Michael Grunwald on How Factory Farms Can Save the Planet
Mark Twain is generally credited with the quip, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same can’t be said about climate change, which has become one of our most contentious and complicated public policy controversies. It’s also divisive. According to a recent Gallup Poll, sixty-two percent of those polled worry about climate change a great deal or a fair amount. Thirty-eight percent worry about warming just a little or not at all.
What to do about it causes further disagreement, even among those very concerned about a warming climate. The question of how to best balance the use of fossil fuels and renewable energy sources takes up most of these debates, an issue for another day. But there are also disagreements about how to redirect the human diet to reduce emissions caused by raising food animals and methods of plant agriculture.
The orthodox view among most climate change warriors argues that we should eat much less meat and dairy products, to the point that some countries have gone so far as to order farmers to cull their herds. Wesley’s guest dissents from those policy prescriptions. He’s written a major book detailing in depth why that approach won’t work and charting what he considers to be a better path forward.
Political journalist Michael Grunwald is the bestselling author of two widely acclaimed books The Swamp and The New New Deal. He’s a former staff writer for the Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine. He is the winner of the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism, among other professional honors.
His current book is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.
Grunwald believes strongly that climate change is a crisis mostly caused by human activities. For the purpose of this interview, Wesley assumed that Grunwald’s climate concerns are warranted so more time could be spent exploring the author’s theses and proposed solutions.
Show Notes
- We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
- Michael Grunwald’s Website
- Michael Grunwald’s Page at Simon & Schuster
- “Spraying Roundup on Crops Is Fine. Really.” by Michael Grunwald at The New York Times
- “Democrats Can Finally Stop Pandering to Farmers” by Michael Grunwald at The New York Times
- “Elon Musk Should Take a Hard Look at One Agency Truly Wasting Taxpayer Dollars” by Michael Grundwald at The New York Times
- “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food” by Michael Grunwald at The New York Times
- “The Climate Solution That’s Horrible for the Climate” by Michael Grunwald at The New York Times
- “Ron DeSantis Is Attacking the Greatest Food Innovation Since the Corndog” by Michael Grunwald at Heatmap
- “The ‘Green’ Aviation Fuel That Would Increase Carbon Emissions” by Michael Grunwald at Yale Environment 360