Showing posts sorted by relevance for query vegetarianism. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query vegetarianism. Sort by date Show all posts

December 13, 2012

Self-sabotage at Green Mountain College

The people of Green Mountain College think it has been wrong for the public to protest their decision to kill their oxen instead of letting them retire at a sanctuary, because the people of GMC are against factory farms so the public should join them in protesting factory farms instead.

Some of them think that protesting GMC's decision to kill their beloved and hard-worked (if that's not too cognitively dissonant) oxen is serving the interests of industrial agriculture by attacking one group's efforts to challenge that hegemony.

Sorry, GMC folks, but that doesn't make any sense.

First, the people you are admonishing already protest factory farms. They care about animal welfare, and that is why they are protesting GMC's efforts regarding their oxen.

Second, killing two oxen after 11 years has nothing to do with moving away from factory farming. And the public outcry against the desire to kill them is not against your efforts to be independent from industrial ag.

The issue is not you or various elements of the public. It's Bill and Lou, and most people think Bill (Lou having already been dispatched) deserves a peaceful retirement. The more you try to rationalize the decision to kill them, the more unhinged and unlikeable you appear to be. And that, not the public's protest, is what reflects badly on, and thus most threatens, the mission we share.

Update, Dec. 22:  The most reactionary students at Green Mountain College continue to amuse with their self-righteous victimization narrative. After the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, they suggested that compared to that crime they ought to be absolved of murdering Lou and allowed to murder Bill. Now they have likened those trying to save Bill and Lou's lives to Fred Phelps and family’s Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, which blames all unnatural death on the tolerance of gays and travels around the country to disrupt funerals to celebrate those deaths as God's righteous punishment. The WBC, basically, hates everyone except themselves, which does not seem very different from what we've seen out of GMC.

But it gets more confused. The WBC post was a tongue-in-cheek letter of gratitude to the Phelps family for raising awareness of issues of intolerance and facilitating support drives. In their enthusiasm to embrace this new model of empowered victimization, the GMC students forget that elsewhere they and their professors (falsely) accuse animal rights and welfare activists of using GMC's intransigence (standing by their "values", as Fred Phelps would agree) for their own publicity. That is, they are now embracing a codependent tactic for which they had earlier attempted to condemn "ARAs". How must be logic twisted and mirror fogged to evade the truth!

Green Mountain College

Update, Dec. 24:  Another example brought to our attention of getting everything backwards (even their own defensive positions) is from GMC student Emily McCoy. On Dec. 14, she shared on Facebook a photo of President Obama wiping away a tear for the victims of Newtown, Conn., with the caption, "Pretends to cry about school shooting — while bombing innocent men, women, and children in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine." The first commenter (Jon) expressed disgust, which McCoy and others fended off, rightly noting the commander-in-chief's hypocrisy. But then she added, ‘Jon's reaction reminded me a lot of ARAs [animal rights activists] being all "everyone feels sorry for the billions of animals in CAFOs [concentrated animal feed operations], but you have a chance to spare the lives of THESE TWO OXEN. COMPASSION!"’

Her thinking almost defies analysis. Which it would have to, because it is animal rights and welfare activists who point out that killing Bill and Lou (and all the other animals on GMC's play-farm, since they insist on making that the issue) is the same result as on factory farms. She must see that, since she can see that we need to decry all of the deaths wrought in our name in other countries along with domestically. That is, killing in one's own backyard and killing in a distant place are both wrong. Killing in CAFOs is wrong, and so is killing in the "happy" farm. Of course, it's not the killing that bothers McCoy, and in that she is aligned with the President, who weeps for irrational carnage but has little problem with it when it is suitably rationalized. And so she believes that compassion means killing Bill and Lou, simply because they are not at a CAFO.

Just as McCoy challenges the President's compassion, we question hers.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

June 22, 2013

The Myth of Sustainable Meat

By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS, New York Times, April 12, 2012

The industrial production of animal products is nasty business. From mad cow, E. coli and salmonella to soil erosion, manure runoff and pink slime, factory farming is the epitome of a broken food system.

... most people upset by factory farming have turned instead to meat, dairy and eggs from nonindustrial sources. ... They appeal to consumers not only because they reject the industrial model, but because they appear to be more in tune with natural processes.

For all the strengths of these alternatives, however, they’re ultimately a poor substitute for industrial production. Although these smaller systems appear to be environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence suggests otherwise.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural” life pecking around a large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what we see as natural doesn’t necessarily conform to what is natural from the animals’ perspectives.

The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in intention — would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could. Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long for production systems to scale back up to where they started.

All this said, committed advocates of alternative systems make one undeniably important point about the practice called “rotational grazing” or “holistic farming”: the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals’ manure, allowing grass and other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer. As Michael Pollan writes, “It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.” In other words, raising animals is not only sustainable, but required.

But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice. Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. ... if a farmer isn’t growing his own feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.

Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives. When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).

Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting animals only for their manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm, all the while doing their own breeding and growing of feed. But they’d better have a trust fund.

Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been declaring for over a decade that how humans produce animal products is one of the most important environmental questions we face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it’s not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we produce them at all.

Also see:  Why Allan Savory’s TED talk about how cattle can reverse global warming is dead wrong, Slate, April 22, 2013:

“There’s no such thing as a beef-eating environmentalist.”

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism

October 24, 2013

It Was Meant to Be

James McWilliams writes:

Grass-fed beef advocates are always going on and on about how cows "were not meant" to eat corn. They were meant to eat grass. This might be true, barring any investigation into how genetics might have structured cows to eat corn, or how grasses and genetics match up. This is might be true, I suppose, if we want it to be true, and the media says so.

