Friday, September 2, 2011

Should meat producers be banned to curb climate change?

re: "
Why Don’t More People Make the Link Between Animal Agriculture and Climate Change?"

By Kamal Prasad and Marilyn Cornelius


The assumption underlying the article: "that if only we will all live a simpler, less technologically enhanced life, everybody can live happily on this planet" is patently false.

All people are in competition for resources. There are winners & losers. People die and that's a fact.

We make choices. Some choose to live in flood prone areas and will watch their house flood and be washed away next year, if not, the year after. I'm not talking about Bangladesh, I'm talking about the banks of the Mississippi.

We work hard to achieve a better lifestyle for our families. If that means emigrating to America, working six days a week at two jobs so your children can have an education, buy a house of their own (away from the Mississippi) one day in which to raise their family, have the independence of a car with a roof and a heater, and eat meat several times a week, then that's what we worked for, that's what we wanted and that's what we have earned. Life's a struggle. You make sacrifices, work hard, then, no matter what you do, you die.

Now, ask the father of an immigrant family who has sweated blood for forty years hanging steel, if he will take that steak out of his children's mouths, and scrap his car, so that some Bangladeshi can re-build his stick and corrugated steel roof shack on the flood-prone banks of the monsoon zone property that got washed away for the tenth time in the last century. Go ahead. Ask him.

Perhaps when all countries provide free birth control, support abortion on demand, educate all their children, not just the boys, provide clean water and basic medical and dental care to their people, then you can go after food producers. The problem is at basis too many people not what they choose to eat. The goal should be population management not to max out the population with everybody eating beans and rice. Let's raise the bar a little.

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