CNN: The next hamburger you eat may doom the Marshall Islands.

[TUMe]

Submitted for your consideration:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/29/opinions/sutter-beef-suv-cliamte-two-degrees/index.html

"But eating beef, as I'll explain, has come to be seen, rightly, in certain enviro circles, as the new SUV -- a hopelessly selfish, American indulgence; a middle finger to the planet.

 

[2PoorTUFans]

I don't disagree. Lessening beef consumption would be an undeniably good thing for the planet, even if you completely ignore the greenhouse emissions and focus only on water consumption and the relative inefficiency of cattle raising when compared to some other protein sources. I'm not made of stone though. I mean look at that brisket in the picture. My god

 

[TUMe]

I have cut my beef consumption almost completely out. But, it was for selfish reasons after a bit of heart trouble.

 

[TUMe]

Double post

 

[Gmoney4WW]

Raising of all animals is innefficient nutrition. It's been a long time since I read about this, but I believe it's takes about 10 times the nutrients and water to produce the same amount of animal per pound, as it does vegetable nutrients. I don't eat much beef, but I sure do eat the hog. Pork is my fav. I make burgers, chili, and numerous other things out of pork. Only thing I care for in beef is prime rib.

 

[TUMe]

Pork is good environmentally, according to the article. Lean ham and pork tenderloin are good heart wise also. Chicken is even better. I expect to start having feathers and crowing any day. It took awhile but now grilled chicken is as good as a hamburger. It's not the cholesterol in in beef so much as the saturated fat.

If you read the article, feed lot beef is not as bad for the environment as grazed. But PETA considers feed lots inhumane. The article points out the stopping beef won't do much to solve the world's problems but it will help on the margins. Fuel is still the culprit.

Of course, I say people eat meat and people use fuel and nothing will work if the population continues to explode. Please continue to ignore that fact. It did say the worst was South America where they still cut trees to graze more cattle. It's a triple whammy since one trees use CO2, trees decay or are burned making CO2 and third then cattle are moved onto the land. Please write to South American countries and ask them to stop. At least, they could promise to and then cheat.

 

[noble cane]

its always kind of funny how they point to Pacific Atolls for climate change sea changes when those islands are slowly sinking into the ocean anyway as the magma domes beneath them move further down the rift.

Volcanic islands are inherently unstable due to the nature of their formation and at any time they could slough off into the ocean or collapse in on top of them selves. Molokai is an excellent example.. it used to be 3X its size and nearly as tall as Mauna Kea until it collapsed and sloughed off to the North of the island.

the entire Hawaiian chain except for the big island is slowly sinking into the ocean... and actually the west side of the Big island is slowly sliding into the sea..

 

[aTUfan]

we are blamed for "climate change" due to our exhaust from producing much of the worlds goods.

I've been to Egypt. They have an air pollution problem there, and they produce 0% of the world goods. i.m sure there are many other ares like this. How do you get them to stop? They don't have a CO2 tax.

 

[TUMe]

Question: Are the green people against fuels the same people who were against building nuclear power plants?

 

[2PoorTUFans]

Question: Are the green people against fuels the same people who were against building nuclear power plants?

I'm sure there's some overlap in that Venn diagram. Are you making the call for nuclear cars?

 

[TUMe]

Nuclear cars well maybe in 132 years. Now there is a call for electric cars at the same time there is a call to close coal fired electric plants, replace fossil fuel cars with electric. Aside from a grid that would be challenge by millions of electric cars, the reduction of power plants that are coal fired or even NG fired would put a strain on power plants to provide the electricity without coal or natural gas.

I think nuclear cars would, however, promote safer driving. No one wants to rear-end and nuclear reactor. When you come home from a hard day at the cubical and plug you total electric car into your charging apparatus it would be nice if power was there. As the globe warms there will be less water for hydroelectric power and we will be dependent on solar power and wind power. Right now, I don't think the grid In Los Angeles would handle all of those electric cars.

I'll be serious, if I must, where is all this electric power going to come from with no coal fired plants, no natural gas plants, no nuclear plants? Wind and solar power but the growth isn't there yet. Remember when the first automobiles came out that they didn't shoot all of the horses. There was a number of years when horse drawn vehicles and petroleum based vehicle co-existed. Again, people aren't going to stop eating beef tomorrow, the new automobiles [please refer to the lots on South Memorial] won't be scrap metal soon. Yet they tell us that we need to take action immediately. I hope you have solar panels on your house and no petroleum driven vehicles in your garage. Mustang GT's and Ford F-15 are still selling. Gasoline was $2.05 a gallon today 14 months ago it was $3.72. I hope climate scientists are wrong, because if they are right well the planet is in a heap of trouble.

