Last week we had a people in New Zealand saying we need edible pets. This week we have England’s “premier climatologist” saying we need to give up meat. You first, me Lord. However, this sort of tactic risks marginalization of his cause. Poll numbers are already falling. What’s really needed here is “steak watch”. Since as we’ve seen with many prominent people who give worldly advice, they often don’t follow it, we need some British paparazzi at restaurants and public banquets to see if Lord Stern follows his own advice. When in Japan, maybe someone can offer him the new Windows 7 Whopper to try. Why no “OSX Snow Leopard” Burger? – Anthony
From the London Times: Climate chief Lord Stern: give up meat to save the planet
People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.
In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “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.”
On bovine flatulance –
My bet’s on the Buffalo – Much bigger beast…
(I just know there’s a pony in here – I can smell it.)
On Soylent Green,
I’m working on becoming tough, stringy and gamey –
Mike
Well the Count Me Out total is still ahead.
I click the link
Climate Science > How do we know humans are responsible?
and the answer they give is:
“The climate change we are experiencing cannot be explained by natural causes.”
I was hoping for a little more information?
Lord Stern is not a climatologist. He is a complete banker.
Now I understand the term “sheepeople”.
Barry Foster … read the records.
I read the Goebbels’ diaries and it is clear that Hitler was a vegetarian.
I don’t think that changes the health benefits of being a knowledgeable vegetarian, but to conclude it somehow makes you “superior” is nonsense.
The diaries of both Goebbels and Bormann clearly prove this. Also, he hated any cruelty to animals (excluding his human victims).
You can be a monster, but also have good personal habits. We don’t despise Hitler and his henchmen for their dietary choices. Saints and Sinners and Madman can be vegetarians.
Wikipedia
In a diary entry dated April 26, 1942, Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a committed vegetarian, writing,
“An extended chapter of our talk was devoted by the Führer to the vegetarian question. He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity. Of course he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also.
Maybe he is right. Certainly the arguments that he adduces in favor of his standpoint are very compelling.”[12]
Martin Bormann, who as head of the Party Chancellery (and private secretary to Hitler) is considered by most historians to have been the second most powerful Nazi official in Germany, built Hitler a large greenhouse at Berchtesgaden in order to keep him supplied with fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the war.
Personal photographs of Bormann’s children tending the greenhouse survive, and by 2005 its foundations were among the only ruins associated with the Nazi leadership still visible in the area.
Finally, in his personal life Hitler showed anti-meat tendencies. Hitler disapproved of cosmetics since they contained animal by-products. He frequently teased his mistress Eva Braun about her habit of wearing makeup.[8] In his post-war reminiscence The Enigma of Hitler, Belgian SS General, and friend of Hitler’s, Léon Degrelle wrote:
“He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed. (13) end Wikipedia
Question- who do you believe; those who personally knew Hitler and his habits or those today who don’t want him be a vegetarian?
Hell, I don’t want him to be part of the human species, but I have to accept that fact.
Come on people, aren’t you all getting sick of this yet? I mean it’s like being an observer inside a lunatic asylum: the behaviors are funny/strange and interesting in a way, but eventually you just want to give someone a slap and tell them to stop being so silly. I realise a CRB check for any future job I might apply for in a lunatic asylum will probably fail now……..
@John W.
To expose a good steak directly to the flames to “seal in the juices” is a fallacy. Why does the steak continue to sizzle? Because moisture is still escaping from the meat.
The correct way to cook a good steak, a whole tenderloin for instance, is first to oil the meat, then to dress it with black pepper and a goodly sprinkle of English mustard powder. The meat is then heated slowly and gently to warm it all the way through to the requisite degree of “doneness”. Then, and only then is the meat exposed to a high degree of flaming heat, and then only for long enough to flavour the outer layer of the meat with the tasty flambe beef flavour, a matter of seconds only.
Mmmmmm!!
I am Canadian and I have been told by an aboriginal Canadian, a Mohawk Indian that vegetarian is an old Indian word.
It means “white man who can’t hunt”
Don’t think the first posting went through … forgive me for wasting more bytes if it did.
I read the Goebbels’ diaries and it is clear that Hitler was a vegetarian.
I don’t think that changes the health benefits of being a knowledgeable vegetarian, but to conclude it somehow makes you “superior” is nonsense.
The diaries of both Goebbels and Bormann clearly prove this. Also, he hated any cruelty to animals (excluding his human victims).
You can be a monster, but also have good personal habits. We don’t despise Hitler and his henchmen for their dietary choices. Saints and Sinners and Madman can be vegetarians.
Wikipedia
In a diary entry dated April 26, 1942, Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a committed vegetarian, writing,
“An extended chapter of our talk was devoted by the Führer to the vegetarian question. He believes more than ever that meat-eating is harmful to humanity. Of course he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also.
