Global Warming and Vegetarianism

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Dardedar
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Global Warming and Vegetarianism

Post by Dardedar »

Lee Dye | Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?

"Your personal impact on global warming may be influenced as much by
what you eat as by what you drive, according to authors of a new study
that ranks the energy efficiency of food production. According to
researchers, the difference between a vegetarian and a red meat diet "is
comparable to the difference between driving an SUV and driving a reasonable sedan."

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/041906EA.shtml

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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Post by Barbara Fitzpatrick »

And as long as they are talking about agribiz livestock feeding units, they are right. However, pastured beef (buffalo, chicken) - especially on natural prairie and marginal lands (land that has to have a whole lot of fossil-fuel and chemical input to grow crops) - come in just about even with vegans' commercially-raised soybean usage. I've heard the comment that pastured is just as bad because they are cutting down rain forests to make the pastures. All I can say about that is, not in Carroll County, Arkansas!
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DAR
A long and powerful 8,800 word article on global warming in Vanity Fair. Here is an excerpt from the middle. I give this part because it shows how the tobacco payola/research comparison is more than just an analogy, it is actually some of the same godamn bullshit artists that have morphed into global warming deniers and are playing the same shamelessly dishonest game. Someday the lawsuits are going to come for these bastards, just like they did for big tobacco. But by the time most of the global warming problems really hit the fan, most of them will be dead. That's a shame.

D.

***
No one pretends that phasing out carbon-based fuels will be easy. The momentum of the climate system means that "a certain amount of pain is inevitable," says Michael Oppenheimer. "But we still have a choice between pain and disaster."

Unfortunately, we are getting a late start, which is something of a puzzle. The threat of global warming has been recognized at the highest levels of government for more than 25 years. Former president Jimmy Carter highlighted it in 1980, and Al Gore championed it in Congress throughout the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher, the arch-conservative prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, delivered some of the hardest-hitting speeches ever given on climate change. But progress stalled in the 1990s, even as Gore was elected vice president and the scientific case grew definitive. It turned out there were powerful pockets of resistance to tackling this problem, and they put up a hell of a fight.

Call him the $45 million man. That's how much money Dr. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, helped R. J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., give away to fund medical research in the 1970s and 1980s. The research avoided the central health issue facing Reynolds - "They didn't want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking," says Seitz, who is now 94 - but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry's purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science - and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.

In the 1990s, Seitz began arguing that the science behind global warming was likewise inconclusive and certainly didn't warrant imposing mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. He made his case vocally, trashing the integrity of a 1995 I.P.C.C. report on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, signing a letter to the Clinton administration accusing it of misrepresenting the science, and authoring a paper which said that global warming and ozone depletion were exaggerated threats devised by environmentalists and unscrupulous scientists pushing a political agenda. In that same paper, Seitz asserted that secondhand smoke posed no real health risks, an opinion he repeats in our interview. "I just can't believe it's that bad," he says.

Al Gore and others have said, but generally without offering evidence, that the people who deny the dangers of climate change are like the tobacco executives who denied the dangers of smoking. The example of Frederick Seitz, described here in full for the first time, shows that the two camps overlap in ways that are quite literal - and lucrative. Seitz earned approximately $585,000 for his consulting work for R. J. Reynolds, according to company documents unearthed by researchers for the Greenpeace Web site ExxonSecrets.org and confirmed by Seitz. Meanwhile, during the years he consulted for Reynolds, Seitz continued to draw a salary as president emeritus at Rockefeller University, an institution founded in 1901 and subsidized with profits from Standard Oil, the predecessor corporation of ExxonMobil.

Seitz was the highest-ranking scientist among a band of doubters who, beginning in the early 1990s, resolutely disputed suggestions that climate change was a real and present danger. As a former president of the National Academy of Sciences (from 1962 to 1969) and a winner of the National Medal of Science, Seitz gave such objections instant credibility. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at M.I.T., was another high-profile scientist who consistently denigrated the case for global warming. But most of the public argument was carried by lesser scientists and, above all, by lobbyists and paid spokesmen for the Global Climate Coalition. Created and funded by the energy and auto industries, the Coalition spent millions of dollars spreading the message that global warming was an uncertain threat. Journalist Ross Gelbspan exposed the corporate campaign in his 1997 book, The Heat Is On, which quoted a 1991 strategy memo: the goal was to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact."