But let's just say its true. So, if cows were meant to eat grass and that is why advocates of grass beef support this form of production rather than corn based, feedlot production, we can logically conclude that those who eat only grass-fed beef – again, because it's more natural, and because this was how it was "meant to be" – don't drink milk or eat dairy products.

Huh? How did milk get into this discussion about beef? Well, if we're going to make a fetish out of what's natural, we have an obligation to ask: is forcibly impregnating cows, kidnapping their offspring, and drinking their milk natural? Isn't it natural for a mother to feed her offspring her own milk? Actually, is anything more natural?

Ask this question next time you hear someone justify some form of animal exploitation or another on the grounds of what nature intended. Make them answer. Force them to answer. Because there is no right answer.

human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism

January 28, 2008

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Mark Bittman writes in the "Week in Review", New York Times, Sunday, Jan. 29 (click the title of this post for the complete article):

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States. ...

If price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

December 11, 2012

Green Mountain College, Carnism, and the Embrace of Death

The echo chamber's not going to work if you allow dissenting opinions!
(Green Mountain College student Emily McCoy, who blocks Facebook users who engage her in public fora, on a GMC page that blocks dissenting opinions)

The people of Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont, remain defensive about the public outcry over their decision to kill for meat two oxen that they had worked for 10 years. A brief history: Lou was injured in the Spring such that he could no longer work; over the summer the GMC farm staff decided it was time to kill both him and his brother Bill and eat them (or, more likely, get some human-grade meat in exchange for their value as dog food). Some students and/or alumni, when classes resumed in the fall, were shocked by that decision and alerted Green Mountain Animal Defenders in Burlington, which led to an offer of veterinary care and sanctuary from VINE Sanctuary in Springfield. People’s shock at the decision to kill Bill and Lou was then compounded by GMC’s refusal of the offer to let them live out their lives in peaceful retirement. But the school became only more entrenched, lashing out at those asking for compassion and mercy as “extremists” and “abolitionists” “terrorizing” slaughterhouses and the college. Then they “euthanized” Lou (†Nov. 11, 2012), who had been seen happily grazing with Bill the day before his pre-dawn “sacrifice”, and perversely made themselves out to be the victim because he had to be composted instead of eaten. Two faculty members in particular, Steven Fesmire and Philip Ackerman-Leist, the latter a beef farmer himself, have been interviewing and writing all over the place to present this simple call for compassion toward two loved and hardworking oxen as a concerted and militant effort to end food choice and all animal agriculture.

It would be funny if it did not mean that Lou was killed and Bill remains in danger.

[[[[[ ]]]]]

The first reason given for killing Bill and Lou, and then for refusing sanctuary, was economic. In a cold calculus of utility, these aging oxen were deemed to be no longer paying for their upkeep, and a sanctuary would only perpetuate the “waste” of resources. This is the thinking of psychopaths. Bill and Lou are not machines to be junked for parts or materials, but living creatures as deserving and desiring to live as those calling for their deaths.

The defense developed, along with the paranoid exaggeration of “the enemy”, to a more complex idea of “sustainability”. At the basis of that “sustainability” ethic is the self-serving “happy meat” paradigm, by which human carnivores think they are being conscientious and environmentally mature by convincing themselves that their taste for meat is “love” for the animal itself and its place in nature (or rather the nature of agriculture that includes them), particularly when it is applied locally (eg, in the name of food sovereignty).

Let us look at that ethic, which has come to be called “carnism”.

To rationalize their inability or unwillingness to live without meat or dairy, they have constructed a system that is environmentally conscientious only within the terms of a perceived necessity for consumption of animals. There is no room in that vision for the rejection of animal agriculture. Ethical veganism is heretical, not just because it considers the interests, even rights, of the animals themselves (assuming that like all creatures they want to live full lives according to their own interests and social needs) apart from their usefulness to humans, but mostly because it recognizes that consuming animals is a choice, not a necessity.

With all ethical issues, each of us comes to a balance or accommodation that we are comfortable with, constantly weighing myriad factors of society, personality, culture, economy, etc. And that balance changes (or ought to) throughout our lives. Ethics isn’t about that balance, but about the choices we make when we are able to.

It is indeed good that some of those who won’t give up meat are trying to make that choice less cruel to the animals and less harmful to the environment. That is a step forward and does not obviate further steps. But the “carnist” trend of recent years has been to assert that it is actually better in every way (morally, environmentally, nutritionally) to continue to consume animals in this “balanced” way, which, first, is offensive to those whose decision not to is also shaped by efforts to be less cruel and harmful, and, second, only suggests that it most certainly is not.

It is obvious that loving animals can not include killing them unnecessarily just because we want to eat them. Animals are not things (”I love my teddy bear”). They are not meals (”I love squash soup”). Love, applied to any animal, is the same love we mean when we apply it to the human animal. That is a simple truth. The complex arguments to prove that animal agriculture is natural or necessary or beneficial serve to obscure that truth. They serve as a firewall between salving one’s conscience by treating animals marginally better and having to consequently recognize animals as having their own rights. They serve as an artificial boundary between granting animals a right to “welfare” and granting them the actual rights implied by concern for their welfare.

