Cont: Global warming discussion V

8enotto said:
There are climates and cultures where agriculture is near impossible, the people there live almost entirely on animal protein foods. There also are places like where I live that agriculture is possible year round for fresh produce.

There is no one size fits all remedy for anything, much less the huge global issues like global warming.

Also nutritional demands of any healthy population requires proteins, and that means animal sources are the best sources in some regions.

To just eliminate red meat consumption in the tropical to four seasons regions would require a large increase in agriculture production and transportation as well as governmental cooperation on a scale we have never achieved yet.
We as a species aren't capable of that right now. The increased transport needs is not green either.

Sensible solutions applied regionally make more sense.6
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Very well put.

It's that old adage of catching more flies with jam than vinegar - develop sensible plans rather than stand on the street corner screaming at everyone.
 
I grew up in a place with fast food on every corner and never considered most fruits or veggies as food most of my adult life.
Then I moved to Mexico. Outside my home a few yards away we have nanches and mango trees in fruit right now. I could eat sufficient quantity of them for the next month without walking far from the house. I won't.
The markets are loaded with tropical fruits I have never tried in two decades. No need to start now.

It was culture shock seeing what passes as an average cheeseburger here. just trying to find foods I actually want to eat is a job. Hot peppers on near everything is something I still battle with, they are basically used in place of salt.

Now imagine convincing the traditional Inuit culture to give up seal blubber and other tasty cuts off of whatever they can shoot to change to the produce section of a regular American supermarket as the new choices to feed the family.
They probably wouldn't know what most of it is and had tasted none of it in a lifetime. Step down to a street market in the tropics and now all sorts of weird and wonderful unknown stuff is available and rather cheap.

It would take two full generations of people to convince most to even try eating half of the plant foods available in a US supermarket.

The Beatles were wrong, we don't all want to change the world. Not quickly at least. Keep your politics off my dinner plate is a big one.
 
It's not about changing the world - it's changing how we do things so the world will stay the same .
 
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8enotto said:
There are climates and cultures where agriculture is near impossible, the people there live almost entirely on animal protein foods.
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What percentage of the world's population do you estimate live in these areas? Is that percentage large enough to wipe out the benefit of people in the rest of the world reducing their red meat consumption?

8enotto said:
There is no one size fits all remedy for anything, much less the huge global issues like global warming.
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I'm not sure anyone's saying there is.

8enotto said:
Also nutritional demands of any healthy population requires proteins, and that means animal sources are the best sources in some regions.
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Not getting enough protein is one of the great undying myths meateaters use against vegetarians. It is simply not true: most people eat far too much protein.
As for sole reliance on animal sources: what are these animals being fed on? If it is possible to grow grain to feed to animals, it is possible just to eat that grain instead. Beyond a few tiny and remote communities, I'm not sure this situation is either real or significant. Can you give some examples?

8enotto said:
To just eliminate red meat consumption in the tropical to four seasons regions would require a large increase in agriculture production and transportation as well as governmental cooperation on a scale we have never achieved yet.
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Now, that is patently untrue. Meat production takes up far more resources, in terms of land and water, than growing plants. That's the ENTIRE POINT of advocating a reduction in meat consumption. It leads to reduced GHGs (carbon and methane) and less deforestation (forests are carbon sinks).
You are also repeating the strawman that we need the 'elimination' of meat-eating. Not true. Just not true.

8enotto said:
We as a species aren't capable of that right now. The increased transport needs is not green either.
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And yet meat consumption per capita continues to fall all over the world. Seems the species is perfectly capable of it. I suspect that it's more a case of you, as an individual, not wanting to cut down on meat, and assuming everyone else thinks like you. This is clearly not the case, as I have shown above.

8enotto said:
Sensible solutions applied regionally make more sense.6
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Your sensible solutions seem to consist of apathy and inaction. That's not what the world needs.
 
8enotto said:
Now imagine convincing the traditional Inuit culture to give up seal blubber and other tasty cuts off of whatever they can shoot to change to the produce section of a regular American supermarket as the new choices to feed the family.
They probably wouldn't know what most of it is and had tasted none of it in a lifetime. Step down to a street market in the tropics and now all sorts of weird and wonderful unknown stuff is available and rather cheap.
It would take two full generations of people to convince most to even try eating half of the plant foods available in a US supermarket.
The Beatles were wrong, we don't all want to change the world. Not quickly at least. Keep your politics off my dinner plate is a big one.
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You shouldn't rely on your imagination when the facts are all there. You seem to have a very ethnocentric idea of inuits and what they know or don't know. People change fairly quickly, and learning about new stuff doesn't take long. Inuits don't continue to eat nothing but seal blubber when they get access to more delicious stuff. However, the dietary change isn't always healthy:
Stor opdagelse: Derfor får grønlændere sukkersyge (Videnskab.dk, June 18, 2014)
Big discovery: This is why Greenlanders get diabetes

ETA: It is no surprise that Novo Nordisk would would want to treat the inuits with pills rather than with dietary change:
“This discovery clearly demonstrates how common diseases are much more complex than we previously thought. Thanks to the breakthroughs in genetic research and data science capabilities, many people around the world may benefit from new personalized medicine approaches that take ancestral, genetic, and environmental backgrounds into account,” says PhD Student Anne Cathrine Baun Thuesen from CBMR, who was co-first author together with Frederik Filip Stæger from the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen.
Promise of better treatment for diabetes in Greenland after discovery of widespread genetic variant (Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metaboiic Research, University of Copenhagen, Nov 14, 2022)
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Cosmic Yak said:
False dichotomy. It is perfectly possible to take action as an individual, to live more sustainably, whilst putting pressure on fossil fuel companies and governments to make changes too.
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Unfortunately, to take action as an individual, to live more sustainably, is as effective as trying to stop war by becoming a conscientious objector. It serves no other purpose than to make people feel good about themselves while letting Big Oil continue to make money by making the planet uninhabitable. To take action as an individual doesn't do ****, which is why BP and other oil companies are so fond of the idea that they invented and propagated it.
 
dann said:
Unfortunately, to take action as an individual, to live more sustainably, is as effective as trying to stop war by becoming a conscientious objector. It serves no other purpose than to make people feel good about themselves while letting Big Oil continue to make money by making the planet uninhabitable. To take action as an individual doesn't do ****, which is why BP and other oil companies are so fond of the idea that they invented and propagated it.
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This wasn't true the first time you said it, and it continues to be untrue, no matter how many times you repeat it.
 
