Letters to the Editor
-
does this make sense?
This article contains the claim "Americans who eat poultry, dairy and eggs, but not red meat, are responsible for fewer greenhouse gases than those who consume a vegetarian diet that includes dairy and eggs."
Can someone explain to me how this makes sense? Everything else being equal, if you eat poultry, you are responsible for fewer greenhouse gases than someone who doesn't eat poultry? Is this what is being claimed or am I missing something?
-
Thank you PETA
I've been saying this (and pissing people off) for years: if you eat a meat-based diet then deal's off - just shut your yap about being an enviromentalist. You do NOT need to eat meat. It's a choice, just like the car you drive or how many lights are on in your house.
...so if the entire U.S. population went vegan, we'd reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by only 6 percent.
That's actually a pretty good number, especially since it asks you to simply avoid an action that can be easily avoided. Do that and take public transportation and now you're up to 15 percent. Lookin' good veggie boys and girls!
-
What's fascinating is that in Brazil
they torch hundreds of acres of rainforest each day to make room for crop agriculture specifically for grains that don't enter the 'meat cycle' so to speak. Oh well - I guess PETA is only for fat stupid urban anarchists.
-
Too many humans
Many of these global warming issues would not be such a problem if there weren't so many humans on the planet--billions of humans eating and growing WHATEVER they eat, using fossil fuels, cutting down forests for all kinds of purposes, etc., etc. Back when the global population was a fraction of what it is now, none of our activities or choices had the impact they have now. Of course, technology is a huge factor as well, but this is amplified by our astonishing reproductive success. We all feel entitled to procreate, but at this juncture in the planet's history, refraining from begetting is something to consider as well as vegetarianism. If we're really serious about addressing the problem, that is.
-
A middle ground
Its nice to read an article that discusses the middle ground. Like it or not, most people are unlikely to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet, at least not cold turkey, no pun intended. Rational discussions of ways to decrease our carbon footprint often lead to more and more small changes which add up. In the same way it might not be helpful for an overweight person to be encouraged to run a marathon, but instead to visit the gym three times a week for half an hour, might one day mean they do run that marathon. In the meantime, they're at the gym and even that is better than nothing. I work in a "green" industry. In my experience, a little education and a nudge in the right direction are way more effective than a lecture on how someone needs to do it all and do it right now.
-
Are there two Gidon Eshels?
Gidon Eshel is mostly vegan because he thinks that is best for the environment.
http://www.satyamag.com/feb07/eshel.html
Here is a quote of his from the above article:
The bottom line is if you eat the mean American diet, then you are responsible for the emissions of an extra ton and a half of CO2 equivalent per person per year, as compared to a vegan who eats the same number of calories but derived only from plants.
Huh?
-
And once again, we miss the elephant in the parlor...
The root cause is not meat.
It's not oil.
It's not coal.
It's the fact that we, humans, as a species, are too damn successful. We outbreed any environment in which we live because we can make things work just a little better, for just a little longer, and thus make the problem last just that much longer.
We can replace every light bulb, switch to biodiesel, end coal mining and use only biomass in electricity production, stop making plastics out of oil and only make them out of the plastic we already have at hand... but if we don't stop having more babies than replacement and we don't stop living longer and longer, we are still a net drain on the planet. It's that simple. We need fewer of us, permanently. (And yes, I'm doing my part -- no kids, and one way or another, when I'm 70, I will not be walking on this earth.)
We eat local, and the local climate cannot support soy, a lot of beans, almonds, olives, and other veggie proteins (we're high in the Rockies). We CAN support chickens, brook trout, sheep and goats, and deer and elk. We eat a lot of wild meat we hunt ourselves - turkey, geese, elk and deer. We trade that meat for chickens. But there's no way we could go vegetarian without putting a lot of oil-based CO2 in the atmosphere (plus heavy metals, acids, and some nasty salts...) And in our region, getting the soy beans from field to table would put a lot more CO2 and et cetera than the methane the deer and elk make anyway.
Don't breed. Eat locally. Walk. It worked for thousands of years....
-
oooohh
Something tells me the comments section for this article will be mighty entertaining.
-
Far, FAR too many humans!!
Chikalada's got it absolutely right - the single underlying contributory factor to practically all of Planet Earth's problems is there are just too many human beings: we are the equivalent of a cancer on Earth, destroying the organism that sustains us.
In the US, some 300-odd million humans overconsume and cause the gravest damage to the planetary ecosystem. In India, we have a 1000 million human beings, mostly 'underconsuming' (by US standards) - but due to our numbers, we too cause quite significant damage to the ecosystem; and now that India seems to have gotten over that famous 'Hindu rate of growth' syndrome, Planet Earth can look forward to the depradations of a sizable number out of these 1000-million Indians!
I don't know how accurate the following statement is: It will take something like the death toll of one 2004-tsunami each day for the next 18 years(!!!) to bring the human population back to levels that Earth can sustain!
Till we learn how to handle this major problem of human overpopulation on Earth, all our efforts are are just 'pissing into the wind'.
GSC