{"id":20461,"date":"2021-04-27T10:19:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T15:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20461"},"modified":"2021-04-27T10:43:17","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T15:43:17","slug":"winning-the-war-on-meat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2021\/04\/27\/winning-the-war-on-meat\/","title":{"rendered":"Winning the War on Meat!"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>The thing that I find interesting about the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2021\/04\/26\/politics\/fox-john-roberts-red-meat-biden\/index.html\">Biden War On Meat<\/a> nonsense is that <a href=\"http:\/\/css.umich.edu\/publication\/implications-future-us-diet-scenarios-greenhouse-gas-emissions\">the original academic study<\/a>, in looking at the possibility of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the amount of animal-based food in the American diet, found that reducing the amount of beef eaten in this country by 90%, plus reducing the total amount of non-beef animal-based foods (including dairy) by 50%, would reduce the diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by only 50% in ten years.\r\n<p>In other words, this is not a problem that can be solved by individuals making individual choices about their individual actions.\r\n<p>Not to mention that if we, as a culture, really did cut our beef consumption by nine-tenths in the next few years, cut our dairy and poultry consumption by half, and increased our plant consumption to compensate, it\u2019s hard to imagine our economy handling that without some sort of massive federal intervention. A quarter of a million people work at the meat-packing plants that see fifteen <i>billion<\/i> pounds of beef. Another quarter of a million people pack poultry. The conversion of those jobs and workplaces to plant-based food (or vat-grown meat) wouldn\u2019t be instant and wouldn\u2019t be cheap.\r\n<p>That\u2019s not to say we shouldn\u2019t do it! In the long run, our dependence on beef is not a Good Thing, and it would be wise to change it.\r\n<p>No, my point is just that addressing the climate issue is going to take <i>co-ordinated<\/i> effort at the national level, addressing <i>industrial<\/i> behavior on a large scale. My example over the last fifteen years has been small appliances\u2014most people have small appliances (refrigerators, clothes dryers, window air-conditioners) that are not energy efficient, and it would improve the national energy-use situation enormously if fifty million households got rid of their old refrigerators and got a new one. Except we don\u2019t have fifty million new refrigerators, and we don\u2019t have anywhere to put the fifty million old refrigerators. There\u2019s a similar problem for the person who eats fifty pounds of beef a year\u2014it would be better if they didn\u2019t, sure, but we\u2019re not ready for everybody to stop at once. Doing what you can as a household or a small business is great, but there is no way for even the accumulated changes of individuals to make the kind of difference we need.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger knows that fuss is made up, but doesn't find that part very interesting any more.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20461"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20463,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20461\/revisions\/20463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}