"Not trivial" is how Seitz reckons the influence he and fellow skeptics have had, and their critics agree. The effect on media coverage was striking, according to Bill McKibben, who in 1989 published the first major popular book on global warming, The End of Nature. Introducing the 10th-anniversary edition, in 1999, McKibben noted that virtually every week over the past decade studies had appeared in scientific publications painting an ever more alarming picture of the global-warming threat. Most news reports, on the other hand, "seem to be coming from some other planet."

The deniers' arguments were frequently cited in Washington policy debates. Their most important legislative victory was the Senate's 95-to-0 vote in 1997 to oppose US participation in any international agreement - i.e., the Kyoto Protocol - that imposed mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions on the US.

The ferocity of this resistance helps explain why the Clinton administration achieved so little on climate change, says Tim Wirth, the first under-secretary of state for global affairs, who served as President Clinton's chief climate negotiator. "The opponents were so strongly organized that the administration got spooked and backed off of things it should have done," says Wirth. "The Kyoto negotiations got watered down and watered down, and after we signed it the administration didn't try to get it ratified. They didn't even send people up to the Hill to talk to senators about ratifying it."

"I wanted to push for ratification," responds Gore. "A decision was made not to. If our congressional people had said there was even a remote chance of ratifying, I could have convinced Clinton to do it - his heart was in the right place. ... But I remember a meeting in the White House with some environmental groups where I asked them for the names of 10 senators who would vote to ratify. They came up with one, Paul Wellstone. If your most optimistic supporters can't identify 10 likely gettables, then people in the administration start to ask, 'Are you a fanatic, Al? Is this a suicide mission?'" (Clinton did not respond to e-mailed questions.)

James Hansen, without singling out any individual, accuses global-warming deniers of "acting like lawyers, not scientists, because no matter what new evidence comes in, their conclusion is already decided." Richard Lindzen responds that Hansen has been wrong time and time again and operates "one of the worst climate models around." Lindzen agrees that both global temperature and atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have increased over the last century. But temperatures won't rise much further, he says, because humans aren't the main driving force in the climate system. The reason most scientists disagree with him, Lindzen explains, is simple careerism. "Once President Bush the elder began spending $2 billion a year on climate science, scientists developed a self-interest in maintaining this is an urgent problem," he says, adding that the scientific community's fixation on climate change will be remembered as an episode of "mass insanity."

Among many rebuttals to the deniers' arguments, perhaps the most authoritative collection is found on the Web site of Britain's national academy of science, the Royal Society. But such rebuttals have little impact on true believers, says Robert May, the Society's former president. "[Nobel Prize - winning physicist] Max Planck used to say that people don't change their minds [because of evidence]," he adds. "The science simply moves on and those people eventually die off."

But if the deniers appear to have lost the scientific argument, they prolonged the policy battle, delaying actions to reduce emissions when such cuts mattered most. "For 25 years, people have been warning that we had a window of opportunity to take action, and if we waited until the effects were obvious it would be too late to avoid major consequences," says Oppenheimer. "Had some individual countries, especially the United States, begun to act in the early to mid-1990s, we might have made it. But we didn't, and now the impacts are here."

"The goal of the disinformation campaign wasn't to win the debate," says Gelbspan. "The goal was simply to keep the debate going. When the public hears the media report that some scientists believe warming is real but others don't, its reaction is 'Come back and tell us when you're really sure.' So no political action is taken."

Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the 1994 hearings where tobacco executives unanimously declared under oath that cigarettes were not addictive, watches today's global-warming deniers with a sense of déjà vu. It all reminds him of the confidential slogan a top tobacco flack coined when arguing that the science on smoking remained unsettled: "Doubt is our product." Now, Waxman says, "not only are we seeing the same tactics the tobacco industry used, we're seeing some of the same groups. For example, the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was created [in 1993] to debunk the dangers of secondhand smoking before it moved on to global warming."

The scientific work Frederick Seitz oversaw for R. J. Reynolds from 1978 to 1987 was "perfectly fine research, but off the point," says Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a lead author of The Cigarette Papers (1996), which exposed the inner workings of the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation. "Looking at stress, at genetics, at lifestyle issues let Reynolds claim it was funding real research. But then it could cloud the issue by saying, 'Well, what about this other possible causal factor?' It's like coming up with 57 other reasons for Hurricane Katrina rather than global warming."

For his part, Seitz says he was comfortable taking tobacco money, "as long as it was green. I'm not quite clear about this moralistic issue. We had absolutely free rein to decide how the money was spent." Did the research give the tobacco industry political cover? "I'll leave that to the philosophers and priests," he replies.