It is the same dynamic that has been seen in every battle for rights. Of course, the first principle of carnism is that animals aren’t people (not even noncivilized people, however sentient and social). Evolution of conscience is a slow process, and most vegans recognize that frustrating fact. Most of the time, they are biting their tongues about the world’s casual cruelty and disrespect. What vegans can not abide is carnists challenging or claiming superiority to veganism on any ground. It is frightening to see the lengths people go to rationalize needless killing. As they take their arguments farther and farther but go nowhere, stuck in their self-imposed carnism, their urge becomes to silence, if not destroy, those who remind them of that shortcoming. The vegan “no” is taken as an existential threat. Again, this is a fact of human history, which vegans must suffer through like anyone who has ever taken an ethical stand against entrenched cultural assumptions.

If carnists were truly comfortable about their choice, then they would not feel so threatened by the very existence of vegans. After all, everyone eats what vegans eat. Vegans just cut out the animal bits. And that small reduction of violence by our diet can only be for the good — of the planet, all animals, and humanity.

[[[[[ ]]]]]

As to Green Mountain College, they were given a choice: kill Bill and Lou or let them live out their lives at a sanctuary. While claiming to assert their rights and responsibilities, they revealed their sustainability ethic as one that embraces death, not love.

[See also:  Omnivores? ]

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

February 20, 2013

Lifting livestock’s long shadow

To the Editor — In the News Feature entitled ‘Light is cast on a long shadow’ by Anna Petherick [1], it is stated that developing countries’ middle classes “are on course to demand twice the current amount of livestock products in 2050.”

This statement does not take into account the International Food Policy Research Institute’s scenario by which global meat consumption will decline until at least 2030 [2]. Moreover, Petherick [1] cited mainly livestock researchers, whereas good practice is to consider assessment by environmental specialists where significant environmental risk occurs [3].

As environmental-risk specialists employed by the World Bank and International Finance Corporation — two United Nations agencies — my colleague Jeff Anhang and I have estimated that livestock products account for at least 51% of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions [4]. Links to consequential citations of our analysis can be found on our website [5].

In our assessment, reality no longer reflects the old model of the carbon cycle, in which photosynthesis balanced respiration. That model was valid as long as there were roughly constant levels of respiration and photosynthesis on Earth. However, respiration has increased exponentially with livestock production, and intensified livestock and feed production accompanied by large-scale deforestation and forest-burning have caused huge increases in volatilization of soil carbon, resulting in a dramatic decline in the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Therefore, either carbon dioxide in livestock respiration, or its reflection in carbon debt created where land is used for livestock and feed production, must be counted as emissions.

In assessing livestock, emissions relating to land use for livestock and feed production are considered indirect emissions. According to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol — the most widely used tool for greenhouse-gas accounting — indirect emissions should be counted when they are large and can be mitigated or reduced [6]. One of the key sources in Petherick’s Feature [1], Mario Herrero, co-authored an estimate that 45% of all land is now used for livestock and feed production [7].

Kanaly et al. [8] summed up our study as follows: “Goodland and Anhang explained what may be a large-scale paradigm shift in the approaches to mitigating climate change.” Previously, renewable-energy infrastructure was thought to be the key to reversing climate change. After years of inadequate action, sufficient new infrastructure is now projected to take at least 20 years and US$18 trillion to develop [9].

Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency have both warned that the next five years may be the last real chance to reverse climate change before it’s too late [10,11]. We say that the only pragmatic way to do so is to replace at least 25% of today’s livestock products with better alternatives — this would both eliminate much more than 4% of agricultural emissions, and allow reforestation and forest regeneration on vast amounts of land, which could then absorb enough atmospheric carbon to reduce it to a safe level.

Robert Goodland
World Bank, 1818 Society
e-mail: rbtgoodland/gmail.com

Nature Climate Change, January 2013

References
  1. Petherick, A. Nature Clim. Change 2, 705–706 (2012).
  2. Msangi, S. & Rosegrant, M. Feeding the Future’s Changing Diets: Implications for Agriculture Markets, Nutrition, and Policy (IFPRI, 2011); available via http://go.nature.com/Sdukkp
  3. Green laws take no prisoners. Legal Brief Today (13 September 2011); available via http://go.nature.com/IeAfKM
  4. Goodland, R. & Anhang, J. World Watch 22, 10–19 (2009).
  5. www.chompingclimatechange.org
  6. Putt del Pino, S., Levinson, R. & Larsen, J. Hot Climate, Cool Commerce: A Service Sector Guide to Greenhouse Gas Management (WRI, 2006); available at http://pdf.wri.org/hotclimatecoolcommerce.pdf
  7. Thornton, P., Herrero, M. & Ericksen, P. Livestock and climate change. (ILRI, 2011); available via http://go.nature.com/wYaVA6
  8. Kanaly, R. A., Manzanero, L. I. O., Foley, G., Panneerselvam, S. & Macer, D. Energy Flow, Environment and Ethical Implications for Meat Production (UNESCO, 2010); available via http://go.nature.com/VBMWVw
  9. Statement by Nobuo Tanaka, IEA Executive Director to COP 16 (IEA, 2010); available via http://go.nature.com/ivfhds
  10. Spotts, P. Climate change report: Time to start preparing for the worst. The Christian Science Monitor (28 March 2012); available via http://go.nature.com/8Cl4ct
  11. DiLorenzo, S. IEA: Time running out to limit Earth’s warming Newsvine (9 November 2011); available via http://go.nature.com/1fdbPO
environment, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism

October 26, 2012

Lou and Bill and the desire to eat them

Alison Putnam and Meiko Lunetta tend to Lou, who with partner Bill has become a symbol at Green Mountain College, but they are to be sent to a slaughterhouse.
Photo by Caleb Kenna for the Boston Globe
Alison Putnam and Meiko Lunetta tend to Lou,
who with partner Bill has become a symbol at Green Mountain College,
but they are to be sent to a slaughterhouse.

