{"id":35689,"date":"2018-07-03T06:32:46","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35689"},"modified":"2018-07-03T06:32:46","modified_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:32:46","slug":"diet-ignorance-and-the-environmental-catastrophe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35689","title":{"rendered":"Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

Climate Change sounds vast and impersonal, but it\u2019s really a very personal matter; a global crisis caused by the individual actions humanity has collectively taken. All too often such actions proceed from a position of ignorance selfishness and habit, and are undertaken with little or no understanding of the effects on the natural environment.<\/p>\n

The debate around climate change commonly focuses on transportation, deforestation, and energy \u2013 replacing fossil fuels with renewables. This is right and urgent, and some countries are taking steps; however, what is not tackled at all is the devastating impact of a meat\/dairy diet, \u2013 common to 97% of humanity. According to Reducing Food\u2019s Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers (RFEI), a detailed report published in the journal Science, consumption of animal produce is \u201cdegrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources, and driving climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Industrial farming of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, plus harvesting fish, for human consumption is the single greatest cause of the interconnected environmental catastrophe; unless urgent substantive change takes place this could single-handedly lead to a polluting point beyond redemption. Misinformed, irresponsible lifestyle choices are behind the environmental crisis. The vast majority of people are unaware of the devastating effects of our collective eating habits, and from this position of uninformed ignorance disaster flows; the earth is poisoned, the climate disrupted and all manner of lives are lost.<\/p>\n

Animal agriculture is responsible for approximately 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is more than any other sector, including manufacturing and transportation. The principal climate change contaminate is methane (44%), which comes mainly from rearing cattle \u2013 the source of 65% of all livestock GGE\u2019s. While methane\u2019s atmospheric life is only decades compared to centuries\/millennia for carbon-dioxide (Co2) Scientific American reports that it \u201cwarms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2,\u201d before degrading to become CO2: So it\u2019s a double whammy, an intensely damaging one.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe Climate Change sounds vast and impersonal, but it\u2019s really a very personal matter; a global crisis caused by the individual actions humanity has collectively taken. All too often such actions proceed from a position of ignorance selfishness and habit, and are undertaken with little or no understanding of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20,20759,3193,141,5493,1334,1057,20758,319,328,18195,5316],"class_list":["post-35689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-c02","tag-carbon-dioxide","tag-climate-change","tag-counterpunch","tag-diet","tag-ecosystems","tag-environmental-catastropher","tag-food","tag-fossil-fuels","tag-graham-peebles","tag-methane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35690,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35689\/revisions\/35690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}