Crazy Climate Talk in Cambridge
Posted: February 12, 2010
The home of Harvard wants to advocate vegetarianism and veganism, complete with “Meatless or Vegan Mondays” to respond to the “climate emergency” they are facing.
According to a Fox News story, the Cambridge Climate Congress is proposing a variety of mandates to address the emergency “created by the growth of local greenhouse gas emissions despite the urgent warnings of climate scientists that substantial reductions are needed in order to reduce the risk of disastrous changes to our climate.”
In addition to new taxes and limits on everything from parking to plastic bags, they want to “advocate” less meat consumption. It sounds like they would like to actually tell people that they can’t eat meat and would “institute disincentives for the purchase of non-regional food.”
This is crazy talk. The article quotes Dr. Ken Green, a resident scholar on environment and energy at the American Enterprise Institute, about the regional food idea. “Trying to grow something out of season in a greenhouse locally may produce more greenhouse gas emissions than having the same food shipped in from a place where it grows naturally,” he said. “Studies do not come down uniformly on the side that local is better.” And as far as vegetarianism is concerned, there is definitely no agreement that eating less meat would have any kind of climate impact.
With the unbelievable snow events we have seen just in the last week, I would think we could use some of those greenhouse gases right now to warm us up a bit.