Tuesday 27 October 2009

Give up meat to save the planet?


The Times splashes on Lord Stern's contention that we should all become vegetarian in a bid to save the planet.
He says: '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.'
Combined with the news that McDonalds is pulling out of Iceland could this spell an end to our love affair with meat?
A firm of architects has even worked out the carbon footprint of the family dog. Apparently it's twice that of a 4.6-litre Toyota Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year.
What about other measures.
The Kyoto Protocol is 'a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), aimed at combating global warming. The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty with the goal of achieving "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."'
The map shows participation in the Kyoto Protocol, where dark green indicates countries that have signed and ratified the treaty, yellow is signed, but not yet ratified, grey is not yet decided and red is no intention of ratifying.
Surely we would be better off putting pressure on the big red country to sign up to this before we put down our bacon butties and eat the dog.

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