One Less Burger, One Safer Planet
“For the world’s higher-income populations, greenhouse-gas emissions from meat eating warrant the same scrutiny as do those from driving and flying,” according to the authors of a study last fall in the Lancet.
This might hit you a bit in the “too-much-information” category, but those authors, from Britain, Australia, and Chile, found that with global meat and milk production being on course to double by mid-century, the methane and nitrous oxide being released (that includes flatulence and gases from manure) is significant. Livestock occupy nearly a third of the land on earth. Agricultural greenhouse gases are about 22 percent of all emissions around the world.
The study said that stabilizing agricultural emissions would require a 10 percent cut in global meat consumption. There would likely be other benefits, such as lower rates of heart disease, colorectal cancer, and obesity, and preservation of the habitat for all kinds of species. “Today, as Chinese, other Asian, European, and US farmers begin to run short of land for crop expansion,” the study said, “the increasing demand for meat in developing economies is forcibly extending intensive agriculture into the tropical rain forests of South America, especially Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay.”
Anyone that has caught a few episodes of the AMC series MadMen and observed the how big a part of our culture that cigarettes were at one time has some idea about the long and difficult road to change our habits as a culture. Getting people to make even a minor change like eating a few less ounces of meat a week is, like cigarettes smoking going to take a while. Its unfortunate that so many other cultures rather then learning from our mistakes seem determined to imitate them. For countries like Brazil and Paraguay it is likely to be a short and costly experiment in imitating what they see as moving their countries into modernity. They simply don’t have the resources to sustain a population that gets so much of its daily calories from grain raised beef.
Group finds 6 million pounds of trash on world’s beaches
WASHINGTON – The world’s beaches and shores are anything but pristine. Volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals.
A report by the Ocean Conservancy, to be released Wednesday, catalogues nearly 7.2 million items that were collected by volunteers on a single day last September as they combed beaches and rocky shorelines in 76 countries from Bahrain to Bangladesh and in 45 states from southern California to the rocky coast of Maine.
The entire world as one big dump. Maybe this will help with green houses gases from jets. In a decade or to we can just walk across the bridges of garbage between countries.
tangledwing 