Apparently now going green means only eating greens. Advice from Lord Nicholas Stern:
Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better. I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating. I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”
Stern also says that “We have not seen those sort of conditions for 30 million years. These kind of changes will have huge consequences — southern Europe is likely to be a desert; hundreds of millions of people will have to move. There will be severe global conflict.”
Stern is most famous for his 700-page report on addressing global warming where he arbitrarily chose 550 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 as a magical threshold. Anything greater than 550 ppm, there are dire consequences. Below the 550 ppm threshold, we just might make it. Heritage analyst David Kreutzer pokes a big hole in Stern’s logic:
The bigger problem is how the costs are calculated. The Stern analysis purports to see the impact of today’s CO2 emissions 200 years into the future. Further, the impact on the much, much higher expected GDP of the future is presented as having an equal impact today. In other words, getting a dollar in 200 years is just as satisfying as getting a dollar today. Therefore, spending $.99 to get a dollar is a good idea independent of whether you get the dollar today or a thousand years from now. For most people who are not Nicholas Stern, Baron of Brentford, it would make a difference.
Well-known environmental economist Professor William D. Nordhaus of Yale University employed the methodology of the Stern Review and calculated that Stern’s twisted assumptions would recommend cutting the World’s income from its average today of $10,000 to $4,400 in order to prevent an annual drop of income from $130,000 to $129,870 starting in 200 years. Further he points out that half of the environmental costs that Stern says occur “now and forever” don’t actually occur until after 2800. As a reminder, that’s 800 years from now.”
To limit carbon dioxide emissions, population control has been suggested. Trading your dog or cat in for something more sustainable that you can eat like a chicken has been suggested and now trading your steak in for a veggie platter. We’re not talking minor adjustments anymore or merely paying higher prices for goods and losing income – although there’s plenty of that to go around, too. We’re talking about social and cultural changes that affect people in dramatic, non monetary ways.
Almost everything we use and do produces carbon dioxide. Look at the sacrifices made by the Beavan family in the documentary No Impact Man. Reason’s Dan Hayes writes, “Colin Beavan and his two-year-old daughter Isabella are in the bathroom cleaning out mommy’s cosmetics when they decide to wash their laundry by stomping their feet on a tub full of clothes and all-natural Borax detergent. It’s one of the many inconvenient and impractical things Beavan and his family do in the new documentary No Impact Man. The Beavans give up toilet paper, any products with packaging, cars and public transit, elevators, plastic bags, and shopping for anything new. In addition, they won’t use washing machines, disposable diapers, or food grown outside a 250-mile radius of NYC.”
These are sacrifices people do not want to make and do not have to make.
In the citation for President Obama’s award of the Nobel peace prize, the Norwegian Nobel Academy mentioned that his style of leadership would bring in a new era for human rights and democracy – among the many other wondrous things that are to be expected from the president. Unfortunately, the academy must have failed to talk to the human rights groups working in support of the Iranian people. As reported by Kenneth Timmerman in newsmax.com, the Obama administration has actually cut funding in support of pro-democracy activists. For all those, who want to see regime change in Iran, preferably by peaceful means, this is a deeply troubling development that sends the wrong signals to the world about American priorities and values. In terms of public diplomacy, this country is now signaling that dealing with autocratic regimes is more important than supporting the rights of the people they oppress. It is a complete reversal of the efforts made by the Bush administration to help develop civil society within Iran.
Back in June when the Iranian people took to the streets to protest against the fraudulent election results that returned Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power, many here were inspired by their courage and the hope that Iran had finally turned a corner. The Obama administration, on the contrary, was stung by the Iranian allegation that it was supporting the demonstrators, and as a result zeroed out the funding for Iranian pro-democracy programs in the State Department budget. For instance, reports Mr. Timmermann, Yale University’s Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, was denied a $2.7 million grant, at a time when Iran was in clear violation of human rights, right in front of the television screens of the world.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discussed what the Obama administration sees as a difficult dilemma with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on August 9. The Obama administration, she said, was torn between their desire to engage the regime and their sympathy for the protesters: “And we knew that, if we stepped in too soon, too hard, the attention might very well shift and the leadership would try to use us to unify the country against the protesters. And that was — it was a hard judgment call. But I think we, in retrospect, handled it pretty well.”
“Now, behind the scenes, we were doing a lot, as you know,” she said, citing the State Department’s intervention with the management of Twitter to keep the website open for Iranian bloggers, an often cited, but modest contribution from the United States, the most powerful democracy in the world.
Meanwhile, writes Mr. Timmermann, Congress is stepping up to the plate. In July, Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s bill, the Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) act, passed the Senate and has been incorporated into the annual defense appropriations bill. It will mean more money for Farsi-language broadcasts by the Voice of America and Radio Farda, and it also authorizes the State Department to spend up to $20 million to develop new technologies to counter Internet censorship in Iran. $5 million is also included for human rights documentation. While the Senate and the House will have to reconcile their versions of the bill, it is critically important that members are mindful of the importance of the Iranian people at a time when the White House has turned a blind eye to their plight. Neither the Iranian, nor the American people are served by this turn to real politik in the White House.