All they need do now is dress the animals in garlands and fine fabrics and dance and sing around them as they're led to slaughter — sacrifices on the altar of environmental sustainability.

The “moral complexity”, as Green Mountain College Provost Bill Throop called it, clearly means only a web of rationalizations based on the false premise that the students must eat meat. The “complexity” arises to create a fog of distraction from the fundamental fallacy behind their choice. Like Michael Pollan, the students and staff at this college are now traveling over great lengths of ethical deliberation only to arrive right where they started: Kill the beast; We must eat.

We have not seen an exercise of moral decision making. We see only self-serving rationalizations of unnecessary violence.

Lou and Bill

Update:  See the articles by Marc Bekoff:
http://www.greanvillepost.com/2012/10/17/the-animal-file-mascot-oxen-to-be-killed-for-burger-meat/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201210/bill-and-lou-who-lives-who-dies-and-why
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201211/green-mountain-oxen-bill-lives-lou-dies

Update (5 Nov):  "Grass Power at GMC"
Training sessions are usually done by Christopher Bergen who has also lead [sic] general driving and experiential lessons in dealing with the oxen. [Ben] Dube closed out with a few tips. “To be a good teamster, you need to be sensitive and attentive, but also not afraid to express authority and dominance. I think that most people who start out on Bill and Lou have more trouble with the latter. Sometimes you have to be a little mean with them, which isn’t easy to do with such sweet animals. I don’t like it, but over time, you learn that they don’t really resent it or mind it much.” [emphasis added] In being around Bill and Lou I have seen that this is definitely the case, and understanding how to work with them is a good learning experience.
animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont

April 10, 2013

Cropland better used for feeding humans

To the Editor (Valley News, April 10, 2013):

Chuck Wooster ("Upper Valley Is an Animal Landscape," April 7) observes, "Most of the agricultural land in the Upper Valley is upland pasture, too steep for cultivating for crops." Yet he also tells us that the sheep he doesn't slaughter "spend all winter devouring ... one luscious bale of hay after another."

In other words, animal agriculture in the Upper Valley depends on a tremendous amount of plant cultivation. As Wooster notes about the grain used for larger-scale animal agriculture, the land that grows hay can be used for crops "that could more efficiently be fed directly to humans."

Feedlots and deforestation demonstrate the stark reality of all animal agriculture as wasteful, cruel, and unnecessary.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont

October 25, 2012

Save Bill and Lou!

Friday
12:00–3:00 pm
Poultney, Vermont

Corner of College and Main Street in front of Brennan Circle on sidewalk

Dress comfortably and warm.

Signs: Bring your own favorite or signs will be available

Contact: Jennifer Wolf: jennifer.wolf78/gmail.com, http://www.nhanimalrights.org/

This protest is for Bill and Lou, 2 oxen who have worked for 10 years at Green Mountain College, which now wants to kill and eat them. VINE sanctuary [blog] in Springfield, Vermont has offered to take Bill and Lou, but the college insists that eating them is the best thing to do.

Whatever your motivation is, ALL are welcome who support Bill and Lou not being sent to slaughter!

The whole world is watching!


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/455989837780838/

List of petitions:

http://www.change.org/petitions/bill-throop-kenneth-mulder-release-bill-and-lou-to-vine-sanctuary

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/136/143/095/save-bill-and-lou-from-slaughter/

http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-lou-and-bill.html

Media links:

http://www.peta.org/action/action-alerts/URGENT--Save-Bill-and-Lou-from-Slaughter--.aspx

James McWilliams:
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2401
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2408
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2416
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2420
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2470
http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2485

http://gmad.info/articles_detail.php?ID=61

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-slaughter-of-two-oxen-teaches-students-status-quo-not-compassion

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/96295/in-vermont-outcry-over-oxen/

http://www.nhpr.org/post/despite-protest-college-plans-slaughter-serve-farms-beloved-oxen

http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/10/25/fire-mountain/f8mIXuOFwg201TopTbeXiK/story.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-friedrich/green-mountain-colleges-f_b_1967361.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/green-mountain-college-oxen-slaughter_n_2007076.html

http://www.dailycamera.com/guest-opinions/ci_21812426/bill-and-lou-who-lives-who-dies-and

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20121009/NEWS07/310090013/Green-Mountain-College-considers-turning-long-serving-campus-oxen-to-hamburger

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20121025/NEWS02/310250022/Opponents-of-plan-to-slaughter-Green-Mountain-College-s-oxen-to-hold-protest


http://www.voanews.com/content/college-plan-to-kill-oxen-draws-global-protest/1532411.html

