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How to REALLY reduce your carbon footprint (1 Viewer)

Just remind me what your degree is in John because you clearly do not understand the science behind energy loss as you move up food chains? Estimated at 90%. This is not a recent discovery: I read papers on it as part of my ecology degree thirty years ago. Several people on my course, gave up eating meat at the time, due to this. Yes biodiversity is higher in mixed farming but the point is less land is needed for farming so more is available for other uses such as conservation. I would be very interested to know which scientific papers support your opinion. Feel free to quote them.

I have no ethical problem at all with eating meat. I do however have an ethical problem with people spouting stuff with no scientific evidence to back it up. Few people I know who chose to eat no/less meat for ecological reasons would want a complete stop to meat farming, just a considerable reduction.

Steve,

it cannot have escaped your notice that the path from vegetable matter growing in the soil to steak on the plate passes through but one change and - for instance - the energy required to cook a steak rare is considerably less than that for even a fairly finely chopped swede. And the fact also remains that a cow in a grass field bounded by hedges is set amid biodiversity whereas a field of whatever drenched in fertilisers and insecticides sets out to - and in a modern farm, as important ecological work tells us, succeeds in - eliminating biodiversity, invertebrate biomass and consequently that of all the wild species that depend upon it.

It is a mistake to depend too much on a single strand of reasoning when dealing with complex interactive systems - which is why the energy loss argument moves me not at all. It is plain that intensive vegetable farming by reducing the complexity of ecosystems to a minimum must be an awful thing.

Better by far to stick to mixed farming and let the human masses starve until there are no more masses - before they have destroyed everything, which they will inevitably do if pandered to by fools who think that it must be possible to feed them all without even defining an "acceptable" limit to the total human population that would then allow conservation and farming planning at the landscape scale.

Instead it seems to be accepted that no limit will ever be placed on human population growth: in which case there is no hope for wildlife and ecosystems now or in any conceivable future. Without immediate powerful population control there is no possible aversion of the climate change emergency or any other aspect of human over-population - emptying the oceans of fish, putting all land under the plough or hoof, eliminating all possible competitors from top predators to invertebrate crop eaters, concreting over the land not farmed for buildings and so on.

So frankly its impossible. Governments can't save the planet because they pander to the people: even the diabolical, inhuman despotism of China has given up on its one child policy, and anywhere that votes count is only concerned to get more of them by promising the earth - literally.....

Get on a jet and go and see it while its there. There's no point bothering with hope for the future. Anthropocentricity has eliminated it.

John
 

Not the highest point of BB.

First, BB should not publish a blatantly promotional stuff from a man financed by SNCF (French Railways). Even stating clearly his background. Big companies which stand to profit from climate panic: wind turbines, burning trees as biomass, nuclear power plants, gas pipelines, railways etc. give big money to climate activists.

Second, BB is silent about the obvious way out: offseting the carbon footprint. Especially, that excellent way of carbon capture is replanting forests in bird reserves supported by Birdlife in Britain and abroad.
 
I am fascinated by the lengths to which meat-eaters go to defend themselves. The evidence that meat industry is a huge contributor to global warming is so ubiquitous that if people invested as much effort into looking for it that they invest into spewing nonsense in order to justify their taste for meat, they would, well, not do the later. I mean the OP of this thread has shown numbers and half of the responses they got were just vague opinions about "how things are". The whole point is that yes, we can of course have pastures and animals on them to be eaten (if your morals are compatible with that) with a comparable environmental effects to the original natural populations that we killed off in the past, but that's nowhere near the scale of meat consumption that is happening right now. But really, what fascinates me the most is how invested people are in being able to eat meat and I have absolutely no idea how that happens to otherwise seemingly normally functioning adults - I just don't, for me it's such an irrelevant thing in my life. Yeah, I will eat meat if it is convenient - when someone presents it to me or there is no other nice choice in a place I went to with friends etc. but I am not actively looking for it nor buying it for cooking at home, because if I go to that kind of effort, why not go for a vegetarian option, or even better a vegan one if such is easily available.

Anyway, I really like the study, it shows me that I am, indeed, saving the planet as we speak - look how much can you do by taking one less flights a year, so the amount of good I am doing by lowering my yearly amount of flights to 31 from last year's 35 is absolutely immense!
 
I am fascinated by the lengths to which meat-eaters go to defend themselves.
And I'm fascinated by the lengths to which chequebook birders go to defend themselves.


Anyway, I really like the study, it shows me that I am, indeed, saving the planet as we speak - look how much can you do by taking one less flights a year, so the amount of good I am doing by lowering my yearly amount of flights to 31 from last year's 35 is absolutely immense!
Is this satire or just a case of a misplaced decimal point?
 
And I'm fascinated by the lengths to which chequebook birders go to defend themselves.

Ditto.

The "get on a plane before it's all gone" is one of the most selfish, ignorant posts I've read on here. Even if it was satire, it's going to be taken seriously by those who've no intention of reducing their life-list dominated ethics.

I'm not trying to "flight-shame" or to be holier-than-thou. But while the futile arguments go on about what's causing our species' extinction, our eco-system dies a little bit more and atmosphere-strangling behaviour remains unchanged.

Trump's view is that he doesn't care about the world after he's dead, so he's no interest in climate-change arguments. At least he's an honest idiot!

Peter:-C
 
I am actually not saying that my flying around isn't selfish, but that doesn't make the butthurt reactions of meat eaters any less absurd, because they seem to lack any comparable self-reflection. Every time I read something like "we have the natural right to eat meat" I feel like taking a flight somewhere and back jusst ti take a piss on it.
 
The meat thing is just veggie propaganda. Before herds of cattle there were herds of Bison, Mammoth, Mastodon, horses, you name it. T'ain't the cattle that are wrong (though wild species would be better). Vegetable monoculture in all forms is wrong, human population growth is wrong, eating meat is fine. What we really need is a new attitude to eating people. Fancy a Chinese? :-O

John
Spot on!
 
I am actually not saying that my flying around isn't selfish, but that doesn't make the butthurt reactions of meat eaters any less absurd, because they seem to lack any comparable self-reflection. Every time I read something like "we have the natural right to eat meat" I feel like taking a flight somewhere and back jusst ti take a piss on it.

What hubris.
What do you know about another persons 'self reflection'?

Will throw a extra steak on the barbi just to further irritate you...
 
Do you think that a red-dressed obese man flying all around the globe should be so carelessly shown in the media aimed for the younger generation?
:-O
 
Do you think that a red-dressed obese man flying all around the globe should be so carelessly shown in the media aimed for the younger generation?
:-O

Clearly not, since his sleigh is propelled by no less than EIGHT large ungulates - how irresponsible can you get..... :eek!:

John
 
But think of the huge effort needed to pass the meat fit for consumption - testing for mercury, pesticides and all the other material and drugs that concentrate in humans...!:eek!:
MJB

I should think diclofenac would be an issue.... :king:

On the other hand "long pig" has a long and honourable history as a source of protein. Don't knock it till you've tried it! :t:

John
 
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