When he saw a public-access broadcast of Al Gore’s presentation on climate change in 2005, Sailesh Rao was working as an internet communications developer.
An electrical engineer by training, Rao had emigrated from India to study at Stony Brook University in New York, later earning a Ph.D. at Stanford University. In the late 1990s, he helped develop the Gigabit Ethernet on copper standard, which serves as the backbone of today’s internet.
But learning about the urgency of global warming set him on a new course. It’s a problem, and he wanted to help solve it.
Soon after, Rao founded a nonprofit called Climate Healers . It partners with schools, tribes and other organizations to implement climate change solutions and promote reforestation. It’s distributed thousands of metal grates for wood burning stoves to women in India and Africa, helping to cut down on fuel use and smoke inhalation.
In 2008, he was awarded the Karmaveer Puraskaar Noble Laureate, a national citizen social justice and action award in India.
Rao also studied the climate problem, coming to the conclusion that a globally adopted vegan diet makes sense from both a scientific and a spiritual perspective. He’s written two books on the subject, “Carbon Dharma” in 2011 and “Carbon Yoga” in 2016.
He’s also contributed to three popular documentaries about climate, diet and toxins: “The Human Experiment” with Sean Penn (2013), “Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret” (2014) and “What the Health” (2017). They’re all available on Netflix. A fourth film, “The Compassion Project,” is in production.
This summer, he’s touring with stops in the U.S., Canada and Costa Rica, giving a series of free lectures and advocating for a vegan lifestyle as a solution to climate change.
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Street Roots sat down with Rao when he stopped in Portland in June to talk about his ideas on climate change.
Emily Green: How does an engineer working in internet communications become a director of a climate-based nonprofit?
Sailesh Rao: When we were doing the internet originally, it was a collegial group working together, and we were idealistic – we were trying to do something that would connect the whole world. By the time I was working on 10-Gigabit Ethernet, it was all about money. How much money could we make, and how much money is being invested in this and that? It’s a huge business. I was disillusioned with the whole process.
I happened to see Al Gore’s presentation on TV. I was so shocked with what he was saying. If half of what he is saying is true, what are we doing? Why isn’t everybody working on this? So I decided to study the problem, and within a few months I realized it was far worse than what he was saying, because he was only talking about one aspect. I told my wife, “I have to start working on this.” She said, “If that’s what you want to do, go for it.” Of course I didn’t know what to do, so I wrote to him (Al Gore) and said, “How can I help you?” And I got trained by him on how to give his presentation. It was in November of 2006; I was in the second batch who were trained.
Then I went around for a year, talking about this. And I realized we can’t just talk about this; we have to do something. In 2007, I started Climate Healers.
I felt that the way the problem was being framed in mainstream circles was all wrong, and it was being framed in a way I thought was absurd. Because if you think about it, if you had a fever, let’s say 1 degree centigrade fever, and you have the lump the size of a coconut on the side of your head, and you go to a doctor and you said, “Heal me.” And the doctor examines you and says, “That fever is caused by your lump. The best I can do is to make sure that the fever does not go over 2 degrees Celsius, and I’ll give you Tylenol for that.” You wouldn’t be saying, “Give me Tylenol that makes it not go above 1.5 degrees Celsius.” You would be saying, “Hey, I want the fever to be reversed! I want the lump to go away!” But that’s not how our world leaders are talking about climate change. They are not looking at the cancer; they are only trying to address the fever while the cancer keeps growing.
E.G.: You began your book “Carbon Yoga” with the idea that our stories are failing us. What stories, and how are they failing us?
S.R.: Happiness comes from consumption. That is a story that is clearly failing us. Because societies that have the most consumption, like the United States, have almost half the people on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications or illegal drugs on a daily basis. That’s not the pursuit of happiness when you have to pop pills just to get through the day.
The story of growth is failing us. We have been told, if we just keep growing the economy, then everybody will prosper, right? If we are growing the economy to the point where it is 60 percent larger than what the planet can support, and we still have 18 million people starving every day, so how much more can we do this? How long can we keep doing this, expecting that we are going to one day solve the problem?
E.G.: Do you think capitalism is the problem?
