Friday, October 23, 2015

Hurricane Patricia, Global Warming, Animal Agriculture and Man-made Climate Change

A letter (e-mail) to my co-workers:

All this talk about hurricane Patricia being the strongest recorded in history adds to the concern of  animal welfare, human welfare, and the future of our planet…
“Scientists have linked the global ocean temperature departures from average to manmade global warming, in addition to El Niño.”

On manmade global warming and climate change: The meat industry (chickens, pigs, cows, dairy, eggs) is number 1 cause of global warming, 51% of greenhouse emissions are coming from animal agriculture. http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

“Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is more than all transportation: planes, trains, cars, COMBINED.

Goodland, R Anhang, J. “Livestock and Climate Change: What if the key actors in climate change were pigs, chickens and cows?”


Every minute, 7 million pounds of excrement are produced by animals raised for food in the US.
This doesn’t include the animals raised outside of USDA jurisdiction or in backyards, or the billions of fish raised in aquaculture settings in the US.
All that excrement is polluting our rivers and creating ocean dead zones. There is a huge problem in North Carolina with hogs and manure.

It is not just about the ‘meat’ or animals we eat, but the water needed to grow the grains they eat, the antibiotics we feed them (70% of all the antibiotics sold in the US are administer to farmed animals) and all the waste the produce that has ‘nowhere’ to go, the energy needed to run slaughterhouses, transportation, freezing of the corpses, etc. etc. etc. Beans and broccoli come from farm to fridge to table, and don’t poop, plant-based protein is more readily and easily digested by our bodies too.

I have read some of Chris Hedges work, I didn’t know he is a vegan:
"I'm a vegan, and I'm a vegan because the animal agriculture industry maybe surpasses the fossil fuel industry in terms of destroying the planet, and you can wake up tomorrow and be a vegan." (don’t have to join Greenpeace and leave your job to fight the fracking industry or Exxon) On California: "And you're enduring this drought. It takes 1,000 gallons of water to make one gallon of milk [source: Water Footprint Network]. And milk's not even good for you. It's made for cows, it's not made for humans. It's made for baby cows. Who we kill."
– Harvard-educated journalist, best-selling author, professor, Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism recipient, and member of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism Chris Hedges of Truthdig
“What We Choose to Eat Is Killing Us and Our Planet” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/saving_the_planet_one_meal_at_a_time_20141109
You can watch the video here, on FB but open to the public
                                                                                                                                       
Thanks for reading, there is something we can do every day to help our planet and our health and we can do it 3 times a day, with our forks.