animal rights, vegetarianism

December 29, 2012

Veganism & the Environment: By the Numbers

GREENHOUSE GASES
  • 1 calorie from animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel as one calorie of plant protein.
  • The diets of meat eaters create 7× the greenhouse emissions as the diets of vegans.
Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)
  • If one person exchanges a "regular" car for a hybrid, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1 ton per year.
  • If one person exchanges eating meat for a vegan diet, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1.5 tons per year.
  • If every American dropped one serving of chicken per week from their diet, it would save the same amount of CO₂ emissions as taking 500,000 cars of the road.
Methane (CH₄)
  • Methane is 20× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
  • Chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are collectively the largest producer of methane in the U.S.
Nitrous Oxide (N₂O)
  • Nitrous oxide is 300× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
  • The meat, egg, and dairy industries produce 65% of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.
WATER
  • Nearly half of all water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.
  • It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat vs. 25 gallons to produce 1 pound of wheat.
  • You'd save more water by not eating 1 pound of meat than you would by not showering for 6 months.
  • A meat-eating diet requires 4,000 gallons per day vs. a vegan diet which requires 300 gallons of water per day.
  • Animals raised for food create 89,000 pounds of excrement per second, none of which benefits from the waste-treatment facilities for human excrement. This creates massive amounts of groundwater pollution.
  • Chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 American states.
LAND
  • Raising animals for food uses 30% of the earth's land mass, or 17 million square miles. That's about the same size as Asia! The moon (at 14.6 million square miles) has less area than that.
  • More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
  • The equivalent of 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
  • Livestock grazing is the number one cause of plant species becoming threatened or going
  • extinct in the U.S.
FOOD
  • Animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn; however, they only produce a comparatively small amount of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return.
  • It requires 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.
  • It requires 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.
Source (with references):  http://www.culinaryschools.org/yum/vegetables/

environment, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism

November 14, 2012

Fear and Loathing in Poultney

Continuing evidence of Green Mountain College's paranoiac lashing out, Steven Wise writes:

Thank you to the thousands who made your position known, loud and clear, that the Green Mountain College’s plan to slaughter and eat their old friends, Bill and Lou was morally unacceptable.

You may have believed no one was listening. Oh, they were. Closely. Those who would slaughter and eat their friends are capable of anything. And so Green Mountain College President Paul J. Fonteyn (a cross between Machiavelli’s Prince and a Keystone Kop) sent an ugly email in which he tried to get one of you in trouble with your boss.

Into my mailbox it pinged, dated November 1, 2012. Alas, thin-skinned President Fonteyn zipped it to a business 900 miles and four states away from the brave emailer.

From: Paul Fonteyn [mailto:fonteynp@greenmtn.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2012 11:03 AM
To: [DELETED]
Subject: Employee of your company

Dear [DELETED]

I am writing to you because I believe the individual sending these emails to Green Mountain College is an employee of your company. I have two questions: If she is, do these uncivil and hostile emails reflect well on your company? Would you embrace this level of activity by an agent if this was occurring in Cincinnati? Please note every email has been sent during the workday hours.

Please note that the Governor of VT and the Secretary of Agriculture have publically supported the position of the college that [DELETED] is so against.

Paul J. Fonteyn
I immediately warned President Fonteyn he should consult a lawyer before he sent emails to the employers of his critics. On Sunday, he finally took my advice. Well, part of it. He consulted a lawyer, who promptly warned me not to communicate with President Fonteyn again.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

November 11, 2012

Lou was reportedly killed this morning

According to an e-mail reportedly sent today by Green Mountain College President Paul Fonteyn,* the ox named Lou was killed early this morning.

We love you, Lou! That’s why we had to kill you! (Alison Putnam, Meiko Lunetta, Paul Fonteyn, Bill Throop, Green Mountain College

Let us hope that Lou's partner, Bill, can be saved from such cowardly and self-serving "love".

*From that message: "Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on [GMC's on-campus] Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals." In other words, as soon as they get a chance, they will sell him for dog food.

The message:
From: President Paul J. Fonteyn
To: GMC Community
Date: November 11, 2012
RE: Oxen Update


Green Mountain College and our senior team of oxen have been much in the news lately: their lives as working animals on the GMC farm, our recent community decision to slaughter them, and the national and international attention that has come our way as a result of our collaborative and rational decision.

As reported in my October 31 email to the community, our original timetable was disrupted by outside organizations seeking to appropriate the images of the oxen for their extremist agendas, including the abolition of animal agriculture. Without shame, these groups harassed and threatened local slaughterhouses, making it impossible for them to accept our animals, and therefore for us to carry out our decision expeditiously. Despite our attempts to use the most humane and local options available, one of the only Animal Welfare Approved [sic] slaughterhouses in the area was forced to cancel our appointment as a result of these hostile threats. Some individuals associated with these efforts have even discussed giving drugs to our animals, which would render the meat unacceptable for human consumption.

In the meantime, Lou's overall physical condition continued to deteriorate. Medication made him more comfortable, but even walking from pasture to pasture has now become an arduous and painful process. Close consultations with several veterinarians over the course of the summer and fall have consistently indicated that Lou's condition would not improve and that his quality of life would only continue to diminish--as has held true. The arrival of cold temperatures and icy conditions are certain to increase his suffering, and we have concurred with our veterinarians' judgment that it not humane for him to suffer further. Therefore, I authorized euthanization, which took place this morning.

Bill will not be sent to a sanctuary but will stay on Cerridwen Farm and will be cared for in a manner that follows sustainable, humane livestock practices, as is the case with all of our animals. We take responsibility for our animals on the farm--it is an obligation we will not ask others to bear.

I know at times the attention has been harsh and unfair, but it has also provided a platform to present some of the best aspects of Green Mountain College: our intellectual courage to squarely examine moral dilemmas, our values of sustainability, and our commitment to discourse over doctrine. I am proud of how GMC students have engaged with colleagues and with people outside our community in mature, thoughtful, and civil ways. Outside scrutiny can be an unwelcome distraction--I urge you not to allow online discussions, which can become volatile and unconstructive, to interfere with your wider educational endeavors at GMC. I consider your safety and your educational progress my top priorities. If you believe you are a victim of any abusive behavior, please do not hesitate to contact the Office of Student Affairs.
[Top photo of Lou with students Alison Putnam and Meiko Lunetta by Caleb Kenna for the Boston Globe. Bottom photos of President Paul Fonteyn (left) and Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs (also Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies) Bill Throop (right) from Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vt.]

