We have run out of time for pretending that climate change is something waiting for us in the future.
The United Nations Environment Programme now says overshooting 1.5°C of global heating is unavoidable. Even under the most optimistic pathway, warming is expected to reach around 1.8°C before potentially declining again.
Its assessment could hardly be clearer:
“There are no good outcomes above 1.5C.”
And here in Britain, we have just had a preview. Summer 2026 was provisionally the hottest UK summer since records began in 1884. The average temperature reached 16.5°C. England hit 38.1°C. England also experienced its driest July on record. The Met Office estimated that this summer’s record-breaking heat was made around 130 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
During the May and June heatwaves alone, an estimated 2,877 people died in England. Across Europe, extreme heat was linked to at least 35,000 excess deaths over the summer. Schools closed. Hospital appointments were cancelled. Wildfires destroyed homes.
This is not normal weather.
And we have barely begun.
The animal agriculture problem
When climate change is discussed, fossil fuels understandably dominate the conversation. We absolutely need to stop burning fossil fuels. But that cannot become an excuse to ignore another enormous part of the problem: animal agriculture.
A 2025 paper published in Environmental Research Letters argues that conventional greenhouse gas accounting significantly understates agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis. The study uses a different accounting approach that includes gross land-use emissions, historical deforestation, warming and cooling emissions, and effective radiative forcing rather than relying solely on the conventional 100-year global warming potential metric. The result is dramatic.
Under this accounting method, agriculture was responsible for an estimated 60% of effective radiative forcing between 1750 and 2020. Agriculture was estimated to have caused around 0.74°C of global surface warming, with approximately 86% of that warming attributable to animal agriculture. That works out at around 0.64°C of warming from animal agriculture alone. The study also estimates that agriculture has emitted almost as much CO₂ as fossil fuels since 1750 once gross land-use emissions are counted. These figures depend on the accounting method being proposed and come with substantial uncertainty, particularly around land carbon flows and aerosol cooling. They should not simply be presented as replacing every conventional climate estimate. But they should make one thing impossible to dismiss. Animal agriculture is not some minor environmental side issue.
We cannot engineer our way out
Governments are beginning to acknowledge this.
The UK’s Farming Roadmap 2050 includes proposals to help farmers diversify into lower-emission agriculture, including growing pulses and oilseeds.
Good. But it also discusses technologies such as methane-suppressing feed products. And this exposes a much bigger problem with the way we approach animal agriculture. Instead of asking how we move away from exploiting billions of animals, we keep asking how we can make exploiting them more efficient. Sometimes the animals themselves pay the price.
A recent UK Animal Welfare Committee report warned that breeding animals for greater productivity and lower emissions can worsen their suffering.
Chickens have been bred to grow extraordinarily quickly. Modern hens can lay more than 500 eggs during a laying cycle compared with around 85 in the early 1900s, increasing their susceptibility to osteoporosis and fractures. Faster growth. More eggs. Bigger bodies. Greater output.
Then we congratulate ourselves because emissions per kilogram have fallen. That is not progress from the perspective of the animal whose body has been redesigned around our demands.
And free range eggs? Worse.
Nature is already being forced to adapt
We are doing something similarly grotesque elsewhere. More than 90% of Florida’s coral cover has disappeared since the 1970s amid warming oceans, disease, hurricanes and pollution.
Scientists are now selectively breeding corals in the hope of creating populations capable of surviving hotter oceans. We are breeding farmed animals to tolerate our agricultural system while breeding corals to tolerate the climate produced by our economic system.
At some point, perhaps we should change the systems.
The alternative already exists
This is not an argument for abandoning farmers. Quite the opposite.
If governments are serious about climate action, farmers need money, support and security to transition towards crops that feed people directly. And reducing our reliance on animal products can produce immediate results.
Two randomised trials published in 2026 found that plant-based diets reduced diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 55% and 57% respectively.
No futuristic technology.
No genetically engineered cow.
No methane mask.
Just producing and eating plants rather than cycling crops through animals first.
This does not make veganism a climate diet. Veganism is an opposition to animal exploitation, not an environmental lifestyle. But sometimes justice and environmental necessity point in exactly the same direction.
We are being warned that 1.5°C will be breached. Scientists say emissions must fall rapidly. Britain is already breaking heat records. Ecosystems are collapsing. People are dying. But animal agriculture remains politically protected as though reducing it were simply too radical to contemplate.
What exactly would qualify as radical enough? Because attempting to preserve the systems driving the crisis while teaching animals, forests and coral reefs to survive the consequences certainly seems radical to me.