Trump – who famously tweeted in 2012 that global warming was a concept “created by and for the Chinese” – made his stance on climate change clear in June by announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Agreement to cut global emissions. Nonetheless, McCartney is confident that ordinary people can take small measures to create change: The former Beatle, a longtime vegetarian, encouraged readers to avoid meat one day per week, arguing that the reduced meat consumption would aid the environment.
“It’s maybe a good time now to try and focus people’s attention and say, ‘Look, forget about [Trump] – we can do something,'” he said. “It’s not the total solution, but it’s part of the solution. A lot of people have been saying this for a long time but there’s resistance.”
As the BBC notes, a 2016 report from researchers at the universities of Vermont and Sheffield and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change concluded that global agricultural emissions need to be greatly reduced to prevent Earth from warming over two degrees Celsius across the next 100 years.
McCartney recently narrated One Day a Week, a short film about the impact of animal agriculture on climate change. The project – the first collaboration between the McCartney family’s Meat Free Monday campaign and French director Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Hope Production – premiered ahead of the 2017 United Nations Climate Change conference, which runs from November 6th to 17th.