Emily McCoy with Bill at Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont
“Part of being honest about your place in an ecosystem is accounting for the full cost of food production, which is what we're trying to do here.” Emily McCoy (GMC student, pictured here, Oct. 30, 2012, apparently satisfied that she has explained to Bill that he is too expensive and no longer useful alive; photo from Facebook)

Sanctuary for Lou and Bill | Compassion is sustainable
[ Signs meant for demonstration on day before Lou was killed ]
Bill and Lou want to live | Sanctuary not slaughter

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

March 28, 2013

Rump Steak

Advocacy group Rural Vermont is promoting its 2013 “Annual Celebration”:

“Philip Ackerman-Leist,” director of Green Mountain College’s Farm & Food Project ... will be the guest speaker. Ackerman-Leist will share his first-person account of the recent international controversy involving Green Mountain College’s pair of working oxen “Bill” and “Lou.” This moving and disturbing story illustrates the profound lack of understanding and connection between contemporary American society and the source of our food. ... Special guest Philip Phillip [sic] will offer his ideas on how we can work together to bridge this divide.
Rural Vermont is a fairly politically progressive organization unfortunately bound by a devotion to and reflexive defense of the exploitation of animals. Ackerman-Leist similarly is too gorged on the flesh of (and the profits from) his grass-fed heritage-breed cows to consider that he might be the one with a profound lack of understanding. What possible ideas could he offer to bridge the divide between those who think a team of oxen deserved retirement after 10 years of work and those who can only think about such animals as food?

It was precisely people who are connected with the sources of their food who were able to draw a line at killing Bill and Lou. Ackerman-Leist, who petulantly had Lou killed despite (or rather because of) the controversy, is like the slaughterhouse worker who recently posted a video of himself shooting a horse. There is nothing in his actions or words that suggests working together to bridge a divide. In fact, the bridge is already there, but he refuses to acknowledge it, stubbornly seething at the shoreline, still shouting impotent defiance after those who have left him behind.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, ecoanarchism

September 7, 2010

Let them eat meat

Speaking of Affiliation, a correspondent writes about yesterday's column in The Guardian by George Monbiot (click the title of this post):

I always felt that there was something quite peculiar about Monbiot and how he never quite "gets" things that should seem so obvious, as in his dogged touting of industrial wind and his dumb war on Agas etc etc -- in this case in his bizarre, chillingly analytical defense of meat-eating (undoubtedly this is very convenient to his own tastes), he seems almost as if he suffers from Asbergers or autism in his precise, desperate totting up of percentages, ratios, and economics of "efficient" corpse production. Talk about missing the point of veganism, all the while he ignores the elephant sitting in the corner of this very tiny windowless room -- the abject horror, routine abuse, suffering and medieval cruelty that these living sentient beings are subjected to, on factory "farms" and little "happy farms" alike, and the fact that all of this nightmarish cruelty is utterly unnecessary, and that we have no right to take another creature's life and even their sense of well being. Monbiot would have made a very good accountant for Hitler -- what a truly dreadful little man he is, a very useful idiot for one destructive industry after another. And this is why I have so little hope for this planet and any evolution to a higher way of thinking about our fellow creatures -- because people like Monbiot, draped in the lurid polyester green flag of what passes these days for "environmentalism" or "sustainable light footprint" living, are listened to by people who used to see this kind of thing as blatant corporate brainwashing of the masses. But alas, no more; now they have joined the rest of the brainwashed greedy conformists -- we live in a real life world of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone really does increasingly seem like drooling idiot zombies.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

June 22, 2009

"American Pastoral"

The account of the couple who gave up the suburban lifestyle and became farmers of organically raised livestock is troubling (Food: Field Report, by Christine Muhlke). There’s something just plain wrong with killing animals after treating them to a lovely and very short life. Is it better than killing them in horrific slaughter facilities after even shorter, truly miserable lives? Of course it is. But that doesn’t make it right or compassionate or decent.

Those of us who spend time with chickens and pigs know that each has a personality and a rich emotional life, complete with humor, love, fears and worries. Dealing out death to those who cannot defend themselves, who are young and healthy, and who love life as we all do, can’t be justified by fulfilling the human desire for a tastier bit of dead flesh, which is the solid manifestation of the terror and death pain of those who trusted their caretakers to treat them well.

SHEILA SEAMAN
Leverett, Mass.

environment, environmentalism, animal rights, vegetarianism

June 26, 2007

Cape Wind insignificant player in energy future

To the Editor, New Yorks Times Book Review:

The subtitle of Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb's book about Cape Wind claims that it is a "battle for our energy future." But wind will never be a significant -- let alone major -- player, for the simple fact that the wind is inconstant and can't be called up on demand.

In his June 17 review of their book, Robert Sullivan repeats the misleading impression that Cape Wind's 468 megawatts of capacity would also be its contribution. In fact, its average production would be only a fifth to a third of that, much of the time when it is not needed (at night) and often idle when demand is at its peak, as on hot summer days.

In other words, the grid would still have to depend on the same sources as it did before, with very little impact on conventional fuel use. In fact, the company behind Cape Wind is also trying to build a new quick-response diesel-fired plant, which would be sorely needed to balance the variable and intermittent production of its wind turbines. An offshore wind energy facility proposed in Delaware would be tied to a new natural gas plant for similar reasons. Thus wind drives a need for more fossil fuel use, not less.

