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Dr. Helen Harwatt, farmed animal law and policy fellow at Harvard Law School, advises that getting protein from plant sources instead of animal sources would drastically help in meeting climate targets and reduce the risk of overshooting temperature goals.
For the first time, Dr. Harwatt proposes a three-step strategy to gradually replace animal proteins with plant-sourced proteins, as part of the commitment to mitigate climate change. These are:
1) Acknowledging that current numbers of livestock are at their peak and will need to decline ('peak livestock').
2) Set targets to transition away from livestock products starting with foods linked with the highest greenhouse gas emissions such as beef, then cow's milk and pig meat ('worst-first' approach).
3) Assessing suitable replacement products against a range of criteria including greenhouse gas emission targets, land usage, and public health benefits ('best available food' approach).
Harwatt further elaborates that recent evidence shows, in comparison with the current food system, switching from animals to plants proteins, could potentially feed an additional 350 million people in the US alone.
You can eat plants or insects, but not meat.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @11:37PM (11 children)
How about instead of these ridiculously inept plans that will result in making people fat and pumping crap into the atmosphere that will create poisonous acid rain, while raising taxes worldwide by 1 trillion dollars/year and giving it to the same incompetant UN bureaucrats and academics who come up with this crap, etc... we do a reasonable thing.
Start with any of these:
1) Get rid of inflationary currencies that punish savers and reward wasteful spending
2) Prepare for general worldwide disaster by building shelters and saving food and fuel.
3) Adopt new (safer) nuclear power along with whatever ongoing oversight the safety may require. Solar and wind are also great for anyone who wants to pay more for decentralized energy.
4) Stop shipping crap halfway around the world when it can be made locally for not that much more (raise tariffs)
5) Increase the rate of space exploration (extra mass leaving Earth = extra energy leaving Earth) and moving power plants to outer-space (leave all that waste heat out there)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @12:15AM
It was an ordinary day. Neither too hot nor too cold, the weather was quite welcoming. Yet, even on an ordinary day, extraordinary things can happen. And on this day, at that time, extraordinary things did happen.
***
What was he witnessing? Just what was Fredrik witnessing? A man was in an alleyway, pummeling something with all his might. After processing the ongoing event for several seconds, Fredrik realized what was happening: Child abuse. That man was abusing a child. Thinking quickly, Fredrik charged in to put an end to the injustice...
***
He had believed it would just be another ordinary day. Yes, "believed," because he had believed that until he saw it.
Ian had just been walking down the sidewalk when he witnessed something truly out of the ordinary. To be honest, the sight of it shocked him to such a degree that he froze on the spot, unable to react for some time. However, using his wisdom and courage, he was able to forcibly snap himself out of his trance-like state and come to terms with the situation. It was a situation unlike any other.
There were two men. Each of those men were wailing on a small child in an alleyway. Ian never thought that he would witness a situation like this firsthand, so he didn't know how to react at first. But, now, he knew what he had to do: Put a stop to the injustice taking place before him.
Always one to act on his convictions, Ian charged in...
***
There were three men in a certain alleyway. But these were no ordinary men, you understand; each of those men possessed unfathomable wisdom, far surpassing that which the average person could even comprehend. This was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by their actions. You see, each of those men - those wise, courageous men - separately arrived at the awe-inspiring conclusion that justice needed to be dispensed. Hence, the current situation.
All three men were brutally beating and violating a small girl. But, they were doing so in such a way as to cause the maximum amount of suffering possible. For that child, pleas for mercy were all for naught. For that child, suffering was all it knew. For that child, death was but a distant dream. What had the child done to deserve this? No, rather, what didn't that wretched toy do to deserve this?
The girl had the audacity to exist in the presence of men, causing them to become aroused. Then, to make matters even worse, the child tried to reject the men who came to utilize it, when it was all her fault in the first place! Thus, for violating men's rights, justice rained down upon her with a level of fury never before seen.
Slam! Slam! Slam! Slam! Robert, Fredrik, and Ian punched, kicked, slammed, grabbed, pulled, and threw the little girl every which way, from every possible direction. She had screamed at first, but she eventually realized that it was useless, so even that aspect of her resistance vanished. No, that wasn't it; she didn't scream because she was incapable of it, having been transformed into a lifeless husk and all.
Ian pulled his penis out of the toy's anus and sighed in satisfaction. All of the men were smiling and anyone could tell that they were satisfied with this result. Everyone had had their turns, after all. With nothing left to do there, the three wise men walked off into the sunset, talking jovially as they did so.
***
In the coming months, news about three men who were said to possess unfathomable wisdom would travel the globe. Various tales of their exploits were told, but all of those tales had one crucial commonality with respect to the actions of those fabled men: They raped all that they saw...
