Stupidity About Climate Change Not Confined to America
by John Lawrence, August 29. 2019
Brazil's President Bolsonoro is following in Trump's footsteps. To hell with climate change, they're going full speed ahead burning down the Amazon. Then the G7 countries offered $20 million to help put out the fires, and Bolsonoro refused it! This is not only looking a gift horse in the mouth, it's slapping the owner of the horse in the face. The Amazon not only produces 20% of the world's oxygen, it sequesters carbon as well. It is essential to the ecological functioning of the world at least as far as oxygen breathing species are concerned. That includes us.
Then to add insult to injury, Bolsonoro wants to expand cattle ranching on the burned out Amazon. Beef cows contribute to greenhouse gasses by their belching and farting. The world's population needs to get away from eating beef because of that reason alone. All the grain and feed that cows eat to feed people with its meat could feed a lot more people if it were used to feed people directly instead of running it through a cow. It takes 2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef. 5 million acres of rainforest are felled every year in South and Central America alone to create cattle pasture. And Bolsonaro wants to burn down the Amazon so that even more beef can be produced for all those quarter pounders and Big Macs as well as filet mignons at fancy restaurants.
I'm sure his thinking goes like this. The rest of the world wants us Brazilians to sacrifice our economic development just so they can breathe easier about the environment. So we should sacrifice while their economic development created the problem in the first place, and they're still doing relatively little about it. Where's their sacrifice? Well all this goes to show that economic development around the world has effectively destroyed the environment and will continue to deteriorate the environment so long as economic development is pursued on an extractive basis. There are trillions of tons of fossil fuels laying in the ground just waiting to be exploited. Problem is their exploitation could virtually sign a death warrant for planet earth, but it could make somebody rich, so, by all means, full steam ahead!
The Amish lead a lifestyle devoid of modern technology. They don't drive cars or fly in airplanes. You'd think they were the most environmentally conscious group of people on the planet. But they're not concerned about the environment at all. They lead their lifestyles strictly because of religious reasons. It just is a happy coincidence that their carbon footprint is very small compared to the lifestyle that most Americans lead. They lead a mostly agricultural life and use horses instead of tractors to plow their fields. There are lessons to be learned here even for the Amish. They should get more environmentally conscious because a lot of their everyday realities could be exported to the "modern" age which has contributed to destroying the planet.
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage environmental activist, recently crossed the Atlantic in a boat instead of flying in an airplane to point out the fact that air travel releases tons of carbon dioxide into the air. Of course military jets around the world are culprits of the highest degree. How ironic if instead of the world being destroyed by nuclear weapons it turns out that it will be destroyed by the exhaust fumes from military jets! The US military is the world's single largest consumer of oil — and as a result, one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters. So we are destroying ourselves in order to save ourselves. Our vaunted pursuit of economic development without concern for the consequences thereof has catapulted the US and its emulators around the world, namely, Bolsonoro in Brazil, to say to hell with the environment, we want our economic development and we want it now.