 

[2PoorTUFans]

I'll be serious, if I must, where is all this electric power going to come from with no coal fired plants, no natural gas plants, no nuclear plants? Wind and solar power but the growth isn't there yet. Remember when the first automobiles came out that they didn't shoot all of the horses. There was a number of years when horse drawn vehicles and petroleum based vehicle co-existed. Again, people aren't going to stop eating beef tomorrow, the new automobiles [please refer to the lots on South Memorial] won't be scrap metal soon. Yet they tell us that we need to take action immediately. I hope you have solar panels on your house and no petroleum driven vehicles in your garage. Mustang GT's and Ford F-15 are still selling. Gasoline was $2.05 a gallon today 14 months ago it was $3.72. I hope climate scientists are wrong, because if they are right well the planet is in a heap of trouble.

Well, I think you are mischaracterizing the stance of basically every reasonable environmentalist on the planet, as this board is wont to do. I can't tell you one person I know that thinks we need to have a complete overhaul of our infrastructure overnight. In fact, I think most would tell you that it is literally impossible to do such a thing in a 24 hour period. But holy hell would it be nice to have us take steps in the right direction. Even China is more progressive than we are on climate change at this point. Add that to our growing pile of national embarrassments.

I've got like another 50-60 years on this rock, would be nice to have some of it preserved; but at this point I treat the prospect of having a nice looking planet to enjoy in my retirement the same way I do the prospect of drawing social security payments, it's a complete pipe dream that I should have no reason to expect. Must be nice, Me.

I bicycle commute to work literally every day, mow my lawn with a non-powered rotary mower and had tofu as my protein source at dinner tonight. Hope I pass your "is eligible to talk about taking action against climate change" threshold.

 

[TUMe]

Yes, good 2Poor.

Nobody is talking about 24 hour changes. Your changes are great. Heck, I don't even go to work. My vehicles are much more fuel efficient than the ones that I had 10 years ago. V8s have been replace with 2 liter turbos. Double meat cheese hamburgers with grilled chicken. If you read the post by WA, chicken is much better for the environment.

I don't know how you can say China is more progressive, the US has pledged to cut emission and China has pledged to increase their's more slowly. They have not pledged, yet, to cut the emissions after that.

Since you plan to live 50-60 more years, I'm sure you were NOT one of the ones that stopped nuclear power plants from being built.

Possibly we are also fibbing about the changes we will make in the next 15 years. It's easy for a president to promise something will happen in 15 years when he will have no power to control it in 15 months.

We can't trust Germany to obey the laws when they sell cars in the US. But we can trust China and South American countries? Glad you eat tofu, but have you seen the cars backed up idling in line at McDonalds, Braums, etc. to poke food into kids as they drive them to school or back? People were depressed this Summer because the lakes were too high to go boating.

Climate Fortunetellers have been saying we were five years away from the point of no return for 15 years. See Al Gore political race in 2000 or Al Gore books and movies in 2006. Yet the UN predicts 35% more people in 40 years. Did you read how fertilizers are much worse than CO2? Yet 35% more people will require 35% more food. I guess we can harvest more fish...no, over fishing now.

 

[2PoorTUFans]

China is instituting a national cap and trade policy by 2017, making real investments in alternative energy sources and raising their fuel efficiency standards within the next 5 years. They've said they will heat peak emissions in 2030, and anticipate a reduction past that. They do more damage than anyone else currently, and another 17 years of increasing carbon emissions is pretty disheartening to see, but they are taking the issue more seriously than the GOP.

As for the rest of your post, which seemed to boil down to an admission of abject defeatism, I'll just tell you what I told URedskin: "you must be the change you wish to see in the world." I think your philosophy that what I do doesn't matter because other people are still going to use drive-throughs and eat beef is a pretty sad one. I'm still not sure where you stand: is climate change fake, or is it real and it just doesn't matter because there's nothing we can do to stop it at this point?

