ALDF: Fix Global Warming the Easy, Low-Tech Way

If you stopped by here yesterday, you saw a post on an upcoming CNN special Planet in Peril. At one point in that post, I lamented the fact that the most obvious, most effective, and easiest thing humans can do to go green and combat global warming was left off of recommended-actions lists featured on the show's Web site. You may also recall that Animal Person recently provided some related commentary.

The director of communications of the Animal Legal Defense Fund has also weighed in on this topic now. She published a fantastic, smart response yesterday to the New York Times article "As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions" and to the issue in general.

I really recommend that you read the whole post, but here's part of it:

According to the article, “As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions,” published on December 3 in the New York Times, consumption of “red meat,” i.e. cows and pigs, is expected to double globally between 2000 and 2050. . . .

Because, according to a United Nations report, livestock generates 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—more than from cars, buses, and airplanes—the projected spike in meat consumption over the next few decades is a piece of the global warming juggernaut that can no longer be ignored.

Or can it? All evidence points to society’s desperate attempts to ignore this very fact, even as we’ve come to grips (most of us, anyway) with the stark reality of global warming. . . .

We just do NOT want to talk about the fact that the personal choice to eat animals, multiplied by several billion, is one of the single biggest factors contributing to impending environmental devastation. Do I sound hysterical? Because honestly, I feel a little hysterical here. Rather, the Times piece details, like a wish list for a sci-fi Santa, the variety of high-tech fixes that we’ve dreamed up and will dump countless millions of research dollars into to avoid prescribing people away from a meat-based diet. In one such futuristic fix for the problem of high-methane-emitting pig poop, “the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity.” Yum. Alternatively, we might focus on “inventing feed that will make cows belch less methane.”

Who dares suggest the low-tech fix, here? Even environmental organizations have by and large shied away from the most obvious, most elegant of prescriptions to the problems caused by raising animals for food: people need to stop eating meat. Not some other, abstract people, who live in very-far-away, oh-so-polluting countries like China and India, but people like Al Gore, for example. People who read the New York Times. How about you?

I’m not suggesting people should stop eating animals because I said so, for god’s sake (I’m hysterical, remember?). But why not listen instead to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “I’m not sure that the system we have for livestock can be sustainable,” the article quotes him as saying. It goes on: “A sober scientist, he suggests that ‘the most attractive’ near-term solution is for everyone simply to ‘reduce meat consumption,’ a change he says would have more effect than switching to a hybrid car.” Simple, right?

Let’s see what kind of mental gymnastics humankind will resort to next.

Read the post in its entirety here: "The Low-Tech Fix That Dare Not Speak Its Name"

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Image courtesy of Animal Aid.