S.R. It is not capitalism per se, because if I look at capitalism versus socialism or communism, the idea there is: Who is in charge of production?
Is it private enterprise that is in charge of production, or is it a public government that is in charge of production? Capitalism has won that argument. Because private enterprise clearly does a better job of assigning resources, of doing the right thing, and five-year plans by governments are not going to solve the problem. So I don’t see that as the main issue. The main issue is the currency system that is dependent on growth. It gets associated with capitalism. I really think we can be private enterprise without requiring growth.
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E.G.: You’ve said that even if we eradicate fossil fuels, because the aerosols that are released when we burn fossil fuels actually cool the Earth, we would still have a problem. Before we talk about solutions, can you briefly explain this little-discussed side effect of cutting down on fossil fuels?
S.R.: When we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, it isn’t just carbon that’s in the fossil fuel; there are lots of other compounds. We try to refine it, but you still have all kinds of things that get emitted along with the CO2, and aerosols are one of those things, like sulfur dioxide comes mainly from coal-fired power plants. They put scrubbers (systems for removing sulfur dioxide from exhaust before it’s emitted) in the U.S. because it was causing acid rain in the Catskills in the ’70s, but other countries don’t do that. Or, the sulfur that’s in the oil, we refine it out and use refined gasoline in our cars, but we take the rest, the crud that’s left behind, and we let ships burn it out in the ocean because there is no regulation out in the ocean. Eventually, it gets up in the air and then it stays up there, and the aerosols are masking some of the effect of greenhouse gas emissions.
Editor’s note: According to NASA’s Web page on aerosols, “human-made sulfate aerosols are thought to outweigh the naturally produced sulfate aerosols. The concentration of aerosols is highest in the northern hemisphere where industrial activity is centered. The sulfate aerosols absorb no sunlight but they reflect it, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.”
If you think about it, there’s CO2, the greenhouse gas, then there’s other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide, and then the third category is aerosols. All three of these are roughly the same size.
The CO2 is causing a whole bunch of heating to happen, the other greenhouse gases are causing the same amount of heating to happen, and then the aerosols are doing the same amount of cooling. So if you are going to stop burning fossil fuels, you suddenly won’t get the aerosols going up in the air because you are not burning the aerosols as well, so the other greenhouse gases become the major issue. I say to people, if suddenly today, we all switched to solar, our temperature will go up, not down, by 1 degree Fahrenheit, almost within a year.
Editor's note: In Oregon, livestock is the greatest source of methane, a greenhouse gas with 86 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. A whopping 1.3 million cattle are spread across the state among farms, ranches, feedlots and dairies, large and small.
E.G.: Let’s talk about your climate solutions.
S.R.: I’m a systems engineer, so I look at things from a systems perspective. If you look at environmental problems from a systems perspective, there are lots of them. It’s not just climate change. We have to deal with diversity loss and ecosystems collapse, ocean dead zones, ocean acidification. We have to deal with toxic chemical pollution, and if you ask any scientist who has studied this, a systems scientist, what is the one thing you can do to address all of these problems simultaneously? It is to go on a vegan diet. Immediately, compassion is a solution for all our problems. Compassion, not just for human beings, but compassion for all creatures.
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E.G.: How does going vegan solve the climate problem?
R.S.: If you look at Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group 3, Chapter 11, you will see a block diagram on land use – how much land is being used for different purposes. You will notice that 35 percent of the land area of the planet is used just to graze the animals that we raise for food. Ten percent of the land is used for crop production. Half of the crop we eat directly; the other half we feed animals. So we feed animals from our cropland; we also feed animals from all the grassland. The total amount of food that the animals eat is five times the amount of food that we eat. And out of that, we get a little bit of animal foods that we consume.
If we replace those animal foods with plant foods, you can release 35 percent of the land back to nature. So we ask the question: If we just take the grassland and replace it with the original forests that were there in 1800, how much carbon is sequestered in the recovering forests? And it’s a very simple calculation because we are just replacing grasslands with native forests when calculating the numbers – so you cannot dispute it. You total it up. On 41 percent of the land that used to be forest in 1800, you can sequester 265 gigatons of carbon, which is more than the 240 gigatons of carbon that we’ve added to the atmosphere since 1750. We can literally reverse climate change just by bringing back the forests, the original forests that used to be there.
