Lord Stern, one of the world’s leading climate change campaigners urged everyone to go vegetarian in an effort to halt global-warming.
According to Lord 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.”
The UK government quickly reacted to distance themselves from the notion that there may be a ‘meat tax’ in the future. Everyone acknowledges that there needs to be a cut back of greenhouse emissions, but is going vegetarian going to help?
In New Zealand there is a well founded view that dairy cows create too much CO2. We experienced the fallout of that when New Zealand signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and the ‘fart tax‘ was mooted. That was back in 2003.
Surely the farming practices of raising livestock in Britain and in the USA especially, where the majority of the stock is grain fed, has a far greater impact on the environment than New Zealand stock wandering the fields eating food that grows naturally, and plentifully.
For entertainment read the comments (at the time of writing there were 687 of them) – there are very few people out of that 687 that think Lord Stern is being either helpful, or sensible.
Here are a few gems:
“I’m rather flatulent myself and I exhale CO2 very deeply. Multiply that times 7 billion. Maybe we’re the one’s who should be eradicated and the cows can just keep eating…….grass!”
“I’m doing my part by eating those tasty animals that are trying to kill us with their gaseous emissions. We need to eat them all, then there’s no problem. If we don’t they’ll multiply and take over the earth.”