Maybe he is right. Certainly the arguments that he adduces in favor of his standpoint are very compelling.”[12]
Martin Bormann, who as head of the Party Chancellery (and private secretary to Hitler) is considered by most historians to have been the second most powerful Nazi official in Germany, built Hitler a large greenhouse at Berchtesgaden in order to keep him supplied with fresh fruit and vegetables throughout the war.
Personal photographs of Bormann’s children tending the greenhouse survive, and by 2005 its foundations were among the only ruins associated with the Nazi leadership still visible in the area.
Finally, in his personal life Hitler showed anti-meat tendencies. Hitler disapproved of cosmetics since they contained animal by-products. He frequently teased his mistress Eva Braun about her habit of wearing makeup.[8] In his post-war reminiscence The Enigma of Hitler, Belgian SS General, and friend of Hitler’s, Léon Degrelle wrote:
“He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed. (13) end Wikipedia
Question- who do you believe; those who personally knew Hitler and his habits or those today who don’t want him be a vegetarian.
Hell, I don’t want him to be part of the human race, but I have to accept that fact.
The Times shows 668 comments: I read 80, of which 3 agreed with the trougher Stern (Sir became Lord because he jumped when our great Prime Minister Brown spoke).
My ancestors didn’t fight their way up the food chain for me to be a vegetarian. I have teeth designed to eat meat as well as the veg I love. I have the enzymes to digest meat. I am an omnivore and proud of it!
The real question is what will be served during the Copenhagen conference? Will it be all vegan? Will all the liquids imbibed be local water, juices, wine and spirits made in Denmark to limit their carbon footprint? Surely all their food will be locally produced and in season (no long term refrigeration/freezing). Does this mean the delegates will be eating Danish winter root vegetables and drinking local water, wine and spirits? If so I’ll pass on the conference and retreat to my barbie. That is if summer in Sydney makes itself known. We haven’t had that many warm days so far this spring! It’s certainly not the Sydney weather I remember from the late 70s when I was in high school when the world was allegedly cooler. 😉
Do I sense another Nobel Peace prize winner – congratulations Lord Stern for a brilliant idea to save all farm animals and fish from ending up on the dinner table – AND saving the planet from climate armageddon.
(remember the Peace prize is now awarded for simply saying something that the Norwegian Parliament appointed Peace Prize Committee likes and not for anything you have actually done or anything that is remotely accurate – so this statement qualifies as much as any of the other recent winners – it may even trump recent winners in the nonsensical hyperbole category which is the prime method for ranking candidates)
If anyone wants to know what people have evolved to eat, all one needs to do is look in mirror and open their mouth. We have OMINIVORE chompers. Our entire digestive tract has evolved to derive sustenance from practically anything ( and I’ve personally eaten nearly everything that doesn’t have the defenses to prevent it ). That is not an accident. Every other life form on the planet has a more limited diet than people. We are at the top of the food chain for a reason. Personally, I like it here and intend to stay.
As others have observed, Nicolas Stern is neither climatologist nor nutritionist.
He is an economist : in 1981 he and 363 fellow senior economists signed a letter to The Times announcing that Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies would severely damage the UK, not rescue it.
Turned out the 364 were wrong and Mrs. T and the two smart renegade economists she relied on were right.
So it goes.
Jim B in Canada (10:46:33) :
Hey speaking of crazies with agendas, the science museum reset the opt out count!
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx
Did anyone get a screen of the count before the reset?
They are now doing email verification, count me out is still in the lead:
* 5436 counted in so far
* 6669 counted out so far
@ur momisugly Eve
Dittos. I, too, wrote a college paper in the early 70’s about using plant-source materials to “feed the world”. I found more than one source that discussed using soy to that end. The biggest problem with it was that the parts of the world that needed it the most were the ones that considered soy to be “poverty food”. It tasted really bad, and you don’t really thrive on it, up to that point all the efforts of the 1st world failed to enamor them with it. Since then, I have learned that soy’s best use is as a “green manure”–to fix nitrogen in the soil naturally. It has large amounts of anti-nutrients in itI. ts most common use in the Far East is as a condiment. The oil makes good varnish. And Bhuddist monks can make good use of it to control their urges (phytoestrogens, anyone?). Now that we have factories that can process huge amounts of soy into sometimes-palatable comestibles, overuse of soybean oil and soy fillers (flours, proteins, etc.) has contributed greatly to the current epidemic of hypothyroidism. It goes give you a docile populace, I guess, so it’s popular to use in prisons, but it is NOT going to reduce healthcare expenses. That is, unless you count killing off most of your people as a means to saving on healthcare. Not only that, but from a farming perspective, it’s a resource hog, especially if you’re using Roundup-ready beans. I can quote one farmer-banker who laughed when he said he had tried and stopped farming soybeans because he had “made his contribution to the bean”. It wasn’t profitable. Indeed, you don’t see miles and miles of soybeans in west Texas–you see scrabbly grass. It’s a losing proposition to try to grow a vegetarian diet out in west Texas. You’d better run livestock, but not too many.
