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• Monday, October 22, 2007 03:00 PM

  Reducing Meat & Reducing Oil

  If you suggest reducing our consumption of oil (in favor of renewable energy like solar and wind) you’re instantly inundated with comments from the Right wing explaining that to modify our lifestyles in any way, shape or form is not only technologically impossible but also the worst kind of authoritarianism!

  “How dare those liberal egg heads in New York suggest that I can’t own 5 Hummers! They all want us to live in caves with no electricity whatsoever!”

  (sigh)

  Poor Al Gore suggested that maybe it’s not the best idea to be 100 percent dependent on foreign oil from 5 Muslim countries that have all sworn blood oaths to destroy us – and maybe it’s not particularly healthy to have coal fired power plants either. A lot of people living near one seem to get cancer. So he (quite reasonably) suggests we should promote energy efficiency (to reduce the amount of energy we consumer) and promote building our own cleaner, more stable, more environmentally friendly energy plants like a wind farm or a solar plant.

  Al Gore is the most hated person in right wing circles.

  Now we turn to our totally unsustainable meat and fish production and consumption. It’s painfully obvious that we basically can’t sustain this level of meat production (forget about just being inhumane for the cows – it’s environmentally unsustainable. The amount of disease in the meat, the inability to properly feed the cows, the inability to actually inspect and monitor the cows/pigs/chickens, the inability to dispose of the massive amounts of waste, etc) – and yet the sensible call to scale back on our meat and fish consumption is met with the (IMHO) same hysterical reactions that AL Gore gets.

  “These people want to control how we live! They want us to live in caves! They will never stop until we’re living in the dirt like savages!”

  We should just give up.

  We’ve been trying to out-shout these people for the last decade and we just can’t beat them.

  They will succeed in keeping things exactly as they are now until the whole thing collapses --- and then try to blame everyone but themselves. And when the end comes we really will be living like savages,

  —Anonymous
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