Environment & Climate
Dr. Sailesh Rao of Climate Healers on Animal Agriculture, Climate Change, and Vegan World 2026
Climate Healers founder and systems engineer Dr. Sailesh Rao lays out the case from his widely-cited white paper that animal agriculture, not fossil fuels alone, is the leading driver of climate change, and explains the Vegan World 2026 project born from a promise to his granddaughter.
Topics Covered
- Dr. Rao's background as a Stanford-trained electrical engineer who pivoted to climate work after seeing Al Gore's presentation in 2006
- The carbon opportunity cost argument: why a vegan world would have net-negative CO2 emissions due to reforestation of the 37% of land currently used for grazing
- His involvement as co-executive producer of Cowspiracy, defending its 51% animal-agriculture-emissions figure against industry pushback
- Critiquing UN FAO and IPCC climate modeling as politically influenced and reliant on industry-tied agro-economists rather than climate scientists
- The 3-10% tipping point theory: how a small percentage of committed 'trailblazers' can transform an entire system, as seen in the rapid adoption of the Internet
- The origin of the 'Vegan World 2026' campaign: a bedtime story to his granddaughter Kimaya that became a pinky-promise deadline to end animal agriculture
- Climate Healers' documentary trilogy (The Human Experiment, Cowspiracy, A Prayer for Compassion) and the Prevent Year Zero campaign against wild vertebrate extinction
- How to get involved via the Vegan World 2026 project's Basecamp study groups and task forces
About the Guest
Dr. Sailesh Rao is a systems engineer and founder of Climate Healers, a nonprofit dedicated to reversing climate change through the elimination of animal agriculture. He co-executive produced the documentary Cowspiracy, authored an influential white paper on animal agriculture's role in climate change, and leads the Vegan World 2026 and Prevent Year Zero campaigns.