Citing wind's rare peaks, as Sullivan does, only underscores its inconstancy. Wind development in Denmark has virtually halted since 2004, because even there its benefits appear to be elusive.

Yet the impacts are substantial and increasingly documented. Cape Wind would fill 24 square miles of shoal -- an important ecosystem -- with 440-feet-high moving machines. Each set of "slowly" rotating blades (made of petroleum-based composites) would be sweeping a vertical air space of 2.4 acres at tip speeds up to 200 mph. There is no question that such a machine would creates noise and vibration (despite the hundreds of gallons of oil in each housing). Inevitable impacts are obvious -- not just aesthetically, but especially on bird and sea life.

Sullivan says that criticism "has been mitigated by increasingly efficient turbines and more bird-sensitive placement." That is industry spin. Wind turbines have simply got bigger, not more efficient. Their space requirements and blade area per megawatt remain essentially constant. Last month, the first-year report of bird and bat deaths at the sprawling "Maple Ridge" facility on the Tug Hill plateau in Lewis County, N.Y., was released. Even that company-backed study estimated that 2,200 to 4,094 birds and bats were killed in 5 months by 120 turbines. That would extrapolate to 8,580 to 15,967 birds and bats killed by the currently operating 195 turbines over a whole year. Efficient indeed.

The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound regrettably opens itself to the NIMBY charge by trying to promote other locations. But many of its members and others fighting Cape Wind recognize that the substantial negative impacts of wind energy facilities anywhere cannot be justified by the very small benefit they may provide.

NIMBY more typically describes the developers and facilitators of these facilities. They are not the ones whose peace and quiet is destroyed. They are not the ones who can no longer sleep in their own homes or enjoy their back yards, who develop migraines, dizziness, and worse from the strobing shadows and noise. A team in Portugal is currently studying evidence of vibroacoustic disease in people who live near wind turbines.

Cape Wind is unique in threatening an enclave of the rich rather than the usual rural poor or otherwise disenfranchised (such as indigenous peoples of Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, India). But the reasons for opposing it are the same. This battle is being fought in thousands of communities around the world, for very good reasons. Giant wind turbines are a symptom of our energy problems, not a solution.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

February 16, 2013

The animal killers' dilemma

Glenn Davis Stone, Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and pro-GMO blogger at fieldquestions.com, posted an essay on Nov. 26, 2012, "The Animal Lover's Dilemma", by Elizabeth Vandeventer of Davis Creek Farm, Nelson County, Virginia. She is another supposedly ex-vegetarian who describes her sense of missing out on the death action in the great cycle of life. So she attacks vegans, who she blames for palm oil plantations, among other evils of industrial agriculture and chemistry, for not being more informed than the general population about the same food that everyone else eats. And of course, unlike people who just buy their packaged meat in the grocery store, she "honors" animals by raising them and thanking them before killing them to sell as packaged meat at farmers' markets.

Vandeventer was inspired to write because of the international outrage about Green Mountain College's determination to kill their oxen Bill and Lou. (They went ahead and killed Lou, rather than give him adequate veterinary care, but did it medically so they could whine that his "meat" was wasted.) Bill, no longer working for his room and board, still languishes at the college in Limbo despite at least two offers of sanctuary.

While the college raised one of those sanctuaries, called VINE, for Veganism Is the Next Evolution, to arch-adversary, unable to separate VINE's specific concern for Bill and Lou from their antipathy to its larger outlook (animal rights, human rights), and then unwilling to hear any advocate for Bill and Lou except that of their imagined version of VINE — now an extremist, terrorist organization ready to firebomb the college — Vandeventer creates her straw man at the other end, conjuring mindless consumerist sentimentalist "animal lovers" who are singularly responsible for the destruction of rain forests for palm oil plantations.

The essay is the usual self-justifying drivel, which continues in the comments below it. I write about it today because host Glenn Davis Stone just added what I suppose he thinks should be a succinct wrap-up:

Meat eating causes more death but it causes more life as well. I have been to Elizabeth’s farm and seen the hundreds of chickens and cattle enjoying life on her pastures. All because of meat eaters.
How does one respond, after the laughter, to such madness? "Rucio" tries:
And then having that life cut violently short. For the enjoyment of meat eaters. Only increasing the animals' gratitude, no doubt.
Note: According to a profile of Charlottesville (Va.)–area farmers, Vandeventer's farm has 4,000 "meat" chickens. Each of them named, of course, and roaming free. And according to her own web site, both the chickens and the cows do not exist solely on the grass and grains of the farm. Although Vandeventer claims that grazing is the only agriculture possible for her land (the pictures showing lush grasses and fairly flat fields suggests otherwise, however), her business depends on other farmland growing crops not for people but for her "livestock", i.e., it is not at all a model of sustainability unless that means only sustaining a meat industry.

Update:  Davis Stone replied to Rucio's comment: "I’m not sure what “violent” means here — Elizabeth’s animals are killed instantly. Hard to imagine an animal being grateful to people for arguing they never be born just because they were going to die." To which Rucio replied: "What could be more violent than killing another being well before the time of its natural death?" and "It is even harder to imagine an animal being grateful to people for arguing that they must kill it to justify its life."

