STUDY: Vegetarian Diets ‘Worse’ For ‘Climate Change’ – Three Times ‘More Harmful to the Environment’
Monday, December 14, 2015
VEGETARIAN AND “HEALTHY” DIETS COULD BE MORE HARMFUL TO THE ENVIRONMENT
Carnegie Mellon Study Finds Eating Lettuce Is More Than Three Times Worse in Greenhouse Gas Emissions Than Eating Bacon
By Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / [email protected]
Contrary to recent headlines — and a talk by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference — eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change.
In fact, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published inEnvironment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns.
Eating lettuce is more harmful to the environment than eating bacon.
“Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor ofsocial and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. “Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.”
Fischbeck, Michelle Tom, a Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering, and Chris Hendrickson, the Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, studied the food supply chain to determine how the obesity epidemic in the U.S. is affecting the environment. Specifically, they examined how growing, processing and transporting food, food sales and service, and household storage and use take a toll on resources in the form of energy use, water use and GHG emissions.
On one hand, the results showed that getting our weight under control and eating fewer calories, has a positive effect on the environment and reduces energy use, water use and GHG emissions from the food supply chain by approximately 9 percent.
However, eating the recommended “healthier” foods — a mix of fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood — increased the environmental impact in all three categories: Energy use went up by 38 percent, water use by 10 percent and GHG emissions by 6 percent.
“There’s a complex relationship between diet and the environment,” Tom said. “What is good for us health-wise isn’t always what’s best for the environment. That’s important for public officials to know and …
Flashback: EPA chief mocked suggestions that Agency violated Anti-Lobbying Act
Published on Jun 15, 2015
Speaking to an audience of mostly federal employees at the 2015 GreenGov Symposium, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy mocks suggestions that EPA is violating the federal Anti-Lobbying Act by employing tactics to influence the public to advocate in support of EPA’s rules.
GINA MCCARTHY: “You know, I was recently criticized for actually doing a tremendous amount of outreach. That’s the kind of criticism that I would really welcome. [Laughter] It was very painful for me to read how successful we’ve been for getting people to comment on our rules. You know. [Laughter] I should learn to stay in that closet that people want me in, but we’re not, and I don’t think any of you should. I think you have to hold your head up high. You have to talk about what you’re doing, why it’s creative, why it matters, and do the best we can to do the outreach so that others begin to have ripples of their own. And, it will connect, and it will work.”
GreenGov Symposium
George Washington University
June 10, 2015
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Related Link:
AUDITOR: EPA Broke the Law to Push Obama Water Rule – ‘Covert Propaganda
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Rush Limbaugh features Climate Depot: ‘Marc Morano – our former ‘man in Washington’ asks a ‘brilliant question’: Now That They Fixed Climate Change, Can We Stop Hearing About It?
It’s over!? Warmist declares Skeptics Lost! Declares Morano ‘Ringleader’ – ‘The Paris UN agreement signals that deniers have lost the climate wars’
Thus the climate wars have been about policy, not science, and international climate negotiations are the ultimate battlefield. To this point, contrarian efforts to undermine these negotiations have succeeded, but in Paris they failed. The whole world agreed, we need to stop delaying and start getting serious about preventing a climate crisis. We’ve turned the corner; climate denial is no longer being taken seriously. The world has moved on, and contrarians have become irrelevant relics of the fossil fuel age.…
‘Objective’ Reporters Wildly Cheer As UN ‘Climate Change’ Agreement Announced
…UN Climate deal price tag: $16.5 trillion
The deal struck at United Nations climate talks requires an overhaul of historic proportions for energy policies worldwide and a huge investment in cleaning up the pollution now damaging the Earth’s atmosphere.
Targets outlined in the agreement on Saturday, involving 195 countries, will require $16.5 trillion of spending on renewables and efficiency through 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). To accomplish that, governments will have to offer incentives for clean energy production, scale back support for fossil fuels like oil, make emissions more costly, and reduce deforestation. The changes will touch industries from transport to construction, and encourage people to change their behaviour.
“The strength of the agreement is that it allows a thousand policy flowers to bloom,” Paul Bledsoe, a climate aide during US President Bill Clinton’s administration, said in an interview in Paris, where the deal was sealed. “This sends a powerful economic signal that fossil fuels will be saddled with financial and legal premiums to remain part of the energy mix, and clean energy will enjoy subsidies.”
The deal aims to limit the global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), while calling on nations to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.” That more ambitious goal implies vast cuts to emissions from burning fossil fuels.…
NYT’s Paul Krugman: Paris climate ‘deal’ may have ‘saved civilization’
…21 Years Of Failure: Obama Gets Weak UN Global Warming Treaty Despite Years Of Politicking
“The announcement of a final climate deal from Paris is no more significant to the United States than the Kyoto Protocol announcement 18 years ago,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe said Saturday of the United Nations deal touted by the Obama administration.
On Saturday, nearly 200 countries signed an agreement to cut CO2 emissions with the goal of keeping future global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. Obama touts the agreement as “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.”
What the president left out, however, is the U.N. deal is based on voluntary participation and is virtually unenforceable.
“In contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal removes all legal obligations for governments to cap or reduce CO2 emissions,” says Dr. Benny Peiser, director of the U.K-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. “This voluntary agreement also removes the mad rush into unrealistic decarbonisation policies that are both economically and politically unsustainable.”
“As seasoned observers predicted, the Paris deal is based on a voluntary basis which allows nations to set their own voluntary CO2 targets and policies without any legally binding caps or international oversight,” Peiser says.
The U.N.’s hyped conference in Paris was held so delegates could hash out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — a legally-binding global warming treaty signed in 1997 and brought into force in 2005. Rich countries that signed the treaty are obligated to reduce CO2 emissions, but poor ones that signed on are not obligated to cut emissions.
The fact that developing countries like China and India aren’t required to cut emissions under Kyoto caused several major countries to abandon the agreement. Paris is supposed to rectify that, but instead resulted in countries simply volunteering to cut emissions with no legal mechanism to hold them accountable.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/13/paris-climate-deal-is-weaker-than-kyoto-protocol/#ixzz3uJQmruKI…
Bloomberg News: A Toothless Treaty Can’t Stop Climate Change
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Climate activists sour on UN climate deal: ‘It won’t save the planet…it saves the chance of saving the planet’ – ‘Bullsh*t’ – ‘Fraud…Fake’ – ‘Magical Thinking’
Warmist Bill McKibben on Paris deal: ‘It won’t save the planet…it saves the chance of saving the planet’ – “This agreement won’t save the planet, not even close,” Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, a climate advocacy group, told The Huffington Post in an email. “But it’s possible that it saves the chance of saving the planet — if movements push even harder from here on out.”
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Warmist George Monbiot: ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the Paris deal is bullshit’
Monbiot: ‘The talks in Paris are the best there have ever been. And that is a terrible indictment.’
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Former NASA lead ‘global warming’ scientist James Hansen on UN summit: ‘It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit’ – Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanor changes. “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
Dem Senator Bernie Sanders slams Paris ‘deal’ “The planet is in crisis. We need bold action in the very near future and this does not provide that.” The Hill reports: “The planet is in crisis. We need bold action in the very near future and this does not provide that,” he said Saturday in a statement released shortly before delegates in Paris are due to vote on the agreement, the first to require climate efforts of nearly every country.
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Warmists protest Paris nothing-burger “It’s going to burn our planet.’ Hundreds Protest “Unacceptable” Draft Climate AccordFrom Democracy Now!:
