And one more thing before I go for now ( I’m getting on a plane tomorrow, so who knows what will happen!)
At the start of the New Year, I was reading a rather conservative newspaper and sure enough, an article appeared concerning how much greener we all can be this coming year…(that in itself was a wheeze given that the whole point of the Conservative Rag is to promote this idea: ”Make Money At All Costs”)
And so I had a read; not because I am green, not because I particularly want to save the planet (it’ll sort itself out; trust me), but because I hate waste.
And one of the exhortions in this rather right-wing rag (I’m dead centre…believe me, if you wanted a balance of extremes, I’m it!!) was to eat less meat.
Well, my answer…you know…this needs no thought, is NO!
No I’m not eating less meat! Where do you want me to get my protein from? A tin of kidney beans??? Don’t think so.
Protein for animals with eyes in the fronts of their heads comes from other animals with eyes in the sides of their heads – and they move sharpish when they see us. And see us they do, what with that almost all-round vision; God that a car was made with such panoramic scope!
Many of these animals that move, don’t move fast enough and that is why the food chain exists. The fact that movement has been domesticated out of certain animals changes little: once, they moved faster than they do now…and so did we! And we’re at the top of the food chain for one reason only: we were smart enough to kill off everything that had a taste for snacking on homo sapiens – apart from sharks.
And the whole point of this was this: cows are huge producers of greenhouse gas. And so my answer is this: “How does eating fewer of them decrease their greenhouse gas production?”
For sure we could ‘not eat them’ into extinction, but we could also ‘not eat ourselves’ into extinction and the world would be rosy! (think David Byrne: “I miss the Dairy Queens and the 7-Elevens”!)
All that would be left is just a bunch of elephants, lemurs and a pygmy tribe in Malaysia who eat each other.
We are also being urged to fly less. Two return seats to San Francisco, for example -I assume from Heathrow- produce 5 tons of CO2. Not only would I like to know who worked that one out, I’d like to know how! So look at it from this point of view: we are being urged to stay home for 31 days of grey funk, waiting for the days to get slightly longer and milder secure in the knowledge that we are doing our bit for the environment.
And while looking at it from this point of view, think of this: Don’t take those return flights to San Francisco…somebody else will and if somebody else doesn’t, the plane will fly either way.
The alternative? I guess you could drive to the south of France and if you don’t need the guilt of your car’s carbon stomp, you could take the bus (diesel) or the train (diesel-electric) and hire a moped (simple, filthy, two-stroke engine) when you get there.
Anyway, here’s a green thought…
We’ve got to watch out also for the melting polar ice-caps. I’m not too worried about the Arctic; that’s already in the ocean…if it melts, we’re not looking at a major sea-level rise. The Antarctic ice-cap on the other hand, is mostly on land. And they tell us it’s melting.
Consider this: It’s fresh water. It’s frozen. There’s a fair amount of sunshine at the south pole. So forget the British Antarctic Survey. Forget the science. Build a huge solar powered brewery. Forget even, your cold-filtered this and your ice-beer that. we have a magical opportunity to create the greatest beer ever brewed. The marketing pitches alone are worth the effort: “Poleweiser – Built on tradition (and penguins)”