E.G.: Do you see this going hand in hand with a reduction in fossil fuels, or do you think going vegan alone will reverse climate change?
S.R.: It goes hand in hand with reduction in fossil fuels. We have to do both because ultimately, you can’t keep pumping toxins into the air. It’s not just fossil fuels. Every industrial process that’s dumping toxins into the environment has to be changed, so there is a huge amount of research we need to do as to how are we going to make everything nontoxic.
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E.G.: Many climate scientists are saying that if we just cut down on our meat consumption, we can reduce the impact of global warming, but you are suggesting a 100 percent vegan lifestyle. I know a lot of people who are progressive, who understand the science, who would probably never go vegetarian, let alone vegan. Diet is such a tricky thing. Why not push for a more attainable goal, such as reduced meat consumption, or going vegetarian?
S.R.: I have faith in people. And when you ask people to do the right thing, they usually come through – they will eventually come through because this is a dire problem we face today.
Between 1970 and 2010, 52 percent of all wildlife has been destroyed, and we are destroying them at an exponentially growing rate. If you do the calculations and you see, how many years do we need before we wipe them all off the face of the Earth, it’s another 16 years. By 2026, they’ll be gone if we continue doing what we are doing.
We are on ecological quicksand. Imagine if a weight-lifter was lifting five times his weight, and he was standing on quicksand and he was sinking. Knowing this weight alone is too much for the quicksand to bear, what is the first thing he should do?
E.G.: Drop the weight.
S.R.: Drop the weight! No one is going to stand there and say, I think I can lift three-fourths of that weight, or half that weight – drop it! Because you are on quicksand. Get out of the quicksand first before you think about weight-lifting again. That is what I’m talking about, so when we frame it this way, people do respond. Have faith in them. They will respond.
E.G.: Have you always been vegan?
S.R.: I became a vegan in 2008, when I found out what it was doing to the environment. I was lacto vegetarian (a person who does not eat meat but who does consume dairy products), but I thought that I could never give up milk because I love my milk sweets, I love my pizza, I love my yogurt. But I had this sense of shame when I saw what it was doing to the environment.
Because the way things are framed for us by scientists, and by the mainstream media, is that lacto vegetarianism is just a little bit worse than veganism, in terms of impact. And that’s an accounting gimmick. Because if everyone in the world became lacto-vegetarian, the planet would be destroyed today. Because you keep impregnating dairy cows to make milk, so you get new cows coming out, and if you don’t kill them and eat them, they are going to be running around eating your forests for the next 25 years. I saw that in India. In India, a lot of people are lacto vegetarian, and hardly anyone ate meat, at that time. Very few people eat beef, so the cows are proliferated, and they have 10 times the density of cows as the U.S.
E.G.: On the Climate Healers’ website, there is a page about going vegan , and as soon as you click on the page, a number ticker begins to count all the animals, by species, that have been killed for consumption since the time you opened the page – which is really disturbing. But I wanted to ask you, climate change aside, the fact that humans kill about 56 billion animals a year for consumption (according to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAOSTAT 2008), what does this mean to you spiritually?
S.R.: I will tell you a story about what happened to me in Marrakesh, Morocco. I was speaking to a high school – 250 high school students were there, and it was about veganism and climate change. I asked, “How many of you are vegan?” And only one child raised his hand. It was clear that he had to raise his hand because everybody knew that he was vegan. They were all looking at him. Then I asked them, “How many of you would deliberately hurt an innocent animal, unnecessarily?” Nobody raised their hand. And I told them, by definition, all of you are vegan in your heart. But who you are in your heart and what you do in your mind don’t match. So we are bringing that into alignment. That is spirituality.
E.G.: Going back to your second book, “Carbon Yoga,” what is the connection between carbon and yoga?
S.R.: Yoga means unity. It’s union. True yoga is really about getting what you think, what you say and what you do in alignment with who you are. What we do as yoga here in the U.S. is really the third step of an eight-step process. And it’s just the calisthenics part of it. It’s really what they call posture. It’s been misconstrued as all of it. It’s not.
