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October 27, 2009 By Fausta

Stern has a cow

t2_cow_605554a

Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Especially if you’re downwind from the cows. But,

Hold on. If we eat less beef, pork and poultry, we’ll be eating a lot more beans, broccoli and cabbage, and producing a heck of a lot more methane ourselves.

Which would make taking public transportation even more unpleasant for Lord Stern (and everybody else) – if he takes public transportation, that is.

Stern wants to raise the price of meat to a point where we all turn vegetarians:

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

Here in the US the Cap and Trade legislation will kill jobs.

And then there’s the redistribution of wealth from rich countries to poor ones: Lord Stern

warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.

If you think your soy diet will save you from Stern’s scheme, think again:

UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.

The basic idea is that people and animals are “bad for the planet.” Malthus is back in fashion, after all.

But things are not bad enough for Stern to give up his meat: He said

said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself

Useful word, “strict.”

UPDATE, Thursday 29 Oct.
Don’t miss Hoi Pollutants?

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Filed Under: Global Warming, Great Britain, UK Tagged With: beef, Cap and tax, cap and trade, cows, Fausta's blog

Comments

  1. foutsc says

    October 27, 2009 at 10:23 am

    Sometimes I wonder if stories like this aren’t just an elaborate joke played on conservative Americans by those witty Brits.

    This does come from the land of Benny Hill, Monty Python and Elton John, after all…

  2. Moooooster Bingley says

    October 27, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    eat mor chikin

  3. Orlando says

    October 27, 2009 at 9:53 pm

    They have something else coming if they think prohibiting meat is a good idea. Boy, it would suck to be them…

  4. filthykafir says

    October 28, 2009 at 9:24 pm

    I’m not on a “strict” vegetarian diet either; I only eat vegetarians on Tuesdays and Thursday — and, then, only for a light lunch with a white wine.

  5. Fausta says

    October 28, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    And some fava beans, filthykafir?

  6. Kate says

    October 28, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    I hope he does stick with his uber-vegetarian diet. More prime rib for me.

  7. Pat Patterson says

    October 29, 2009 at 6:26 am

    Well, since someone else started this I’ll point out that I agree that something needs to be done. I don’t really like the taste of meat but I do like the idea of killing them. Something along the lines of Eddy from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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