Essay by Eric Worrall
“… Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our climate and our environment should become vegans …”
‘We are gambling with the future of our planet for the sake of hamburgers’: Peter Singer on climate change
Published: June 15, 2023 6.11am AEST
Peter Singer
Professor of Bioethics in the Center for Human Values, Princeton UniversityI wasn’t aware of climate change until the 1980s — hardly anyone was — and even when we recognised the dire threat that burning fossil fuels posed, it took time for the role of animal production in warming the planet to be understood.
Today, though, the fact that eating plants will reduce your greenhouse gas emissions is one of the most important and influential reasons for cutting down on animal products and, for those willing to go all the way, becoming vegan.
A few years ago, eating locally — eating only food produced within a defined radius of your home — became the thing for environmentally conscious people to do, to such an extent that “locavore” became the Oxford English Dictionary’s “word of the year” for 2007.
If you enjoy getting to know and support your local farmers, of course, eating locally makes sense. But if your aim is, as many local eaters said, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you would do much better by thinking about what you are eating, rather than where it comes from. That’s because transport makes up only a tiny share of the greenhouse gas emissions from the production and distribution of food.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/we-are-gambling-with-the-future-of-our-planet-for-the-sake-of-hamburgers-peter-singer-on-climate-change-207605
I don’t know what the professor is complaining about.
When you think about it we’re all vegans – just some of us let the cows, pigs and sheep pre-process and concentrate the vegetable nutrients before consumption.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The fact that he’s an academic should make us suspicious of his motives because bio-ethicists are inevitably leftists. So naturally he’s likely to be a climate alarmist.
Arts degree, so basically ignorant…
… and as his attack on human protein sources is highly unethical.
professor Singer just proved that his degree, self importance and position are completely meaningless.
““If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
And continuing with Singer’s juvenile logic, how does Singer dare to pick on vegetables and insects for his food! How dare he feel so entitled to exploit lower forms of life!
Why the arbitrary distinction between animals and plants/fungi?
If it is unethical to k!ll a living thing or use it for our benefit then our very survival is unethical.
If the justification for eating a living plant is our need, there shouldn’t be a distinction between animal and non-animal.
Peter Singer has been at one bound of the animal rights spectrum for decades.
It wouldn’t be at all surprising if he is the driving force of the “go vegan to prevent global warming” movement..
Methane is the irrelevant trace gas as it is less than 2 parts per million in the atmosphere and what these university researchers don’t tell you is that water vapour completely covers the wave lengths that methane could warm a completely dry atmosphere.
The average water vapour in the atmosphere is between two to three percent which is 20,000 to 30,000 parts per million.
Then what these so called educated people don’t or will not recognize is that methane is continuously breaking down in the upper atmosphere into water vapour and CO2 within ten years which can pose no risk to the world..
All fodder that ruminants farmed animals consume has absorbed CO2 the gas of life to grow and the minute amount of methane emitted during digestion is broken down within ten years into CO2 and water vapour.
NOT ONE additional atom of carbon or molecule containing is added to the atmosphere over any time span.
Enteric methane will never warm the world as the process is a cycle .CO2 is absorbed by all plants to grow with water which is what exactly what methane breaks down into .
How long does this nonsense have to go on for being pushed by so called educated people ?
I write this from New Zealand where the vast majority of beef and lamb are fed on grass alone. We export milk products ,beef ,lamb mutton and venison to the world but our stupid government wants to restrict our production because they have been hood winked into believing that our methane emissions make up 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions.
Methane is irrelevant 2ppm when any one with half a brain should be able to see that water vapour is by far the most prolific green house gas at between 20,000 to 30,000 parts per million.
Climate. Change is only a problem because governments cannot see any solution beyond tax and spend. Every dollar in tax is one less dollar the taxpayers have to fix climate change. It is hard to buy and EV or heatpump when the government taxes you into poverty.
Only eating food grown within 100 miles of your house would result in mass starvation in almost every city on the planet. Does no one stop to consider how stupid these ideas are.
Our cities only exist because massive amounts of energy is used to bring food into cities. Cut of the energy and again you get mass starvation.
Mass starvation means less people so that’s a feature, not a bug.
“Only eating food grown within 100 miles of your house would result in mass starvation in almost every city on the planet.”
That sounds brilliant. I’ve always thought that we need to reduce the urban population drastically. (/sarc – sort of)
What if millions of bison were roaming the plains, would they suggest culling the herds?
What do you want on your vegetarian pizza? Dead pigs and cows. They’re vegetarians. (From one of the Dresden Files books.)
“eating only food produced within a defined radius of your home”
My defined radius is 12,500 miles.
If it was 12.5 miles, I’d have a diet of about 97% beef.
That sums it all up nicely, right there.Sounds like a church to me.
Peter Singer is a so-called “philosopher”. I say so called, because the Princeton Philosophy Department, which one of the most prestigious in the world, won’t have anything to do with Singer.
Among his major theories is that infanticide and euthanasia of the elderly are moral, and indeed, praiseworthy. At the same time he preaches the virtues of veganism and his beliefe that it is immoral to eat meat.
His opposition to eating meat is not rooted in environmentalism. He thinks that it is immoral to kill animals. Humans, you can kill them if you want to but cows are sacred, so are pigs and chickens.
Needless to say. this is the sort of incoherent nonsense that is produced by modern American universities, which is why we should shut them down.
Better yet, all the climate hoaxers should go on hunger strikes until they expire. To save the planet from these climate hysterics. It’s the only way to be sure that the planet won’t end in 4 days, according to St. Greta.
Peter Singer, famed author of “Animal Liberation” in 1975 and partly responsible for the animal rights movement, such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Basically equating animals with people (i.e., we are turbo-charged monkeys in his world view), PETA has moved from stemming obvious animal cruelty to glorifying animals at the expense of humans.
Singer himself favors infanticide (murder of the unwanted young) and euthanasia (murder of the old, useless eaters). Bioethics? Wow, I wouldn’t want him in the delivery room or the ER.
Singer’s personal revelation about climate was likely the realization that here is a gravy train of academic funding that would last until he dies and his sorry carcass is eaten by dogs.
Obviously, since in his view, all animals are equal to humans, he would of course call for veganism. This is nothing new for him. That has been his modus operandi for 50 years.
Yeah, well…
I might be a different species from the author. I find eating plants can lead to substantially higher and smellier emissions. I am however all in favour of everyone who thinks we should chase the mythical net zero restricting their own diets to weeds and insects. And while they are at it they can stop driving, flying, heating, cooling, lighting and wearing or using anything derived from fossil fuels. The rest of us will carry on living in the real world and enjoying the benefits.
Vegans emit way more CH4 than ordinary people, so, if the goal is to mitigate CH4 emissions to save the planet, vegans should be given the same fate as Irish cows if they do not comply to wear a fart and a burp GHG sequestration device 24/24 7/7 :
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2638
/s ?