Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret Quotes

Kip Andersen: You either live for something or die for nothing.

Howard Lyman: You can't be an environmentalist and eat animal products. Period!

Howard Lyman: Do what you can do as well as you can do it every day of your life and you will end up dying one of the happiest individuals that ever ever died.

Howard Lyman: You can't be an environmentalist and eat animal products. Period. Kid yourself, if you want. If you wanna feed your addiction, so be it. Just don't call yourself an environmentalist.

Kip Andersen: Raising animals for food is responsible for 30% of the world's water consumption, occupies about 45% of the Earth's land, is responsible for up to 91% of Brazilian Amazon destruction, is the leading cause of ocean "dead zones," habitat destruction, and species extinction

Kip Andersen: Two environmental specialists at the World Bank Group using the *global* standard for measuring greenhouse gases concluded that animal agriculture was responsible for 51% of human-caused climate change, when the loss of carbon sinks, respiration, and methane are properly accounted for, which the UN study failed to address.

Kip Andersen: Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas uses a staggering amount of water: 100 billion gallons every year in the U.S. But when I compared this with animal agriculture, raising livestock just in the U.S. consumes 34 trillion gallons of water! And, it turns out, the methane emission from both industries are nearly equal.

Herself (Pacific Institute): The average Californian uses about 1500 gallons of water per person per day. About half of that is related to consumption of meat and dairy products.

Kip Andersen: I found out that one quarter-pound hamburger requires about 660 gallons of water to produce. Here I'd been taking these "shorter showers," trying to save water, to find out that eating one hamburger is the equivalent of showering two entire months!

Kip Andersen: So much attention is given to lowering our home water-use, yet domestic use is only 5% of what is consumed in the U.S. vs. 55% for animal agriculture. That's because it takes upwards of 2500 gallons water to produce one pound of beef.

Kip Andersen: Animal agriculture produces 65% of the world's nitrous oxide, a gas with a global warming potential 296 times greater that CO2, per pound. Yet all we hear about is fossil fuels.

Kip Andersen: Energy-related CO2 emissions are expected to increase 20% by the year 2040, yet emissions from agriculture are predicted to increase 80% by 2050. This devastating figure is mostly due to a projected global increase in meat and dairy consumption.

Kip Andersen: It turns out that, due to land-use, grass-fed beef is even more unsustainable than factory-farming.

Kip Andersen: Cows and other farmed animals produce a substantial amount of methane from their digestive processes. Methane gas from livestock is 86 times more destructive than CO2 from vehicles.

Herself (Natural Resources Defense Council): The *majority* of antibiotics used in the U.S. is administered to healthy livestock.

David Simon (Author, "Meatonomics"): If you take the externalized costs, which are about $414 billion- if the meat and dairy-industry would bear these costs themselves, the retail prices of meat and dairy would skyrocket. A $5 cartoon of eggs would go to $13. A $4 big mac would go to $11.

David Simon (Author, "Meatonomics"): When somebody goes into a McDonald's and buys a big mac for four Dollars, there's another seven Dollars of costs that are imposed on society. And I'm paying that, you're paying that, whether you eat meat or not!

Himself (physician): When you think about it, the purpose of cow's milk - I did most of my growing-up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin - the purpose of cow's milk is to turn a 65 pound calf into a 400 pound cow as rapidly as possible. Cow's milk is baby-calf growth fluid.

Himself (physician): Whether you pour milk onto your cereal as a liquid, whether you clot it into yogurt, whether you ferment it into cheese, whether you freeze it into ice-cream... it's baby-calf growth-fluid.

Himself (physician): Cow's milk is the lactation-secretions of a large bovine mammal who just had a baby. It's for baby-calves. You know, I tell my patients, "Go look in a mirror. Do you have big ears? Do you have a tail? Are you a baby-calf? If you're not, don't be eating baby-calf growth-food!"

Himself (Sustainability Institute): Quietly and unmistakably, the most powerful thing that someone can do for the environment. Um, no other lifestyle choice has a farther reaching and more profoundly positive impact on the planet and all life on earth than choosing to stop consuming animals and live a vegan lifestyle.

Kip Andersen: I had to come to the full conclusion the only way to sustainably and ethically live on this planet with seven billion other people is to live an entirely plant-based vegan diet. I decided instead of eating others, to eat for others.

Kip Andersen: Like so many people, I saw his film, An Inconvenient Truth, about the impacts of global warming, and it scared the emojis out of me.