The Stavdals

In a cutting edge 2006 report, Livestock's Long Shadow, the U.N. conclude that the meat industry generates almost 40 percent more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, SUVs, ships and planes in the world put together. In addition, the report shows that the meat industry is one of the top three most significant benefactors to the most dire environmental predicaments, at every scale from local to global.

The Nobel committee has made a powerful statement by giving the Peace Prize 2007 to former vice president Al Gore and the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In Al Gore's Nobel lecture we were reminded that scientists and economists warn that climate change will lead not only to droughts and rising sea levels, but also to disease outbreaks, economic mayhem and conflicts among people struggling to survive in an ever more hostile environment. Already we are starting to see the first climate wars in Africa, where farmers are facing off with herders and nomads because the changing climate has brought drought and a decline in fertile lands.

Raising this question as an addition to the action the global community needs to take, might not come as a surprise to the readers of this blog that know me. With an Adventist Christian background, vegetarianism has always been a part of my wholistic view on health.

We could actually justify saying that people's addiction to junk food hamburgers and buckets of chicken is destroying the planet. In a cutting edge 2006 report, Livestock's Long Shadow, the U.N. conclude that the meat industry generates almost 40 percent more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, SUVs, ships and planes in the world put together. In addition, the report shows that the meat industry is one of the top three most significant benefactors to the most dire environmental predicaments, at every scale from local to global.

It should be noted that vegetarians in cars with an awfully big CO2 footprint, do more for the planet than meat-eaters who cruise around in hybrids or bikeride to work. The former should of course get rid of those cars anyway.

Interestingly, on its global warming Web page, Environmental Defense writes that if every American substituted vegetarian foods for chicken in just one meal per week, the CO2 savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off U.S. roads. Going completely meat-free for one full day per week, the group says, would be the same as taking 8 million cars off the roads.

Image sources: Wikipedia.com and msnbc - picture stories