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The Forum > Article Comments > Factoring meat into our carbon footprint > Comments

Factoring meat into our carbon footprint : Comments

By Brian Sherman, published 30/7/2007

Reducing meat and dairy consumption, or even better becoming a vegetarian, is an easy way to help address global warming.

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Dickie “Australia has 68,505 beef cattle properties with a national cattle herd of 24,725,000 and Australians eat 37kg per person each year. Of course, that doesn't include the chickens,lamb, pigs, goats, processed and smoked "plastic" meats etc.”

One of the things with the agrarian / pasturalist aspects of our economy, you do need a large herd to manage, if you expect to have sufficient to support an export industry.

Now we come to the reality of this carbon footprint rubbish. It is a fraud,

Enough theoretical assumptions to choke a cow, to say nothing of a chook.

Economic realities will minimise the implications of carbon footprints by ranking their relevance in priority behind (or well down the list) of the wealth creation processes undertaken by individuals.

Dickie can be as petulant as he wants but he is writing like someone who already knows he has lost the debate by falling back on what the bunkum scientific merchants have to say about their own (less than empirical) studies of the irrelevant.

To bring up an earlier point “Membership is free to the institute…”

I have several institutional memberships, all of which cost me money. Through my involvement with one institute, I am sponsoring the formalisation of a process to measure and analyse carbon production and all the rest of the bunkum not because I think that there is added value from such analysis but because there are enough dullards around who will be game to pay for access to such a process.

It is all about supply and demand, when people like dickie jump up and down, salivating and hysterical about carbon this or carbon that, people like me see the opportunity and line them up like ducks for plucking.

It is like having a bet each way really, a personal win-win, either I am right because the realities transpire to prove me right or I will make a bucket of money from being wrong.
Posted by Col Rouge, Tuesday, 7 August 2007 12:29:04 PM
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"60% of all Australians are now overweight or obese. Obesity tripled between 1985 - 1995."

Australians have always been large meat eaters, so start to ask
yourself what has changed. In the 70s, you'd have to get off
your arse to operate the tv, few remote controls then. So less
exercise.

Then we have the change of diet. The proliferation of American
fast food joints, using largely lard to superssize that double
burger with extra fries etc. More processed foods, cheaper food
so larger portions.

Back in the 70s, people ate less processed food, less fast
food. So you are barking up the wrong tree about lean meat.
Posted by Yabby, Tuesday, 7 August 2007 1:56:49 PM
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"At no time have I recommended readers to convert to vegans. Nor am I a vegan."

Well dickie maybe you should reconsider, it could be harming your sex life.
http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2007/08/pork.html
Posted by alzo, Tuesday, 7 August 2007 2:33:59 PM
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What a fatuous article, and so many blinkered posters! But one wily crustacean is a beacon of reason among them.
Over about 80,000 generations, our ancestors evolved on a diet of roughly one third grain, one third fruit, and one third meat. They were adaptable; to long periods of differing diets and proportions; to feasts and famines.
About 400 generations back, to the delight of mice and rats, they started growing and storing grain. They tended to live longer, though often more miserably, and produce more descendants as grain growing and its storage became standard.
But the basic human digestive inheritance had not, and has not yet, had time to evolve to match the new regime.
Lean free-range meat, obtained from clobbering some feckless beast which had been grinding down its tooth-enamel on silica-rich grass stems, is still what our choppers and the fermentation-tank of our gut expects in reasonable proportions. Yes, minor variations have developed. Societies which did not develope a milk-drinking culture have digestions which do not take kindly to the milk jug subsequent to infant-weaning.
And location and lifestyles must be expected to impinge upon appropriate diet: a pig-out on whale-blubber would be kosher for an Innuit freezing his freckle while stalking a seal, but would not be much good if he were translocated to Florida for a life with a tinny-in-hand while watching a television re-run of evangelical gospel. Whatever the location and circumstance, a wide range of fresh food appropriate to them is the optimum – combined with sufficient physical activity to enhance metabolism.
I am in agreement with Yabby. It is a mistake to push the population out onto the extreme of one limb of human diet. Doing so might – unlikely, but might – enable us to cram a few more hundred million people onto the planet. But, when that slack is taken up by the ever-exapanding population, what then – confine our eating to the cyanide-laced Cassava perhaps, as some societies already are forced to do, because that crop has less need for water and nutrients than others? Perhaps enable 15 billion?
Posted by colinsett, Tuesday, 7 August 2007 10:08:29 PM
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Perhaps you could give us your views on the topic at hand Colinsett.

That is: "Factoring meat into our carbon footprint."

You will need to take into account the following:

Livestock in Australia up to 2005: 129 million

Total meat and egg birds up to '05: 76 million

The Canadian Inuit is now rethinking their tradional diet of "blubber meat" and other marine life. You see the marine life is heavily contaminated with pesticides including dioxins - you know that bioaccumulative, transboundary stuff farmers spray on their crops, contaminating all living species and eco-systems on the planet? The Canadian Inuits now suffer a high rate of cancers.

A reduction in livestock will increase global population??

Yep - we certainly have some "blinkered posters" on OLO.
Posted by dickie, Wednesday, 8 August 2007 8:21:59 AM
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Dickie, “Factoring meat into our carbon footprint” – yes it is the topic, the purpose of which is questionable.

If we are to limit our diet to vegetables in order to lessen our carbon footprint, is that to enable business as usual to proceed for a bit longer, to when our total carbon footprint returns to, and then exceeds, the present size?

If the purpose is not so blinkered - should a vegetarian diet be as environmentally beneficial as portrayed - then it can’t stand alone. It needs to be accompanied by advocacy for women throughout the world to have access to education and empowerment to limit their fertility according to their wishes. As things stand, about 80 million extra mouths need feeding every year – contributing considerably to the total carbon footprint.

Yes, farmers do spray their crops with stuff which is neither good, nor always lawful. They also, in Australia’s case, grow their vegetation at the expense of living entities which make up more than 20% of the earths biological mass: fungi. A abiodiversity essential to our existence. Much of this is incorporated into the top soil layers. Huge quantities of this have been exported towards New Zealand by air and water. Most of it done in the process of clearing paddocks to produce grain and other vegetable matter. Yes, most of us would be more healthy if less of this grain was sent to hen/pig/cattle concentration camps. But vegetarianism is not all that pure.
Posted by colinsett, Wednesday, 8 August 2007 10:26:31 AM
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