Sangamithra Iyer's Climate Chronicles

Pilgrim’s Pride, the world’s biggest poultry producer, faced disgrace several years ago when undercover investigators from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals documented slaughterhouse workers abusing chickens. Here's what investigators witnessed in 2004 at a Pilgrim’s Pride slaughterhouse in West Virginia that was supplying Kentucky Fried Chicken:

[W]orkers were caught on video stomping on chickens, kicking them, and violently slamming them against floors and walls. Workers also ripped the animals’ beaks off, twisted their heads off, spat tobacco into their eyes and mouths, spray-painted their faces, and squeezed their bodies so hard that the birds expelled feces—all while the chickens were still alive.

Essentially the chickens were treated like what they would eventually become: cheap meat.

Roughly nine billion chickens are slaughtered annually in the U.S.—23 million killed each day—in a brutal but efficient system of industrialized animal agriculture. The cheapness of their meat is a function of the huge scale of the operation in which they are raised, reliant on two main ingredients: cheap oil and cheap grain.

The times they are a changing, though. In an age of peak oil, are we also reaching peak meat?

B.Y.O.M—bring your own meat—is the strategy the U.S. Olympic committee plans to implement this summer in Beijing. Wary of steroid-laden proteins from China, U.S. Olympians are relying on Tyson Foods to send them 25,000 pounds of American meat—beef, chicken and pork—for the summer games.

Meat produced in the U.S. won’t fully alleviate their concerns. Remember the recent massive beef recall? And let’s not ignore the carbon footprint of this Olympic strategy, which is not limited to the gas-guzzling transport of goods across the globe. The other downer—the inconvenient truth the other Nobel Laureate spoke—is that “meat is a very carbon intensive commodity.” Even before you fly it across an ocean.

For more than 15 years, the Environmental Working Group has been active protecting public health and the environment with public information. Their latest tool: an interactive map of editorials from newspapers around the country demanding reform of the Farm Bill which Congress is reauthorizing without much change.

The editorials unmask the economic unfairness of the farm bill and show a nation ready for a break from record-high commodity prices, rising rates of obesity and diabetes, and growing concern about industrial agriculture’s contribution to global warming and other environmental perils.

Last week, the New York City Council passed an electronics recycling bill that would make e-waste recycling mandatory and place responsibility for collecting and recycling discarded items on manufacturers.

Council Member Bill De Blasio, lead sponsor of the bill, provided this rationale:

New York City annually disposes of more than 25,000 tons of discarded TVs, computers and other electronic equipment, which contain mercury, lead, cadmium and other hazardous materials that not only endanger sanitation workers but contaminate our landfills, our water, and our air. It is time for manufacturers to take responsibility for the impact their products have on our environment.

Though the bill would make New York the first city in the nation to enact such a measure, ten states including New Jersey and Connecticut have already passed similar legislation. Even Apple, a target of environmental campaigns for its ‘iwaste,’ supports the City Council's bill.

You'd think Mike Bloomberg, America's climate action mayor, the man behind PlaNYC and GreeNYC, would be a staunch supporter. Not so.