In 2015, Greenpeace estimated that we had until 2020 before the planet reached the point of no return on climate change – not an apocalypse, but a point beyond which consequences would be unavoidable and irreversible.

According to the opening press release for the UN 2019 Climate Action Summit, “The world would need to increase its efforts between three- and five-fold to contain climate change to the levels dictated by science – a 1.5°C rise at most – and avoid escalating climate damage already taking place around the world.” That unavoidable, irreversible date is now only a few months away. So what can we do?

According to an article from the BBC, up to one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from the food production industry. If the world became vegan, that amount would fall by about 70 percent.

Mark Potosnak, associate professor and chair of the environmental science department at DePaul, said that much of this greenhouse gas comes from over-fertilization.

“The nitrogen in the soil, there’s so much of it, yeah some of it goes into the plants, but some actually goes back out into the atmosphere and is a greenhouse gas called nitrous oxide,” Potosnak said. “A lot of the corn and soy, we don’t actually consume directly, we grow them and then they’re consumed by cattle, chickens, pigs and then we eat the cattle, chickens, pigs.”

So, there appears to be a simple solution: If you want to help the environment, go vegan. If we stop consuming animal products, corporations that produce those products would go out of business, and the energy from plants we eat would be used more efficiently. However, it’s not that simple; the hypothetical world where everyone goes vegan just can’t happen.

Being able to make your diet sustainable is a privilege. Frankly, it’s expensive and labor-intensive to maintain a vegan diet. I can get a cheeseburger meal from McDonald’s, over 1,000 calories, for $6. However, at a nearby vegetarian and vegan restaurant, Native Foods Cafe, the cheapest meal costs $10, and has a lot less calories. 

Low-income households are already at a disadvantage when it comes to eating healthy, let alone eating sustainably. Being poor is expensive, and not having the money to make strategic purchases limits your ability to make better choices for the long run.

You need to be lucky in a lot of ways to sustain a vegan diet. You need to be able to afford it, have the time to plan it and live in an area that allows access to a variety of foods. If you have an allergy like nuts or soy, many vegan and vegetarian foods aren’t edible. If meat holds great significance in your culture, you would have to give that up.

According to sophomore Tommy Virgl, the stigma and inaccessibility surrounding the diet are barriers to maintaining veganism. Virgl was briefly vegan a few years ago, but was unable to continue after the effort became unrealistic.

“Every restaurant has a vegetarian option, but it’s rare that there’s a select vegan option, so it would kind of make me uncomfortable in social settings,” Virgl said. “My family was not supportive of [veganism] at all, so whenever I was with them they would make me meat and stuff … and I was like, ‘Well, I have nothing to eat now.’”

This isn’t to say that going vegan doesn’t work; if we don’t become vegan globally, but still have more people do so, we will still reap some benefits, such as decreased demand for meat products and a more health-conscious ideology. But, in the same way we can’t expect everyone to install solar panels on their roofs, we can’t move forward saying that, if only more people were vegan, we would be saved. Like everything, veganism has its downsides.

“I don’t think it’s good to make all these vegan products that are coming from all parts of the world and say that that’s better than chicken that’s grown right outside your door,” said Rachel Elfant, climate justice organizer and administrator for the activist group Chicago Area Peace Action.

According to Elfant, there’s a lot more we need to consider in discussing our climate crisis.

“We need to be talking about the system in which we live in,” Elfant said. “I think we’re stuck in a one dimensional thought process of economics…and we’re not thinking in terms of pollution, in terms of the environmental expenses, the social expenses. System change, not climate change.”

The only way to make that system change in today’s landscape is to engage on a political level. Fight for regulation on corporations, fight for energy research, for economic equality, fight to give more people the ability to make change.

“There’s personal steps, they can only go so far,” Potosnak said. “We need that commitment at the government level, but the government level of commitment won’t happen if we’re only taking these personal steps. It’s a hand-in-hand thing.”

As much as we like to think that one person can change the world, our strength is in numbers. We can’t keep putting the responsibility on others as an excuse to not do more ourselves.

Being able to make change in your own life is a privilege few have, and we need to use that privilege to change more lives than our own.