Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Oratio obliqua of one Oxfordshire opinion on outrageous oration...

...or, to put it another way, I report below the blogpost of a Geek in Oxfordshire who gives his own opinion on Lord Stern's ridiculous statement telling us that we should give up eating meat in order to save the planet, "Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas." I suspect that to save the planet we just need to stop deforestation, which is responsible for upward of 20% of global carbon emissions. Anyway, re methane...they have to say this when awkward facts are pointed out like the most major greenhouse gas, by far, is water vapour, with CO2 about 30% of the water vapor total (not the overall total). Admittedly the 3rd worst offender is methane; the "23 times more powerful" merely means that methane is 23 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but he fails to mention it accounts for less than 10% (some say less than 5%) of 'global warming'.

Well, anyway, I agree with Geek and his ideal solution: Eat Your Greens!

"I am calling for environmental campaigners to become as socially-unacceptable as wife-beaters (there, do you see how easy the emotive link is?). And I think the best way to solve all the crises of the planet is to kill and eat anyone who bleats on about lowering carbon emissions, getting rid of airliners, or taxing whatever it is they don't agree with in the name of the environment."

amount of methane produced

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4 comments:

Paul said...

One of the spokespersons from the meat growers association (or whatever daft name it is) was on Today and he said the main reason that anybody should advocate a drop in meat production is because of excessive water use which is a real concern.

By the way, did you know (and I'm sure as a lover of all things EU you do) that swill is illegal. All pig food must be kosher (if you pardon the confusing language) no more leftovers for Mr Pig.

Span Ows said...

The guy was right, I think in one of my water day/toilet day posts or something I wrote about this, I think 15,000 litres per kilo of beef is an average (see HERE for various calculations in OZ between 1 and 100,000 litres!)


Re swill, yes I was aware; in another life I was very close to a "famous" family of waste disposal...they had a national fleet of skips but also a big swill-fed pig farm...needless to say they were filthy rich! (Dad had a A1 condition DB5 a la James Bond classic in the garage).

bonnie said...

I understand a golfers diet is greens.

Span Ows said...

Hi bonnie, very funny! :-)

Just seeing this comment NOW! D'oh.