At this point, we might as well mass suicide.
Climate despair. I know that feeling.
Well Jay Inslee just said he’s running for president with climate as his platform, so there’s something.
But so slow and so late.
I didn’t know it was supposed to fix the planet.
When my friends in the restaurant industry talk about it, it’s always from the point of view of reducing animal waste and ending arguments with PETA.
in a way, that’s what we ARE doing.
I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at Project Drawdown, but here’s what they say about switching to a plant-based diet and GHG emissions.
Shifting to a diet rich in plants is a demand-side solution to global warming that runs counter to the meat-centric Western diet on the rise globally. That diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
They say the potential savings here of a complete switch away from dietary meat, including savings from attendant land use, is around* 60 gigatons of GHG not emitted between now and 2050.
(* I fudged their 60-ish GT number a little because it’s been a couple years since they did their math, time has passed and many of us still love our beef. I know I do.)
The full Project Drawdown top 100 solutions list is here for anybody interested.
I’ve been looking at stuff like this since the late 80s. Kind of sick of people assuming I don’t know about it, to be honest. Friends of mine ran a vegetarian/vegan community radio show when I was in university.
I was vegetarian for 12 years, and discovered I’m one of those people who can’t handle going totally without meat. (And OMFG please nobody use this as an excuse to lecture me about vegetarian nutrition. I studied it for decades, bought all the cookbooks, and got sick anyhow.)
Today I eat demi-veg; it’s common for me to have a totally veg day, and rare I have meat twice in one day. That seems to be enough to keep me okay.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to lecture. I didn’t know what you knew. Obviously, a lot.