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday November 28 2018, @04:03PM (1 child)
I really do like space exploration and it's really cool science stuff, but the actual benefits to our society in any semi-near to even long-term future are negligible. In fact, with every launch, we are polluting the Earth even more. So, in actuality, the long term take away may be more along the lines of breaking even. Sure, there's cool things to be done, researched, etc, but at what cost and given what benefit? I would say the interest that it brings to Science, may be worth it, but it's certainly not doing the environment any favors.
Trump is the first president I've heard in a long time talking seriously about introducing new tariffs on imported goods.
Nuclear power may be the answer, but the fallout can be quite devastating. I'm quite in favor of focusing on Wind and Solar for power generation. In fact, I already know someone who mostly generates power and hardly pays anything in electric bills. That's what I would love for my own house.
I'm uncertain what general worldwide disaster you're trying to save us from. Are you thinking the Fallout game series had things "sort of right"? Just without all of the dystopian science experiments being performed on various Vaults?
Yeah, I'm in the category of people who are barely scraping by. Thus, don't have much time to think about pie in the sky kinds of finances. I have been taking some financial advice and been putting away for retirement, but who knows if that will truly be enough.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @07:48PM
Just buy some amd stock and wait for intel to lose half the datacenter market. The latest thing is intel saying they dont even care about cpus anymore: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4224840-intel-corporation-intc-management-presents-credit-suisse-22nd-annual-tmt-conference [seekingalpha.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:53PM (7 children)
>5) Increase the rate of space exploration (extra mass leaving Earth = extra energy leaving Earth) and moving power plants to outer-space (leave all that waste heat out there)
No. Just... no.
Transporting mass off earth burns energy *on* Earth. The mass-energy of the payload is removed, but it wasn't a problem to begin with.
The waste heat form energy production is not an issue. Not even remotely - the problem is the CO2 released into the atmosphere by most of our energy sources, which then traps far more abundant solar energy as heat. I did the calculations a couple years ago, and as I recall the CO2 released from burning 1W worth of coal will capture roughly 1MW worth of solar energy before it leaves the atmosphere. The waste heat (typically 1-2W) isn't even a rounding error compared to that.
As for (1) - if you really want to cut down on wasteful spending, why not tackle it at its source and ban advertising? After all, if you actually want/need something, you're going to go looking for it. The entire purpose of advertising is to manufacture transient desires to motivate impulsive purchases, and/or get you to pay more than the free market prices for things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:23PM (6 children)
Banning things just creates a black market and all the associed crime... are there seriously people who dont get this yet?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:53PM (5 children)
How exactly do you plan to have a black market for ads? Nobody actually wants the things, and the primary function of an ad is to get people to buy a product, so you can't really hide who's probably paying for that black-market billboard in Times Square.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @11:22PM (4 children)
1) I do know people who actually like ads and would not, for example, use an adblocker for that reason.
2) The ads wont be immediately obvious to a square, half the ads today are already disguised as news stories and academic research.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 29 2018, @12:36AM (3 children)
1) That's what catalogs are for.
2) Doesn't matter - once someone spots one, it's easy to trace to it's purchaser. The current "fake article" ads would disappear, since it would be illegal for publishers to sell the space. "product placement" articles might blur the line, but I'd bet most media would err on the side of caution - nobody wants to deal with legal complications, especially if they're not allowed to get paid for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @01:13AM (2 children)
You dont get it. People do things if they make money, whether legal or not. You are just making it more lucrative with your ban. The simplistic 'who would profit analysis' will be defeated easily by arguing it was the competition trying to frame you. Its no different than pot.
Source: The results of every ban in history.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 29 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)
Three words: Follow the money.
Also, you're thinking of things from the wrong end - you don't try to stop people buying, that never works. You stop them selling. It's awful hard to make a compelling case that your competition managed to insert an advertising break into *your* broadcast. Or gratuitous product placement into *your* movie or TV show.
The reason it's hard to ban goods and services is that plenty of sellers don't mind operating outside the law. Advertising though - the sellers are media companies and property owners - they have compelling reasons to remain legal.
Yes, maybe you still have ads on pirate video streaming sites and the like - but we could easily eliminate it from the mainstream media. Whether their business model could adapt... that's another question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @07:10PM
It is like you didnt retain anything that was explained to you. The ads are going to be in the form of "academic researchers say fat is bad for you" (funded somehow by the sugar lobby) or "take this pain survey at the hospital" (funded somehow by big pharma).
Anyway, it was an interesting glimpse into the mindset of a "banner", it is clear we are doomed to continue making the same mistakes over and over as long as people like that make up a substantial part of the population.