Andrew Yang agrees that the world should stop eating meat immediately.
“The U.N. just released a study that said we’re going to be OK if the vast majority of the world goes vegetarian immediately,” the entrepreneur and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said. “So, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for your health if you eat less meat. Certainly, meat is an extraordinarily expensive thing to produce from an environmental sustainability point of view. So, I think it would be healthy on both an individual and societal level for us to move in that direction.”
But Yang, speaking during CNN’s marathon climate-focused town halls, acknowledged the United States was “a country where there is a lot of individual autonomy.”
“So, you can’t force people’s eating choices on them. All do you know is try and shape our system so that over time we evolve in a productive way,” he said.
The United Nations report, released last month, doesn’t explicitly call on universal veganism or vegetarianism. Instead, the 107 scientists on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found a diet change would mean that less land was needed to feed people, allowing it to store more carbon emissions.
“We need to help farmers modernize their land use in terms of the environmental impact,” he said. “And once again, this is an issue around economic incentives being in one direction and then what’s good for the climate and what’s good for society in the other. So, we have to try to bring those together by providing economic incentives and resources to help farmers modernize.”