Seitz is equally nonplussed by the extraordinary disavowal the National Academy of Sciences issued following his most visible intervention in the global-warming debate. In 1998 he urged fellow scientists to sign an Oregon group's petition saying that global warming was much ado about little. The petition attracted more than 17,000 signatories and received widespread media attention. But posted along with the petition was a paper by four global-warming deniers that was presented in virtually the same layout and typeface used by the National Academy of Sciences in its scholarly journal. The formatting, combined with Seitz's signature, gave the clear impression that the academy endorsed the petition. The academy quickly released a statement disclaiming any connection with the petition or its suggestion that global warming was not real. Scientific American later determined that only 1,400 of the petition's signatories claimed to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science, and of these, some either were not even aware of the petition or later changed their minds.

Today, Seitz admits that "it was stupid" for the Oregon activists to copy the academy's format. Still, he doesn't understand why the academy felt compelled to disavow the petition, which he continues to cite as proof that it is "not true" there is a scientific consensus on global warming.

The accumulation of scientific evidence eventually led British Petroleum to resign from the Global Climate Coalition in 1996. Shell, Ford, and other corporations soon left as well, and in 2002 the coalition closed down. But Gelbspan, whose Web site tracks the deniers' activities, notes that key coalition personnel have since taken up positions in the Bush administration, including Harlan Watson, the State Department's chief climate negotiator. (Watson declined to be interviewed.)

ExxonMobil - long the most recalcitrant corporation on global warming - is still spending millions of dollars a year funding an array of organizations that downplay the problem, including the George C. Marshall Institute, where Seitz is chairman emeritus. John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA, calls the denial campaign "one of the great crimes of our era." Passacantando is "quite confident" that class-action lawsuits will eventually be filed against corporations who denied global warming's dangers. Five years ago, he told executives from one company, "You're going to wish you were the tobacco companies once this stuff hits and people realize you were the ones who blocked [action]."

The public discussion about climate change in the US is years behind that in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the deniers are a big reason why. "In the United States, the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers are deeply skeptical of climate-change science and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions," says Fiona Harvey, the environment correspondent for the Financial Times. "In Britain, the equivalent body, the Confederation of British Industry, is absolutely behind the science and agrees on the need to cut emissions. The only differences are over how to do that."

America's media coverage is also well behind the curve, says Harvey. "In the United States you have lots of news stories that, in the name of balance, give equal credence to the skeptics. We don't do that here - not because we're not balanced but because we think it's unbalanced to give equal validity to a fringe few with no science behind them."

Prominent right-wing media outlets in the US, especially the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, continue to parrot the claims of climate-change deniers. (Paul A. Gigot, the page's editor, declined to be interviewed.) Few beat reporters are still taken in, but their bosses - the editors and producers who decide which stories run, and how prominently - are another matter. Charles Alexander, the former environmental editor at Time, complains that, while coverage has improved recently, media executives continue to regard climate change as just another environmental issue, rather than as the overriding challenge of the 21st century.

"Americans are hearing more about reducing greenhouse emissions from BP ads than from news stories in Time, The New York Times, or any other US media outlet," Alexander says. "This will go down as the greatest act of mass denial in history."
***

The rest:

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/042106EA.shtml
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Doug
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Who Farted?

Post by Doug »

A report by EarthSave International, based on the work of leading climate scientists, shows that vegetarianism is a far more effective strategy for addressing global warming in our lifetime than is reducing emissions from cars or power plants.

See here.

Summary
Global warming poses one of the most serious threats to the global environment ever faced in human history. Yet by focusing entirely on carbon dioxide emissions, major environmental organizations have failed to account for published data showing that other gases are the main culprits behind the global warming we see today. As a result, they are neglecting what might be the most effective strategy for reducing global warming in our lifetimes: advocating a vegetarian diet.
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Post by Barbara Fitzpatrick »

Again, it isn't eating meat per se that causes the problem, it's the Agribiz "concentrated feeding facilities". Those are nasty for a whole lot of reasons, methane generation being just one. However, if a little "royalty reprieve" money was shifted to startup funds for biomass gas plants next to beef, pork, and chicken CFFs, we'd see that greenhouse gas which is 4 times as damaging as CO2 turned into fuel for home heating, cooking, electricity, and natural gas powered vehicles.

If the meat you eat is pastured raised (or hunted - deer, elk, various birds, etc), then your eating habits are no worse, and potentially better, for the environment than vegetarianism, which depends heavily upon (80% GMO, heavy fossil-fuel dependent, has its own health issues, and subsidized) soy.
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