Over My Dead Body

The Left Is Hoping to Eliminate Steak, Hamburgers, and Bacon

In a nutshell, and quite simply, they think that meat eaters are moral monsters and they want to ensure that no humans eat meat. That being said, they're not afraid to think of new ways to accomplish their goals. An article in The Atlantic touting meat grown in laboratories as a substitute for meat from animals is a case in point.

Derek Thompson begins his article with the provocative claim, "There are two big truths about eating meat from animals."

If I didn't know better, I would've assumed that the two big truths are: 1. meat is delicious, and, 2. humans are designed to eat meat.

But I know better, and Thompson drops that claim as a setup for a few of animal rights activists' favorite canards:

First, animal flesh imposes a high moral and ecological price for a tender medallion of food. Factory farming incurs the torturous treatment of millions of chickens, cows, and pigs each year. This constitutes a rolling moral catastrophe. What’s more, one-sixth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are directly attributable to raising livestock, and the figure is rising as more countries enter the global middle class. For most Americans, cutting meat out of their diets would reduce global warming more than giving up driving.

I'll circle back to Thompson's palaver in a bit. Before doing that, though, and in the issue of fairness, the staff writer for The Atlantic does utter actual truth with his second "big truth about eating meat from animals."

But here’s the second truth: Americans don’t really care about all that. Or, perhaps more subtly, many of them do care. But weighed against the panoply of meat-related rewards—the succulence of a perfect ribeye, the abundance of affordable meat options at the grocery store, the convenient protein-density of the food, and the opportunity to try the glazed duck at that place all your friends have been going on about for weeks—the moral and environmental costs of meat register as real, yet ignorable; snowflake static on the radar.

Thompson is correct. "Americans don't really care about all that." What he misses is that we don't really care about all that because "all that" is mostly bunk. Notice how he places animals over and above the well-being of humans. What's immoral is the notion that humans should forgo food because we don't want to hurt animals. Wrapped up in Thompson's leftist moral preening is a subtle dig at the growing global middle class. "See," he almost snarls out, "it's capitalism's fault that people are eating more meat." And then he gets to a growing favorite position of leftists - eating meat causes climate change.

A friend of mine from K Street warns that if conservatives aren't wary and watchful, we're going to wake up one morning and discover a hefty carbon tax placed on red meat.

But, according to Bjorn Lomberg,  No, giving up burgers won’t actually save the planet

This week the Wombat has returned, along with "Late NIght With Rule 5 Sunday: Nurse! Nurse!" (gic).

Abandoning meat is now the latest advice for saving the planet: A “major new study” suggests that a “huge reduction in meat-eating” is “ ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown,” as The Guardian puts it.

This follows claims from the Humane Society that “your diet could save the planet” and the German Green Party’s proposal for a national weekly vegetarian day. Even the UN’s former top climate official believes “the best solution would be for us all to become vegetarians.”

The science clearly shows that meat production — especially beef — emits methane and requires CO2-heavy inputs. But when we dig deeper, it turns out such claims are massively overhyped.

I assume bbq is equally bad

I’ve been a vegetarian for four decades because I don’t want to kill animals. If much of climate change could be prevented by more people following suit, it’s an idea that should be discussed.

Doing so means setting aside our distaste with the idea of politicians or the UN dictating what people eat, and ignoring the sticky fact that 1.45 billion of the world’s vegetarians are actually the poorest people on Earth who would like nothing more than to eat meat.

Almost all articles on this topic suggest going vegetarian could achieve emission cuts of 50 percent or more. But these figures are never a reduction of total emissions, just those emitted from food. This is an important distinction because four-fifths of emissions are being ignored. The real impact is five times less.

Anyway, a systematic peer review of studies shows vegetarian diets likely reduce an individual’s emissions by the equivalent of 540 kg (1,190 lbs.) of CO2. For the average person in the industrialized world, that’s the equivalent of cutting emissions by just 4.3 percent.

Vegetarian diets are also slightly cheaper, and saved money will be spent on goods and services that emit more CO2. A new Swedish study shows a vegetarian diet is 10 percent cheaper, freeing up about 2 percent of an individual’s budget. The extra money would likely be spent proportionally on existing purchases.

This boosts one’s carbon emissions by about 2 percent. So eating carrots instead of steak means you effectively cut your emissions by about 2 percent. This won’t save the planet.

Believe it or not, some liberals can do math too, and know that cutting out meat won't save the planet. They don't care, because the point is simply to deprive deplorable  people of something they like.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links.