048: Understanding the IPCC's New Compendium of Science on Climate, Forests, and Farms

We eat to live, but the food we're eating is killing us – not just because of what it does to our bodies, but because of what it does to our climate. Beef, for example, comes from cows that burp out methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 80-times more heat than carbon dioxide does, and we often chop carbon-absorbing forests to graze those methane-emitting cows, only to throw away one-third of all the food we produce. If there are two things scientists who study this stuff agree on, it's that we can slow climate change by eating less meat and wasting less food, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) new Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), which was published this morning in Geneva.