No one will be shocked to learn that George's plan for the future involved us all turning vegan but what disturbed me more was their view of agriculture as simply a series of carbon sinks with which to offset global warming.
We can reduce CO2 in the atmosphere if we stop cows farting is a rejection of agriculture as a natural part of the carbon cycle. Of course if it was all trees and bogs this would capture more carbon but clearly humans stopped being hunter gatherer societies some time ago because if we hadn't we'd still be living in caves. Of course heavily pesticided land is not going to capture as much carbon as land farmed using traditional organic rotational methods ... but it seems to me wrong to see it as the job of the farming industry to put right the pollution created by the industrial burning of fossil fuels for well over 150 years. It's as though none of these people have even heard of the carbon cycle...
...whereby the CO2 naturally produced by the cows eating grass is supposed to return to the earth in dung. No we need to control the very small amounts of methane that are given out in cow farts etc...
There may be some truth in this but trying to merge together the effects of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel output with that of CO2 emissions from intensive farming methods is like blaming coastal erosion equally on both the sea and on children who take pebbles home from a beach holiday. Yes, the children have an effect but they're hardly the primary cause... although doubtless the environmentalists will argue that everything is connected.
Naturally both commentators on Today - who both seemed to be on the same side ...what happened to "impartiality"? - seemed to think that meat was somehow uneconomic and that we should all eat less of it. It is true the higher up the food chain you go the more energy is lost along the way but you have to eat of cereal to get the same energy as you'd find in a stake...
Well, maybe there are alternatives but I tried and quorn is a bit boring after a while. As for giving up cheese - Yes, I know it shortens my lifespan but booze will have to go first...
Still what amazes me more than these environmentalists theories of how everybody should eat ... is their sheer confidence that everybody else will adopt their policies meekly. It doesn't seem to occur to them either that part of human evolutionary progress could be down to the fact that our nature allows us to be both herbivore and omnivore... I'm probably a bigot to say it but animal herbivores with the possible exception of horses don't seem to be very bright. Okay that's probably a eugenic argument for meat eating but ...
...being told that it's all down to cows and we must stop eating meat because it creates CO2 is a bit depressing... particularly when you suspect that the interlocutor's primary objection is not damage to the enviroment as much as the morality of killing anything with a central nervous system. Anyway apparently to save the planet we must now all change our diets... And no one is immune to these new political machinations to control everybody's diets ...including the cows themselves who must now - according to wikipedia - only be fed the right kind of food that will prevent them producing the wrong type of farts...
"There are some controllable ways to reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. Improving the digestion of bovine will decrease the bovine's tendency to belch and release digestive gases through the anus, which emit methane into the atmosphere. One way is to grind the cattle feed to make it finer which leads the cow to take less time and energy to digest it, and as a result, less methane is produced in the process. Scientists have introduced garlic into cattle's diets; garlic inhibits the microorganisms in the intestines from producing methane"
...it can only be a matter of time before human farts are subject to a similar level of micromanagement. Soon people who do a silent but violent one will be lectured severly not about the antisocial aspects of not popping to the bathroom but about how they are damaging the environment. And about time too...
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