Living an Ethical Life: Achieving Goals of Poverty, Environment & Animal Welfare - Essay Sample

Introduction

Living an ethical life is usually a personal decision from individuals for their daily lives, putting into consideration ethics and moral values (Sayer, 2011). It is with regard to what people consume, sustainability, actions that are put into place to protect our surroundings (environment), wildlife and animal welfare at large. Goals can be set towards trying to achieve the listed above, and this includes: trying to end poverty in all its forms. The target looks ambitious but it can be delivered if individuals decide to dedicate themselves to doing so. That is by being human-centric, and putting reasonable right based approaches into other sustainable development goals. Doing so will reduce the poverty level and improve the quality of life, the surroundings, and governance for everybody. The second goal is how to end hunger, how to attain food security and ways of improving nutrition and promoting agriculture. All these can be achieved when farmers are granted opportunities and the society puts its focus on the hungry people. It is also of great benefit to educate people and promote equal learning opportunities that will serve people for a long time. Lastly, the goal is to ensure people are living healthy and improving their well- being regardless of age. The listed above are some of the ways that we should consider while viewing our daily actions from what we consume to how we power the planet as being central to leading an ethical life over the next 50 to 100 years.

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Additionally, we should consider eating more vegetables to beat the climatic change. Apart from it being useful to the body, vegetables produce less carbon to the environment as compared to a meat diet, which is approximately 2.5 times as little (Panel, 2015). Meat products such as chicken breast also require more water for it to get produced. Also, eating vegetarian sources of protein such as nuts and beans and not meat helps in the reduction of carbon. We can help our planet by preventing it from heating up, and this can be achieved by taking those vegetables and encouraging the practice of farm-to-plate as it sums up to 30 percent of the global greenhouse gas emission. Besides, eating vegetables yearly is equal to preventing the same amount of emissions that a small family car would emit in half-year. It is thus encouraged to eat more vegetarian foods daily as few individuals can go without driving their cars for one year, so it is difficult to convince them to do so. Eating veggies food also saves on land and water. Most land that should be used for agriculture has been set aside to raise cattle. Crops and vegetables require land 2.5 less than that used to keep animals, and still, the livestock feed on more than 20 million tones' of what is grown on the ground (Sayer, 2011). To save water, we have to eat more veggies as it takes less water to produce it.

Furthermore, how we power the planet in the next decades matters a lot. Recently, the World Energy Council reported that the World's Total Capacity is now represented by 30 percent of the renewable sources of power, whereas the total global electricity production is represented by 23 percent of the same (Panel, 2015). The WEC later reported the "explosive average annual growth" experienced with wind and solar power for the last decade as 23 and 50 percent respectively (Adaption committee, 2019). Ultimately, we can power the planet by using the remains of fossil fuels. However, if the world is indeed thirsty about handling the climatic change, then in the next 50 to 100 years, we will have to look at the different aspects compared to what is available today (Adaption committee, 2019). First, to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius, as earlier on discussed with delegates at the climate summit that occurred in Paris, this requires the supply of electricity which is carbon-free and reduced use of fossil fuel in industrial sectors, transportations as well as building areas. Having put in mind the listed above, then we can deduce that solar will play a significant role in changing the World's energy mix as predicted in 2014 by the International Energy Agency (Panel, 2015). The question at hand is how quickly that would be attained and not when it can be achieved, because as for sure, solar is fast-growing and highly unsettled to produce energy.

On the other hand, there are other renewable sources of energy that are also growing quickly and trying to occupy the more significant part of the energy pie. An excellent example of such sources of energy is the Wind energy. From January to July 2016, the Europe wind industry made $15.7 billion in their new projects; this is according to Wind Europe (Adoption Committee, 2019). Wind energy should be made a centerpiece of energy system worldwide, and this is due to the cost reduction it impacted in the last few years especially in Europe. And by 2040, we are also expecting a reduction in the price of onshore wind by 41 percent (Adoption committee, 2019). It is due to the larger turbines which capture higher energy, thus making the economy to be more interesting.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is wise to update parties on how useful it is to enhance international cooperation for climate action. By so doing, the global stocktake will have quiet time in ensuring that the involved parties are doing the right things towards achieving their set goals expressed in the Agreement and gradually putting more effort into their dedication until the end.

References

Adaptation Committee, 2019, 25 Years on Adaptation under the UNFCCC file:///C:/Users/hp/Downloads/AC_25%20Years%20of%20Adaptation%20Under%20the%20UNFCCC_2019%20(1).pdf

Sayer, A. (2011). Why things matter to people: Social science, values, and ethical life. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/9781107001145s

Panel, A. P. (2015). Power people planet: seizing Africa's energy and climate opportunities: Africa progress report 2015. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/APP_REPORT_2015_FINAL_low1.pdf