That's what BP and Exxon Mobil want you to think.
They are grateful to you for spreading the word.
Not everybody is willing to do so for free.


0:00 - Your carbon footprint is a lie
0:53 - Where "carbon footprint" came from
3:01 - BP's climate propaganda campaign
4:03 - Lobbying against climate action
6:15 - Getting rich off carbon trading
8:00 - Can we do anything?
Your "Carbon Footprint" is a LIE (and we all fell for it) (Abundantia on YouTube, July 14, 2022 - 9:59 min.)
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Everybody keeps telling us to cut our carbon footprints. So how guilty should I feel about my personal emissions? And what's Big Oil got to do with it?
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
00:00 Intro
01:10 History of carbon footprints
03:23 Plastics, tobacco, and PR
05:56 Fossil fuel companies
09:15 Does individual action matter?
Why Big Oil loves to talk about your carbon footprint (DW Planet A on YouTube, Aug 27, 2021 - 12:46 min.)
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0:00 Introduction
1:20 A fuller picture
2:48 The grey areas
4:58 Food
7:13 Solutions vs Expenses
9:38 Can YOU Fix Climate Change?
12:04 What Can You Do
Can YOU Fix Climate Change? (Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell on YouTube, Sep 22, 2021 - 15:49 min.)
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(Unfortunately, the one from Kurzgesagt ends up offering voting as the solution.)
 
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Cosmic Yak said:
Are you saying the oil companies made me go vegetarian?
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I have no idea why you went vegetarian.
I'm saying that you appear to believe that your going vegetarian helps prevent global warming even though it has done nothing to curtail CO2 emissions.
So if that was your reason for going vegetarian, then the oil companies made you do so.
 
Progress may be small, but, for example, electric lawnmowers is a 9 billion dollars per year business.

As soon as my lawnmower dies, I will replace it with an electric one. Might get an electric trimmer first though.

I buy a couple pounds of fake meat each month, and do a few vegetarian meals that don't rely on fake meat on a regular basis.

Every little bit helps.
 
Cosmic Yak said:
Not true. In the vain hope you are open to correction, here's the history of how the EPA came into being. It was a direct result of public opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_Protection_Agency#History
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trying to score cheap points?

The EPA did NOT some into being because individuals decided to change their consuming behaviour.
Which is what I said, and which you decided to replace with a straw man.

There was Protest and Counterprotest, violence, sabotage, Scientist going public and lots of people dying.
And a President who decided to actually create and enforce standards against polluters.

Changing consumer behaviour had nothing to do with it and would have changed nothing: only the force of the State can stop the biggest polluters in the world. i.e. Big Oil, etc.

We need to nationalize them, fire-sell their assets and use them to pay for the cleanup and transition to sustainability.

Which is obvious, and which is why no one is allowed to say it on mainstream media.
 
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To poke at the industry versus consumer bit just a little -

Methane is worse for climate change in the short term than carbon dioxide. There are a massive number of orphan wells spewing methane that the oil industry just didn't care to take responsibility for, in fair part because the government was exceedingly lax in the measures that it took to prevent industry from neglecting such. That's really, really not a consumer end issue in any meaningful fashion. There's some sharing to be had when it comes to leaking at active sites, but again, industry cutting corners and not really cleaning up their messes is fairly certainly the more problematic part of that.

On the agriculture front, cows produce large amounts of methane. Likely notably more than orphan wells, when it comes to the US, though I wasn't finding numbers for oil wells more generally on a quick check. That's more directly attributable to the consumer end of things. It's rapidly becoming less so, though, as advances in potential feed (adding a tiny portion of certain seaweeds to the diet) have been found to reduce methane generation by up to 90%.
 
The ENTIRE excuse for Gas as a "transition fuel" was based on the lie that it's better than oil - which is only true if pipelines and productions are not as leaky as they are, with no one bothering to patch them.
 
dann said:
I have no idea why you went vegetarian.
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Right. So you've no reason to think it was because of propaganda from Big Oil.

dann said:
I'm saying that you appear to believe that your going vegetarian helps prevent global warming even though it has done nothing to curtail CO2 emissions.
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We've been here before, with arthwollipot. One individual alone going vegetarian will, of course, make no discernable difference to CO2 emissions. However, this is not the point. No-one is saying that: that's a strawman. The point is that, if enough people do this, or reduce their red meat consumption, then it will make a difference. Pretending we are talking about one person, and one person alone, is simply dishonest.

dann said:
So if that was your reason for going vegetarian, then the oil companies made you do so.
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Ridiculous. You have no basis for saying that whatsoever. You- like many others in this thread- are simply making things up to justify your personal hobby-horses.
And, no, that wasn't the reason why I stopped eating meat.
Let me ask you this: Suppose, for the sake of argument, that everyone in the world went vegetarian overnight. As of tomorrow morning, not one person in the world is eating meat. Are you claiming that this would have no effect whatsoever on the meat industry, and thus no effect whatsoever on the environmental harm that industry is causing?
 
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