DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Worldwide Climate Change Strike

And the irony behind that is that when I was younger, it was the environmentalists who were screaming that we needed to go to plastic grocery bags because paper bags were killing trees.. plastic was cheaper and it was recyclable...

Growth mindset. You learn and everybody should embrace being a lifelong learner. We know a lot more now than we did back then. People also used to be taught to be "colorblind". That's not to say it was wrong back then, but we have grown and changed our thinking and our teaching. Plastic is obviously harmful & wrong for the environment and all 21st century Equity classes will explain why "colorblind teachings" are wrong and harmful to POC.

If Everyone Ate Beans Instead of Beef
With one dietary change, the U.S. could almost meet greenhouse-gas emission goals.
The Atlantic |

James Hamblin



Ecoanxiety is an emerging condition. Named in 2011, the American Psychological Association recently described it as the dread and helplessness that come with “watching the slow and seemingly irrevocable impacts of climate change unfold, and worrying about the future for oneself, children, and later generations.”

It’s not a formal diagnosis. Anxiety is traditionally defined by an outsized stress response to a given stimulus. In this case, the stimulus is real, as are the deleterious effects of stress on the body.

This sort of disposition toward ecological-based distress does not pair well with a president who has denied the reality of the basis for this anxiety. Donald Trump has called climate change a fabrication on the part of “the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He has also led the United States to become the only G20 country that will not honor the Paris Climate Accord, and who has appointed fossil-fuel advocates to lead the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency.

For people who experience climate-related anxiety, this all serves as a sort of exacerbation by presidential gaslight. The remedy for a condition like this is knowing what can be done to mitigate environmental degradation, from within in a country singularly committed to it.

Like what?

Helen Harwatt is a researcher trained in environmental nutrition, a field focused on developing food systems that balance human health and sustainability. She’s interested in policy, but realistic about how much progress can be expected under the aforementioned leadership. So she and colleagues have done research on maximizing the impacts of individuals. As with so many things in life and health, that tends to come down to food.

Recently Harwatt and a team of scientists from Oregon State University, Bard College, and Loma Linda University calculated just what would happen if every American made one dietary change: substituting beans for beef. They found that if everyone were willing and able to do that—hypothetically—the U.S. could still come close to meeting its 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals, pledged by President Barack Obama in 2009.

That is, even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.

“I think there’s genuinely a lack of awareness about how much impact this sort of change can have,” Harwatt told me. There have been analyses in the past about the environmental impacts of veganism and vegetarianism, but this study is novel for the idea that a person’s dedication to the cause doesn’t have to be complete in order to matter. A relatively small, single-food substitution could be the most powerful change a person makes in terms of their lifetime environmental impact—more so than downsizing one’s car, or being vigilant about turning off light bulbs, and certainly more than quitting showering.

To understand why the climate impact of beef alone is so large, note that the image at the top of this story is a sea of soybeans in a silo in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The beans belong to a feed lot that holds 38,000 cattle, the growth and fattening of which means dispensing 900 metric tons of feed every day. Which is to say that these beans will be eaten by cows, and the cows will convert the beans to meat, and the humans will eat the meat. In the process, the cows will emit much greenhouse gas, and they will consume far more calories in beans than they will yield in meat, meaning far more clearcutting of forests to farm cattle feed than would be necessary if the beans above were simply eaten by people.

This inefficient process happens on a massive scale. Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of red meat, holds around 212 million cattle. (In June, the U.S. temporarily suspended imports of beef from Brazil due to abscesses, collections of pus, in the meat.) According to the United Nations, 33 percent of arable land on Earth is used to grow feed for livestock. Even more, 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of Earth is used for grazing livestock. In all, almost a third of the land on Earth is used to produce meat and animal products.

This means much less deforestation and land degradation if so many plant crops weren’t run through the digestive tracts of cattle. If Americans traded their beef for beans, the researchers found, that would free up 42 percent of U.S. crop land.

“The real beauty of this kind of thing is that climate impact doesn’t have to be policy-driven,” said Harwatt. “It can just be a positive, empowering thing for consumers to see that they can make a significant impact by doing something as simple as eating beans instead of beef.”

She and her colleagues conclude in the journal Climatic Change: “While not currently recognized as a climate policy option, the ‘beans for beef’ scenario offers significant climate change mitigation and other environmental benefits, illustrating the high potential of animal to plant food shifts.”

