal welfare. It’s a win-win situation for the animals.” Of course, it’s not a win-win for the humans always; if meat becomes a luxury good then it will become predominantly a food for the rich, a problematic outcome in different ways.
Still, Americans actually are eating less beef than they used to, but we are also eating more animals, overall, than ever. The year 2022 set a record for meat consumption, and 2023 is projected to set a new one, due mainly to the increased consumption of chicken by U.S. households. “When additional meat choices are offered,” researcher Richard York discovered in a 2021 study, “that additional variety tends to … increase overall meat consumption,” rather than shift Americans from one kind of protein, like beef, to another.
Is the only truly ethical way to eat, then, to be a full vegan? Even that depends on who you ask. In Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence, a forthcoming book by Paco Calvo, a professor of philosophy of science and the principal investigator at the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the Universidad de Murcia in Spain, the author makes the case that it’s “very unlikely that plants are not far more aware than we intuitively assume.” And if that’s true, then “we can no longer turn a blind eye to the ethical implications of our interactions with them,” he writes, since, “if an organism has awareness, then our treatment of it has implications for its suffering.”
Absurd as such a line of thinking might seem — Singer, for one, outright dismisses the possibility that plants feel pain in Animal Liberation, and Calvo will be the first to admit the theories in his book have yet to be accepted by the wider philosophical and biological science communities — I’ve actually found it to be one of the most enlightening ways to think about how we should approach food. Speaking with Calvo, he advised me against connecting climate-conscious eating and animal welfare too tightly, lest we “run the risk of feeling safe.” Just because someone is a vegetarian, for example, doesn’t mean they’re not practicing or supporting intensive agriculture and in doing so, unnecessarily stressing living organisms; that person might even be in a worse ethical position than someone living off of free-range, free-roaming animals. “It has to do not with the intrinsic value, or with the organism, per se, but with the suffering being inflicted unnecessarily, regardless of the kingdom of precedence,” Calvo said.
The argument of Planta Sapiens, after all, isn’t that we shouldn’t eat salads anymore, but that all life is deserving of dignity, even when that means humbling ourselves with the recognition that we might not have a monopoly on behavior, intelligence, and awareness. While I believe Singer is right — that it is difficult to minimize suffering as an omnivore within the parameters of the world most of us actually live in, i.e. one full of Costcos and Price Choppers — the important thing is to mitigate harm whenever and however we can. “I mean, it takes a toll, being alive,” Calvo counseled me. “So we’ve got to be realistic to some extent.”
Okay, so maybe I don’t have the moral high ground I thought I did on my hamburger-munching elementary school classmates who are now DIYing candles and chronicling their composting efforts on Instagram. The answer to “What is the best and most realistic diet for most people?” continues to be reflected well in the old Michael Pollanism: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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Though it might not be as comprehensive or as permanent as renewables advocates have feared, it’s also “just the beginning,” the congressman said.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team is drafting an executive order to “halt offshore wind turbine activities” along the East Coast, working with the office of Republican Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, the congressman said in a press release from his office Monday afternoon.
“This executive order is just the beginning,” Van Drew said in a statement. “We will fight tooth and nail to prevent this offshore wind catastrophe from wreaking havoc on the hardworking people who call our coastal towns home.”
The announcement indicates that some in the anti-wind space are leaving open the possibility that Trump’s much-hyped offshore wind ban may be less sweeping than initially suggested.
In its press release, Van Drew’s office said the executive order would “lay the groundwork for permanent measures against the projects,” leaving the door open to only a temporary pause on permitting new projects. The congressman had recently told New Jersey reporters that he anticipates only a six-month moratorium on offshore wind.
The release also stated that the “proposed order” is “expected to be finalized within the first few months of the administration,” which is a far cry from Trump’s promise to stop projects on Day 1. If enacted, a pause would essentially halt all U.S. offshore wind development because the sought-after stretches of national coastline are entirely within federal waters.
Whether this is just caution from Van Drew’s people or a true moderation of Trump’s ambition we’ll soon find out. Inauguration Day is in less than a week.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “Super Scooper” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the Super Scooper collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the Super Scooper collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the Super Scooper, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Québécois firefighting planes are called Super Scoopers, not super soakers.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
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Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.