If I was throwing a dinner party and had to choose between inviting a hardcore Amway enthusiast and a vegan, well, just sign me up for a fun evening learning how to earn extra income.
Amway are notorious for the cult-like evangelism of their members, whose persistence would shame a toddler dragging on your arm in the supermarket aisle and screaming for a Bertie Beetle. Vegans are even worse. Vegans seem to see everything as an opening to hold forth on the moral superiority of their cult. Their latest fixation is climate change, and the wholly fictitious notion that veganism is an absolute necessity if we are to avoid barbecuing the entire planet.
After years of failed global attempts to cut carbon emissions meaningfully, some activists are propagating the idea that everyone on the planet should go vegetarian or even vegan.
But when an idea is too ridiculous for even the Greens, then you just know it’s all a load of pure-meat baloney.
It’s interesting to note that even environmentalists themselves are loathe to make the major lifestyle changes that would be required to avoid all meat products. A recent survey found that most of the UK Green Party’s elected representatives are in fact meat-eaters…who see veganism is a fad.
Still, this nonsense gets a lot of uncritical airtime, mainly, it seems, because it panders to the never-ending thirst for climate change extremism among the media-elite.
The truth is we can’t stop temperature rises with our diets…First, that cut isn’t to our entire emissions — just those from food. That means Four-fifths of emissions are ignored, according to an analysis of emission from the European Union, which means the impact is actually five-times lower.
Second, the more optimistic figures about how much of your emissions you can cut are based not just on a vegetarian diet, but on an entirely vegan one where we avoid every single animal product altogether.
But, the luvvies know that veganism is way harder to sell to the masses than vegetarianism. Especially to the masses in developing countries who are itching to get off a vegetarian diet imposed by poverty, and chow down on some of that luxurious, tasty meat.
A systematic peer-review of studies of going vegetarian shows that a non-meat diet will likely reduce an individual’s emissions by…just 4.3%.
This still overstates the effect, because it ignores the well-established “rebound effect.” Vegetarian diets are slightly cheaper, and saved money will likely be spent on other goods and services that cause extra greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S., vegetarians save at least $750 on their food budgets every year. That extra spending will cause more carbon dioxide emissions, cancelling about half the saved carbon emissions from going vegetarian.
So much for the much-vaunted savings from going vegetarian. $750 a year is a price I’ll gladly pay to keep my steak, instead of some tasteless, vat-grown conglomeration of industrial chemistry.
In a first world setting, the reality is that going entirely vegetarian for the rest of your life means you reduce your emissions by about 2%, according to a study of the environmental impact of Swedish vegetarians.
usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2019/07/25/vegetarianism-climate-change-meat-vegan-livestock-column
So you decide, dear readers: reduce emissions by a whole two percent, or, for just $14 a week, continue to enjoy tasty, nutritious meat? In fact, why not show your utter contempt for environmental hysteria by ordering a delicious Whale Meat Company package today?