The beans for beef scenario is, it seems, upon us.

“I think it’s such an easy-to-grasp concept that it could be less challenging than a whole dietary shift,” said Harwatt. The words vegetarian and vegan have stifled some people’s thinking on what it means to eat well—to consume responsibly, conscientiously. Rather the beans for beef scenario is the dietary equivalent of effective altruism—focusing on where efforts will have the highest yield. “It’s kind of a worst-first approach, looking at the hottest spot in the food system in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions, and what could that be substituted with without losing protein and calories in the food system? And at the same time, gaining health benefits.”

In addition to the well-documented health benefits of a plant-based diet, this case also brings empowerment, or at least reprieve. Regardless of a person’s degree of ecoanxiety, there is some recourse in knowing how far individuals can go to make up for a regressive federal administration simply by eating beans.

James Hamblin, MD, is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk and is the author of a book by the same title.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/if-everyone-ate-beans-instead-of-beef?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Oregon banned plastic grocery bags. HOWEVER, they still have plastic bags at the end of the fruit & veg displays. I hate that. We don't use them as it eliminates another unneeded waste that will just go to the landfill. To be honest taking our own bags to the grocery and bagging our own is a lot quicker now than using paper bags! And, our bags are can hold more and take more weight.

I seriously hate all the single use plastic packaging tho. Especially irks me when I am at a place like Trader Joe's that should be moving beyond it. HOWEVER, greener options, as with organic food options, are ALWAYS more expensive. That too needs to change.

I wouldn't be opposed to using something like that for single use packaging if it's food safe.

Go have one of those Wendys impossible burgers and come back and tell us if you liked it better than beef.

j/c..

Recycling is a wonderful idea. Maybe? Reduce and Re-use seem much more important.

Planet Money (a podcast by NPR) did an episode on recycling and the perceived benefits.

Just some food for thought. (I still recycle).

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-should-we-recycle

And...I wish those who are relying on the "earth warms and cools throughout history" rationale as the basis of their argument realize that the Science understands this and takes it into consideration. However, it has never warmed this rapidly THAT is the worry. It is spiking quicker than ever especially since the Industrial Revolution, but in particular in the last few decades, which coincides with India and China's rise and the growing population on the planet as well as the excessive demands on non-renewable and dirty energy sources.

IF science understands it why is it nobody is able to answer my question that I asked early in this thread?

So you say this is the fastest it has ever warmed?

What was the average high temp in Ohio in 1880? How about in 1780? How about in June 5,000 years ago? or how about in June 100,000 years ago?

And the irony behind that is that when I was younger, it was the environmentalists who were screaming that we needed to go to plastic grocery bags because paper bags were killing trees.. plastic was cheaper and it was recyclable...

j/c:

I think we should encourage people who are not recycling to start recycling rather than giving them reasons why not to recycle. Just my personal opinion.

No they didn’t scream that. rofl... and so what if they did? You never believed what environmentalists say anyways until this post. And plastic is cheaper and recyclable. It’s the litter bugs, military, and corporate polluters who trash up our earth with plastic instead of recycling it. Humans own 100% impact on the waste we cause which is a source of global warming. Study up. Stop the ignorance.

j/c:

I think we should encourage people who are not recycling to start recycling rather than giving them reasons why not to recycle. Just my personal opinion.

Like I said, you try to make a counterpoint or point out some inconsistency in the argument and you get called a denier and you get called ignorant by the snarky morons who immediately assume they are smarter and more enlightened than you and who add nothing to the conversation.

Been studying and working with environmental impacts on contaminated soils for nearly 20 years. Worked for an engineering company that has soil remediation on various superfund sites in the US. I know more than you on this subject. Not that you’ll listen.

I've managed six $50 million + urban renewal construction projects on brownfield sites with strict removal and/or cap and cover requirements and stringent storm water runoff regs...

Not once did anybody on any of those projects reference the dangers of plastic grocery bags...

Come at me bro.

Funny.... so many people complain about plastic grocery bags, yet not ever a single peep from them about plastic garbage bags that everybody uses

Don't look at me. We use grocery bags as garbage bags in our small garbage cans. (I.E. bedrooms, bathrooms.)