Apparently now going green means only eating greens. Advice from Lord Nicholas Stern:
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. I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating. I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”
Stern also says that “We have not seen those sort of conditions for 30 million years. These kind of changes will have huge consequences — southern Europe is likely to be a desert; hundreds of millions of people will have to move. There will be severe global conflict.”
Stern is most famous for his 700-page report on addressing global warming where he arbitrarily chose 550 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 as a magical threshold. Anything greater than 550 ppm, there are dire consequences. Below the 550 ppm threshold, we just might make it. Heritage analyst David Kreutzer pokes a big hole in Stern’s logic:
The bigger problem is how the costs are calculated. The Stern analysis purports to see the impact of today’s CO2 emissions 200 years into the future. Further, the impact on the much, much higher expected GDP of the future is presented as having an equal impact today. In other words, getting a dollar in 200 years is just as satisfying as getting a dollar today. Therefore, spending $.99 to get a dollar is a good idea independent of whether you get the dollar today or a thousand years from now. For most people who are not Nicholas Stern, Baron of Brentford, it would make a difference.
Well-known environmental economist Professor William D. Nordhaus of Yale University employed the methodology of the Stern Review and calculated that Stern’s twisted assumptions would recommend cutting the World’s income from its average today of $10,000 to $4,400 in order to prevent an annual drop of income from $130,000 to $129,870 starting in 200 years. Further he points out that half of the environmental costs that Stern says occur “now and forever” don’t actually occur until after 2800. As a reminder, that’s 800 years from now.”
To limit carbon dioxide emissions, population control has been suggested. Trading your dog or cat in for something more sustainable that you can eat like a chicken has been suggested and now trading your steak in for a veggie platter. We’re not talking minor adjustments anymore or merely paying higher prices for goods and losing income – although there’s plenty of that to go around, too. We’re talking about social and cultural changes that affect people in dramatic, non monetary ways.
Almost everything we use and do produces carbon dioxide. Look at the sacrifices made by the Beavan family in the documentary No Impact Man. Reason’s Dan Hayes writes, “Colin Beavan and his two-year-old daughter Isabella are in the bathroom cleaning out mommy’s cosmetics when they decide to wash their laundry by stomping their feet on a tub full of clothes and all-natural Borax detergent. It’s one of the many inconvenient and impractical things Beavan and his family do in the new documentary No Impact Man. The Beavans give up toilet paper, any products with packaging, cars and public transit, elevators, plastic bags, and shopping for anything new. In addition, they won’t use washing machines, disposable diapers, or food grown outside a 250-mile radius of NYC.”
These are sacrifices people do not want to make and do not have to make.
