If we all gave up meat, it would stop global warming before it's too late.
We have anywhere from 3 to 12 years to lower global temperatures before it becomes irreversible.
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ArishMell · 70-79, M
I don't think it would, although concerted groups of vegetarians like to campaign on that.
The fear is due purely to cattle belching methane, which is a powerful "greenhouse gas", but it is possible to give the animals supplements (including I think seaweed) to reduce that. In any case, it is a natural by-product of fermenting vegetable matter in anaerobic conditions.
We'd need replace meat and presumably dairy products with other food sources, but what sources? What environmental problems of their own would come from increasing their production sufficiently?
What would replace wool and leather? Sensibly and sustainably, that is. Most of us likely wear on any one day a mix of natural materials (chiefly cotton, wool, some linen, plus perhaps leather and rubber shoes) and synthetics (all plastics made from petroleum products). Errr... what will happen when the oil stops by depletion, policy or both?
The primary man-made climate-change driver is still burning coal in large but (world-wide) diminishing quantities for power generation and as coke for iron-ore smelting, natural-gas for power-generation and a heating fuel, and petroleum-derivative fuels in much larger and increasing volumes.
The hazard was identified over a hundred years ago, when coal was the world's primary fuel. It was conveniently ignored or forgotten by a mix of the then-calculated danger time being far into the 21C, and by a comforting belief that rapidly-developing Science and Engineering will "tame Nature" to solve all the world's technical problems. Only, although petroleum and methane have replaced coal as the main fuel sources, we are already nearly a third of the way through the Twenty-first Century.
The fear is due purely to cattle belching methane, which is a powerful "greenhouse gas", but it is possible to give the animals supplements (including I think seaweed) to reduce that. In any case, it is a natural by-product of fermenting vegetable matter in anaerobic conditions.
We'd need replace meat and presumably dairy products with other food sources, but what sources? What environmental problems of their own would come from increasing their production sufficiently?
What would replace wool and leather? Sensibly and sustainably, that is. Most of us likely wear on any one day a mix of natural materials (chiefly cotton, wool, some linen, plus perhaps leather and rubber shoes) and synthetics (all plastics made from petroleum products). Errr... what will happen when the oil stops by depletion, policy or both?
The primary man-made climate-change driver is still burning coal in large but (world-wide) diminishing quantities for power generation and as coke for iron-ore smelting, natural-gas for power-generation and a heating fuel, and petroleum-derivative fuels in much larger and increasing volumes.
The hazard was identified over a hundred years ago, when coal was the world's primary fuel. It was conveniently ignored or forgotten by a mix of the then-calculated danger time being far into the 21C, and by a comforting belief that rapidly-developing Science and Engineering will "tame Nature" to solve all the world's technical problems. Only, although petroleum and methane have replaced coal as the main fuel sources, we are already nearly a third of the way through the Twenty-first Century.