Feeling passionate about curbing climate change? Worried about your kids’ and grandkids’ future? Have opinionated views about deforestation and desertification? Anxious about Greenland and Antarctica ice melt? Not happy with the outcome and commitments made by the head of states in the Glasgow COP26 summit? Think more should be done and done soon? If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you are climate conscious. You don’t have to be Greta Thurnburg to care about climate change!
Climate consciousness starts at a personal level. You take stairs instead of using the elevator (it makes you healthier as well), walk or bike to work/school, use LED lights instead of incandescent lights, turn off lights when not in the room, drive an EV, reduce, reuse, and recycle your stuff. You are doing your part as a responsible climate conscious citizen. You may also be participating in protests and marches to put pressure on the elected officials, which puts you in the climate activist category!
Another important aspect that is often overlooked is diet. Yes, diet at personal level affects climate in a profound way. A non-vegetarian diet puts a lot of impact on the scarce resources. Without attaching any emotions to Livestock, it is perfectly fine to consider it as a machine. All of us are aware that no machine is 100% efficient. A machine takes in input and provides output and there is wastage in the process.
Livestock machine is probably one of the least efficient machines with 20% efficiency, at best (as highlighted in Are you a vegetarian ), with an unduly large incubation period of 3 years or more. This machine does not produce any output for 3 years while consuming resources and creating waste, body heat, CO2, Methane, urine, fecal matter and one time waste of blood and skeleton. This is like running an Internal Combustion engine continuously for 3+ years to get output! What a waste of resources! Of course, the incubation period can be reduced through the use of artificial growth hormones!
All the waste materials, over the lifetime add up and continue to cause climate change. Methane is 80 times as potent as CO2 to cause climate change (UNEP article on Methane pollution), the main source of Methane emission is livestock. In general, you would drastically cut your GHG emissions with a meatless diet. The carbon-emissions cost is 3.5 kilograms per American per day for producing all the meat they need that day, and only about 0.6 kilograms for producing the meat’s replacement (Vegan Buzz)
It takes 10 times the water to produce 1kg of beef as compared to 1kg of tofu. Water is another scarce resource in many parts of the world. Many intellectuals think the next war will be over water! Even where it’s not scarce, it takes a lot of energy to pump and distribute it. It takes triple the land to grow the food for livestock as compared to feeding those grains to people.
With all that wastage accounted for, how can the price of beef be $5/lb in the USA when less resource intensive foods like fruits are sold at $3/lb? Because the Big Meat industry is heavily subsidized! It’s equivalent to subsidizing Big Oil, Shell and Chevron, to pollute the atmosphere! The strong meat lobby continues to pressure the US government to help keep the meat prices lower, at the expense of the environmental damage.
Let’s take a holistic approach in solving the climate change crisis and arrest the environmental damage soon before it’s too late!
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