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Norway's Army Battles Global Warming By Going Vegetarian
cold fjord writes "It looks like no more spam, spam, spam for Norway's warriors... at least on Mondays. The Daily Caller reports, 'Norway's military is taking drastic steps to ramp up its war against global warming. The Scandinavian country announced its soldiers would be put on a vegetarian diet once a week to reduce the military's carbon footprint. "Meatless Monday's" has already been introduced at one of Norway's main military bases and will soon be rolled out to others, including overseas bases. It is estimated that the new vegetarian diet will cut meat consumption by 150 tons per year. "It's a step to protect our climate," military spokesman Eystein Kvarving told AFP. "The idea is to serve food that's respectful of the environment." ... The United Nations says that livestock farming is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting meat consumption, environmentalists argue, would help stem global warming and improve the environment." — The Manchester Journal reports, "The meatless Monday campaign launched in 2003 as a global non-profit initiative in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University to promote personal and environmental health by reducing meat consumption.'"
If Norway was really going to make a dent in Global Warming, they would stop pumping up oil.
cannibalism
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Sweden annexed Norway without fighting after shelling Norwegian formations with cans of corned beef.
Maybe just on Monday...
The impact on global climate would be NOTHING MEASURABLE whatsoever. Several years ago I read China is about to launch 700+ coal power stations by 2020. Sure, China will decommission other stations in that period, but the overall trend is obvious. Even if the whole Norway, not just the army, stops eating anything and even stops breathing to reduce the so called carbon footprint, the impact would be ... nothing. China alone will more than compensate :)
Well fuck it, nothing can be done. We might as well give up and prepare to die as there is no cumulative effect when combating global warming. Goodbye cruel world...
Even if I stop killing people at my usual rate of one per week it will make no difference because of the huge number of people being killed by other "so called" things.
Small numbers of people doing stuff is obviously not going to make any difference but small numbers of people start doing anything before large numbers of people do it. Somebody has to be first.
Only a drop in the ocean, eh? They did something. What did you do? They found one thing that they CAN do, and did it. Maybe some day the chinese will do one thing also. Or several. I'm sure the US is never going to do a damn thing. They seem selfish assholes.
I agree, the problem should be solved in a different way. did you know that an average USian uses double the energy than an average German (with similar living standards). Maybe it is time that you start having proper insulation in your homes and start investing in quality public transport. I understand that the distances in US are very big (I also come from a very big country), so the contamination associated to the transport is also higher, but if you do proper urban planification those things can be mitigated.
Per capita wise, we probably should start with the USA. If the Americans eat less meat, drive less and consume less resources, I'm sure that's going to have a very positive impact on their health too, not just the environment of this planet.
Unfortunately, the american lifestyle is a model that most Chinese dream of right now. So this trend is a terrible one. But what do you expect people in other countries to do, when the Americans export their movies in which people are living in big houses, with gigantic backyard, and there are more cars than persons in a family, have a fun life with a lot of meat (fill in your favorite resources)? When people in other countries have the means, they will want the same thing. And they emulate. This is totally normal. That means, in China, people also want a big house, at least a car, or preferably, one car per person, and all the comfort in life that the Americans have been enjoying for so long.
I gave up driving 10 years ago, my wife and I each have a bike. We ride or take the public transit, set a quota on our own diet, watch closely our AC and heater to just have a minimum of comfort. We watch our carbon footprint carefully. But when we try to convince other people to at least try to do something, people think we are idiots. The planet belongs to everyone, if the Americans/Europeans can enjoy the resources, why can't we?
It would interesting if there was some kind of quota system on all countries in the world, based on the population size. And it would be even more interesting if we can control it at the individual level. You want to enjoy more resources? Pay for it. That money will go to those who have left over. So the rich people can have all the shit they want, as long as they pay for it.
But the population isn't really increasing in the western world where we have all the food we can eat. By your reasoning western populations should be increasing a lot. The number of people will stop increasing when also poor countries have enough food and good health care so that parents are confident that the children they get will reach adulthood.
This is not a sig.
Yeah, but most of the soya is fed to animals. 70% of corn grown in the USA is fed to animals. For every kilo of meat you eat, 10 kilos of feedstock went into an animal.
So you could eat less meat, and devote more land to growing plants, which is the essence of carbon capture. And all those animal farts contribute to global warming as well (methane is a greenhouse gas).
Regardless of whether vegetarianism / veganism is better for animals or your health, they require less energy and produce less CO2.
You're outer category delusional.
The projected sea level rise is up to about a meter by the year 2100. Not in the form of a sudden tidal wave arriving next tuesday, but a few milimeters per decade.
Think of the world 100 years ago. Think how different agriculture was then, how different cities were. A century is a very long time on the scale of a human life and culture.
Let's adapt to a potentially global and humankind-annihiliating catastrophy once the methane under ice in Siberia starts to melt and gets released to the atmosphere. It's already bubbling out, you can see it with your eyes.
Earth will go on, some life possibly will also go on but humans are facing the business end of a shotgun at the moment.
(...)
You're harming your cause with such extreme and patently ridiculous alarmism. Did you know that up to the start of the Pleistocene, there were no permanent ice caps on either pole? Was the earth in the Pliocene an uninhabitable wasteland? We are living in the Holocene interglacial stage of an ice age today. Today's climate isn't the norm, it isn't the only climate in which life is possible. In fact, every species alive today, except for perhaps a handful of human domesticated crops, already existed during the last ice age, and lived through the transition. Before you bring up the standard response about the rate of climate change being completely unique in the history of the earth, this too is false. The transition from the last glacial to the Holocene interglacial was just as sudden. Vast subarctic tundras, built up over a period of 100,000 years (the duration of the last glaciation) thawed and became exposed (in fact, some of it is still frozen deep under the surface in central Europe!).
The environment is facing a number of terrible human induced crises - primarily habitat loss, over-fishing, and pollution. Yes, many species will disappear by the end of the century, even if the climate stops changing today, even if the climate goes back to the way it was before the industrial revolution. If you live long enough, you will find that a slight increase in temperature will have been a minor influence compared to these things.