Good Bye To Ronald McDonald

TRIGGER WARNING:  No more burgers for you.

For John, BLUF:  They won't be satisfied until we are back to 54 million people in the Western Hemisphere and all living a primitive nomadic life without horses or cattle.  Like after a global nuclear holocaust, with attendant global cooling.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Meeting Paris goals means dealing with climate impacts of eating meat

The sub headline:

With our already slim chances of avoiding “dangerous” global warming, the science suggests we can’t afford to leave food and farming off the negotiating table.

From Uber Progressive Nation of Change, by Reporter Ashley Braun, 2 September 2017.

Here is how it starts out:

Environmental groups place a lot of attention on trying to stop new oil, gas, and coal development since current fossil fuel projects would likely already blow us past the less-than 2°C upper limit for warming laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. In fact, there’s a whole movement, known as “Keep It in the Ground,” predicated on this idea.

But when faced with a resurgence of support for fossil fuels from the White House, perhaps just as important is talking about how to “Keep It in the Cow,” according to some reports.  Right now, experts predict agriculture is set to eat up half the greenhouse gas emissions the world can release by 2050 and still stay below 2°C (3.6°F) of warming.

That is, unless the world takes a big bite out of its meat consumption, especially from cattle and other livestock that chew their cud, say researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.  Raising these ruminants produces a lot of methane, a much more potent but shorter-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

While “Meatless Mondays” is one approach to this problem, their studies show that it’s not necessarily how much meat people eat that’s linked to the climate impacts of their diet.  Instead, it’s the amount of beef, lamb, and dairy.

A 2017 Chalmers study concluded that: “A switch from diets rich in ruminant meat to diets with meat from monogastric animals (pork, chicken) reduces [methane] emissions by almost the same amount as a switch to an entirely vegan diet.”  Researchers at the University of Oxford in 2016 found similar benefits, concluding that shifting to a vegetarian diet could lessen greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds.

So President Reagan was correct?

Regards  —  Cliff