 

[TUMe]

China is instituting a national cap and trade policy by 2017, making real investments in alternative energy sources and raising their fuel efficiency standards within the next 5 years. They've said they will heat peak emissions in 2030, and anticipate a reduction past that. They do more damage than anyone else currently, and another 17 years of increasing carbon emissions is pretty disheartening to see, but they are taking the issue more seriously than the GOP.

As for the rest of your post, which seemed to boil down to an admission of abject defeatism, I'll just tell you what I told URedskin: "you must be the change you wish to see in the world." I think your philosophy that what I do doesn't matter because other people are still going to use drive-throughs and eat beef is a pretty sad one. I'm still not sure where you stand: is climate change fake, or is it real and it just doesn't matter because there's nothing we can do to stop it at this point?

First paragraph. "within the next 5 years." "They've said they will" "They are taking the issue more seriously." I will gladly pay you in 15 years for a hamburger today.

What do I think. First I think there is natural change and manmade change may be added upon it. I think no one is doing much about the man made part. Everyone talks a big game. And for the 11,000th time man mad change whether the cause or part of the cause of warming will never stop as long as man keeps becoming more numerous. 35% more people by midcentury.

 

[Clong83a]

Nuclear cars well maybe in 132 years. Now there is a call for electric cars at the same time there is a call to close coal fired electric plants, replace fossil fuel cars with electric. Aside from a grid that would be challenge by millions of electric cars, the reduction of power plants that are coal fired or even NG fired would put a strain on power plants to provide the electricity without coal or natural gas.

I think nuclear cars would, however, promote safer driving. No one wants to rear-end and nuclear reactor. When you come home from a hard day at the cubical and plug you total electric car into your charging apparatus it would be nice if power was there. As the globe warms there will be less water for hydroelectric power and we will be dependent on solar power and wind power. Right now, I don't think the grid In Los Angeles would handle all of those electric cars.

I'll be serious, if I must, where is all this electric power going to come from with no coal fired plants, no natural gas plants, no nuclear plants? Wind and solar power but the growth isn't there yet. Remember when the first automobiles came out that they didn't shoot all of the horses. There was a number of years when horse drawn vehicles and petroleum based vehicle co-existed. Again, people aren't going to stop eating beef tomorrow, the new automobiles [please refer to the lots on South Memorial] won't be scrap metal soon. Yet they tell us that we need to take action immediately. I hope you have solar panels on your house and no petroleum driven vehicles in your garage. Mustang GT's and Ford F-15 are still selling. Gasoline was $2.05 a gallon today 14 months ago it was $3.72. I hope climate scientists are wrong, because if they are right well the planet is in a heap of trouble.

Electric cars and nuclear plants are the only way forward that I see. I've always been a huge proponent of nuclear power.

Cattle are tasty, but are certainly a drag on resources including water and otherwise arable land for grazing. Also, the loss of arable land being used to grow cattle feed for feedlots instead of people food. Beef should probably be a lot more expensive than it is. But I never did totally buy into the argument that cattle methane farts are going to doom us. I believe climate change is a serious issue, but to me this is one example where a few people with an axe to grind (looking at you, PETA) have blown everything out of proportion. There were millions of free-ranging bison farting methane for eons before we killed most of them and replaced them with factory cattle ranches. Cows do produce more methane than bison, and there are more cattle now than there were bison. So modern livestock practices definitely produce more methane than indigenous herds did 200 years ago. But we're not talking about an increase of hundreds or thousands of orders of magnitude over historical values, like, for instance, CO2 emissions from fossil fuel extraction. They claim in this article that 14% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to cattle. Great, but the "14%" number is without any historical context. What would the number be if historical bison herds were still somehow around today and factory farming didn't exist? Figure out an estimate, and then only report the difference in your figures. If the historical estimate is 0.001%, then hey, now you've got my attention. It's otherwise alarmist and misleading.

To be clear, I'm not saying modern livestock practices don't contribute to climate change. I just think that there are much better arguments against massive scale cattle ranching than how it affects climate change. Similarly, I think fossil fuels are of astronomical more importance to climate change than cattle. Fretting over the cattle is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you still want to feel guilty about the Marshall Islands, look no further than the Castle Bravo test. Made the entirety of Bikini Atoll unihabitable. Unambiguous loss of an island due to American activities. No need to feel guilty for maybe accelerating some land loss due to rising sea levels which may or may not be related at all to the farts from a cow you ate as a hamburger.