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism

December 19, 2006

Excusitarianism

From "Beyond the Grave," by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau:

I've heard every excuse in the book for eating animals, but I've yet to hear a convincing reason. It's a pretty simple equation: since humans don't need to consume animals to survive, killing them simply to satisfy our taste buds amounts to senseless slaughter. But our eating habits and appetites have very deep roots, and we prefer convenience over conscience. With a determination that belies an irrational attachment to animal flesh and secretions, otherwise sensible and sensitive people spend vast amounts of time and energy concocting outrageous excuses to justify this unnecessary habit. Using lyrical and exalted language, they extol the virtues of tradition, glorify the need to conserve "heritage breeds," and wax poetic about our "evolutionary heritage." With "humane meat" gaining popularity, non-vegetarians have co-opted the ethical argument ..., but it's not the vegetarians who are losing. It's the animals. ... If we have to disguise, rationalize, romanticize, and ritualize eating animals to such a degree that we're no longer living in truth or reality, then perhaps we're not comfortable with it at all. Adopting a vegan diet is the best choice I've ever made, and I've never had to offer any excuses for it.

animal rights, vegetarianism

March 17, 2011

Brotherhood of Man

Motorhead reminds you to get back in line:


And from the song "Brotherhood of Man":

We are worse than animals, we hunger for the kill.
We put our faith in maniacs, the triumph of the will,
We kill for money, wealth and lust, for this we should be damned.
We are disease upon the world, brotherhood of man.
environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

June 26, 2013

White House misinformation and inaction regarding greenhouse gases

Thanking Obama for his "climate action", as Paul Burns of VPIRG has asked me to do, would be like thanking him for universal health care — not only are Obama's "actions" utterly phony, they are a meaningless sideshow to distract attention of the willfully gullible from the creation of such a paranoid militarized corporatist murderous state that Obama makes Dick Cheney look like Elmer Fudd and Dick Nixon like one of the Three Stooges.

On the White House web site, the President's climate action plan includes this graphic, with the EPA cited as reference:


What's glaringly missing is any indication that the non-CO₂ greenhouse gases (GHGs) have a much greater warming effect per unit of mass emitted. For example, the EPA, despite ignoring it on one page in the same way as the White House, notes on another page the different "global warming potential" (GWP) values of a few GHGs relative to CO₂. They note that over 100 years, methane (CH₄) has a GWP of 20 and nitrous oxide (N₂O) a GWP of 300. That would appear to mean that the 9% of GHG emissions represented by methane actually has more than twice (9 × 20), and the 5% represented by nitrous oxide more than 17 times, the effect of the 84% represented by CO₂.

Moreover, the EPA notes that CO₂ persists for thousands of years in the atmosphere, whereas CH₄ persists only about 10 years and N₂O over 100 years. [Update:  “Continued global warming after CO₂ emissions stoppage”, Thomas Lukas Frölicher, Michael Winton & Jorge Louis Sarmiento, Nature Climate Change, published online 24 November 2013, doi:10.1038/nclimate2060.]

In other words, even if we were successful in drastically reducing CO₂ emissions, there would be no effect for thousands of years. If we want to more quickly reduce the effects of GHG emissions, the obvious primary target is CH₄, with at least 20 times the warming effect of CO₂ and one that lasts only 10-12 years. According to other sources, CH₄ has a 100-year GWP of 25 and a 20-year GWP of 72.

The White House graphic describes methane as coming from the production and transport of coal, natural gas, and oil, as well as from landfills. It neglects to mention that the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") process of releasing natural gas, which Obama strongly supports, releases a particularly large amount of methane into the air. [Update: "Study: Methane Leakage From Gas Fields Guts Climate Benefit".] And it completely ignores the methane emissions from animal agriculture, which the United Nations has calculated contributes more to global warming than all transportation. [Update:  “Anthropogenic emissions of methane in the United States” [are probably at least twice as high as previously assumed], Scot M. Miller, Steven C. Wofsy, Anna M. Michalak, et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Published online November 25, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1314392110.]

Simply changing our diet away from meat and dairy would have much more effect on climate change than all of Obama's "actions".

And there are many other benefits in reducing animal agriculture:
When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9% of CO₂ deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the GWP of CO₂. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for 37% of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO₂), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64% of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Livestock now use 30% of the earth's entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33% of the global arable land used to produce feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70% of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. [Between 25% and 30% of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year -- 1.6 billion tonnes -- is caused by deforestation.]

At the same time, herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20% of pastures considered to be degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution, eutrophication, and the degeneration of coral reefs. The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers, and the pesticides used to spray feed crops. Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above- and below-ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Livestock are estimated to be the main inland source of phosphorous and nitrogen contamination of the South China Sea, contributing to biodiversity loss in marine ecosystems.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20% of all terrestrial animal biomass. Livestock's presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to biodiversity loss; 15 out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed to be in decline with livestock identified as a culprit.
Another obvious target is to reduce hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which have come into use as refrigerants and propellants to replace chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, such as freon). CFCs were phased out because of their destruction of the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere. They are also potent GHGs, as are HFCs. For example, HFC-134a (CF₃CFH₂) has a 100-year GWP of 1,430 and 20-year GWP of 3,830 and persists in the atmosphere only 14 years, making it, with methane, another obvious candidate for meaningful action. In fact, in 2011 the E.U. banned HFC-134a in new cars in favor of HFC-1234yf (100-year GWP of 4), with a total ban on all uses being phased in through 2017. Meanwhile the U.S. has only talked and delayed about doing the same.

Update (note):  Like his continuing delay (renewed in this latest "action") to finally approve the Keystone XL pipeline to appease Bill McKibben and his 350.org "activists", while it continues to be built nonetheless, Obama's "climate action" seems to be little more than another cynical bone thrown to them, who are just as phony, just as adept at misinformation and inaction, because 350.org also ignores all but CO₂ in the atmosphere, ensuring no reversal of anthropogenic warming – let alone environmental depredation – at all.

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism, veganism