I must add that you see lots of cotton in west Texas. Lots and lots of cotton! Where you don’t see scrabbly grass. And windmill farms.
All this talk about steaks is making me hungry. And it’s now time for me to fix dinner. Wonder what I’ll have….
BTW, regarding the comment about thinking of meat as recycled grass … my view is that meat is processed grass; what comes out of the other end of the cow is recycled grass. Which, in turn, invites several indelicate thoughts about AGW and its pompous proponents which I’ll leave unsaid – use your own imagination.
Thanks Power Grab. I was thrilled in the 70’s when I went to a food exhibition and they had meat slices, made from soy. Also in the late 70’s, grocery stores in Toronto were selling a soy hamburger mix. It was great, much cheaper, looked and tasted like hamburger. I wonder why that didn’t last? Sometimes I think marketing boards do more harm than good. In fact, they always do more harm than good. But when talking about doing more harm than good, humans have never seen anything as destructive as this global warming movement. There are kids in Boston who have pledged to sleep outside until Copenhagen. I am encouraging them. I imagine their parents are also.
Call this one of the newest and innovative ways your government has come up with to battle greenhouse gas emissions.
Indirectly it could be considered a cheeseburger tax, but one of the suggestions offered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is to levy a tax on livestock.
“The tax for dairy cows could be $175 per cow, and $87.50 per head of beef cattle. The tax on hogs would upwards of $20 per hog,” the release said. “Any operation with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs would have to obtain permits.”
http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081230165231.aspx
Apparently the Admin. backed down from a cow tax for now, but kept methane on the list of greenhouse gases to be regulated by the EPA.
From the Times…
“[Stern] said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.”
Well, veggie lunacies aside, this sounds like a veiled threat to me. It’s worth wondering what ‘changes’ Stern has in mind that he believes his accomplices will be empowered to implement in a post-Copenhagen world?
Stern’s use of an historical example of ‘changed attitudes’ about drink-driving may be an important clue to his state of mind. Making it illegal to irresponsibly operate a car on the highway (when deemed psychologically unfit to do so and a danger to the wider public), could well suggest Stern anticipates making it illegal to ‘irresponsibly’ operate a website on the ‘super-highway’… deeming the owner of any anti AGW website both psychologically unfit and a danger to the future of the planet and its people.
Stern’s dark mutterings about “the kind of changes that will be necessary” and his apparent surprise that most people laugh at whatever fantasies slip out have all the hallmarks of a tyranny in the making to me.
Perhaps Anthony and all of us who value such beacons of light as WUWT, should be more prepared for the worst. Reading between Stern’s dark mutterings, it might be much closer than we think.
Re: Alba (13:40:37) :
“Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital.” (The Times article on Lord Stern’s interview)
—
And that’s just the delegates. Then there’ll be the news crews, lobbyists, PR crews, eco-activist-climate-artists and sundry hangers on. But with a bit of luck, they’ll all get snowed in. Some food info here-
http://en.cop15.dk/about+cop15/going+to+cop15/sustainable+food+for+cop15
Not entirely sure what sustainable food is, unless the Danes have developed rather more radical recycling systems since I was last there. Chances of our UK delegates noticing how Danes manage their domestic waste & home energy are probably slim to none though. Our building regs are stuck in the dark ages compared to theirs.
“And windmill farms.” Power grab
I used to think those were nonsense but when we go big time nuclear we can run them backwards to create nice breezes and maybe divert hurricanes.
Meat’s just great. Green coloured vegetables are ok. Starchy tubers and cereals will result in Type II Diabetes Vegetable oils will cause cancer.
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/low-carb_index.html
Non fermented soya will feminise blokes.
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/
Pasta will make chaps very fat and womanlike. Hello fatty stern. Do please carry on killing yourself with cereals & save us the bother.
http://www.england2018bid.com/Contentimages/Bid%20team/Nicholas_Stern_026.jpg
How to win friends and influence people. Here’s a way of getting India to contribute to reducing a greenhouse gas, (as if it mattered)! Offer to harvest all the wandering cows to feed Westerners. Yum yum.
Check please!
I don’t know where Isaac Asimov got his info. but he said the human digestive system is weighted towards meat as 9 is to 7. I read somewhere that meat is the only food we can bolt down in the biggest chunks we can swallow, without chewing, and all the enzymes we need to digest it are waiting for it in our stomachs. I know of only one cave painting of a plant in all the cave paintings yet discovered and it seems to be there as a signal for when to look for salmon in the rivers. If you look up ‘life’ in any dictionary, the words in the definition all apply to plants as fully as to animals. Biologists will tell you that; “life feeds on life”. Maybe lichens eat rocks and sunshine but who envies their lifestyle. As far as I know, there is no place on this planet that a diet restricted to only the plants native to that place will not result in a serious vitamin or mineral deficiency disease. And there is no truth to the rumor that all the scientists doing research on plants being sentient feeling entities and emitting electrical screams when harvested died in unexplained accidents.