Fire In The Hole!


Methane gas is the worst of the greenhouse gases, and the numero uno source of methane is animal agriculture.

Yes, your insatiable desire for cheeseburgers is helping to ruin what's left of this beautiful little blue orb on which we live.

It's not a stretch of the truth to say that if everyone switched to a meatless diet our worries about global warming would be essentially over. We're not just talking cow farts here folks. In order to eat that Quarter Pounder you have to:

(1) Fight oil wars (lots of carbon emitted in the process)
(2) Transport crude to our country.
(3) Convert crude to petroleum and fertilizer.
(4) Ship fertilizer to farms to grow corn.
(5) Ship corn to ranches to feed cattle.
(6) Ship cattle to processors to be butchered.
(7) Ship meat to stores/restaurants.
(8) Travel to buy meat.
(9) Travel to job which provides cooked meats.
(10) Cook meat.
(11) Travel to place where cooked meat is ready.

Every step along the way creates a lot of CO2, especially in Step 2 as those oil tankers alone emit more C02 than all the cars in the world combined. The stuff they burn is the left-overs, the dreck, the literal bottom of the barrel. What they spew between continents is pure, unregulated poison.

In the meantime we have hundreds of millions of cows standing around each day eating a rich diet of corn and farting their brains out. What's worse, cows fed corn develop e. coli in their stomachs. Cows that eat grass don't.

And let's not forget spongiform encephalopathy (speaking of farting your brains out), better known as mad cow disease, a disease which comes from feeding cow carcasses to other cows. Inherent to mad cow disease are prions, an infectious agent that is incurable and fatal to both cows and humans. Prions are truly nightmare stuff. You may be infected now and not even know it. In humans it's called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Go read about it here.

Would we still have to grow crops? Certainly, but we would only have to grow but a fraction of the previous amount as converting corn to fat and protein is a very inefficient use of calories. This results in but a fraction of the carbon footprint compared to meat production.

Yeah, I know, meat is tasty (sweet, tasty murder) but it's a contemporary vanity as it's only until comparatively recently that human societies have had meat available to them every day, much less three times a day. Worse, you're not even a carnivore. At best, you're an herbivore who can stomach carefully prepared meats. Carnivores can eat raw meat, we can't.

If you've read this far I hope you've been intrigued enough to do some secondary reading on the subject. Going meatless is not difficult and, in the long run, saves you money, improves your health and might even save this planet for future generations.

=Lefty=