November 20, 2009

Eat Global Warming!

I am opposite to PETA's agenda. Saying I am a vegetarian can have an odd effect on some people who mentally categorize in a mind narrowing fashion.

However, I am reading today that California decided that people need to go out of state to purchase Televisions. This is due in part to Man Made Global warming and government wanting the highest energy cost they can achieve. Yes, that paragraph is very slanted.

In reading all this cap and trade, carbon footprint, government regulation. I wonder when we will each have our own carbon limit. Something like the UK is contemplating. "Wow, I am over my carbon allowance, I better stay home and darken my house to catch up..."

Why is it, I wonder, if the planet is in such danger, why not simply outlaw meat production?

Eating vegan is more environmentally efficient than feeding the animals in a meat-based diet. Veganism also greatly reduces the wastes, pollution, and deforestation caused by mass raising of animals.

We have altered vast ecosystems and devoted massive resources to support the world's burgeoning livestock herds. These animals need to be fed. They need water to survive. If they are ranged, they need land. And these animals produce enormous quantities of waste.

The ecological footprint of meat production is deep and wide, and ranges from forest destruction in Central and South America for ranching to suppression of native predators and competitors in the United States.

Seven kilograms of grain are required to produce 1 kilogram of beef; the conversion is 4-to-1 for pork and 2-to-1 for poultry. Each kilogram of meat represents several kilograms of grain that could be consumed directly by humans, not to mention the water and farmland required growing the grain.

Huge amounts of food - not to mention the water and farmland required growing the food - can be freed up by reduction in meat production. For example, if the 670 million tons of the world's grain that is fed to livestock were reduced by 10 percent, the resulting grain could feed 225 million people.

The massive waste produced by livestock threatens waterways worldwide. In the United States, where 130 times more animal manure is produced than human waste - 5 tons for every U.S. citizen - animal waste is the principal source of water pollution.

However, Al Gore has dismissed this method, maybe because it will do nothing for his bank account. Nothing in the cap and trade bill address meat consumption either, possibly due to the lobbyists?

Or maybe all of this rancor is not about the Earth at all...

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