Climate change thoughts made bite sized.

Climate change 2008 itsy-bitsy synopsis. Read it.

For those of you who don't know, or don't care: our so-called leaders keep on saying that we can make small incremental changes that will mitigate climate change. At least this is what the meetings at Poznan would have us swallow. Riiiiiiight. Just like you can staunch the flow of blood from a severed limb by applying small band-aids one at a time, slowly, and without too much effort. Moving to a more concrete and relevant example: you do not stop climate change by switching to energy efficient lightbulbs and by recycling the packaging from your overpackaged, unnecessary shit. The kind of half-assed and ineffective measures that people are taking in the name of "do what you can without actually changing any of the big stuff" are exactly that: half-assed and ineffective, at least on their own. If you don't care enough about your home (ie, the entire planet) to actually make real changes, then how can you expect real change to come about?

Let me try an analogy. The planet is warming, and weather is becoming more and more unpredictable at some rate. Let's call this rate Fucking Fast (FF). Now, we are in a metaphorical footrace with FF, and want to win. If we move Fucking Slow (FS), FF will outrun us, and we will lose. FF will not negotiate with us, and will not slow down (in fact, it's accelerating). Either we speed up enough to keep up, or we lose. Right now, we're losing, and refusing to speed up. And idiotically, we're pretending that we can win with such a strategy.

Frankly, the answers are simple. They probably cost money, and require a dip in our ridiculously high standards of living and consumerism in the developped world. But frankly, the planet will not negotiate with you (or me, or the president of the US, or the head of any multinational corporation, no matter how rich) on this one. Either we smarten up, or it might stop playing nice with us. Cutting into "economic growth" kinda sucks, but not having a habitable planet sucks worse. And like I said, while leaders sit on their thumbs at these international meetings "negotiating", they forget that the planet and it's climate won't negotiate. Either we put in less greenhouse gas than the planet can absorb, or we risk whatever it has in store for us when the surplus gasses stay in the atmosphere (where we put them, remember).

Here are some *real* changes you can make (along with your lightbulbs and your recycling):

Go vegan. Animal agriculture is the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses. Plus, it takes more energy at every level to make animals and get them to your dinner plate than it does to make plants. And don't give me that "local meat" bullshit. If you really think that current levels of meat consumption can be sustained using local, small-scale operations, you're wrong.

Stop driving. Even if it means you have to get up a whole 15 or 30 minutes earlier to bus or subway to work. If you're just too damn important to waste 15 minutes of your valuable time, consider getting an ego reduction. If you live somewhere with no public transportation, organize some carpooling, and lobby for public transportation.

Buy less stuff. Buy used stuff. Fix your old stuff, or pay someone to fix it for you. Freecycle.

Vacation near your home. Go camping. Take a bus or train to a nearby city and explore it.

Pressure politicians at local and national levels. Lobby for bike lanes, better public transportation, and community recycling/composting . Ask that governments actually commit to taking action on climate-change related issues.

Breaking news: meat is bad for the planet...still

Rajendra Pachuri, bless his stubborn self, is at it again, asking people to PLEASE EAT LESS MEAT to reduce our impact on the earth. Animal agriculture is not good for anyone, and is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gasses. I've blogged about this before, and I will do so again. Consuming meat and other animal products is worse driving an SUV, or heating your house to near-tropical temperatures if you live in the north. Not only is it unethical in that you have to imprison, torture and kill sentient animals, but it is unethical because you are trashing a planet that is not yours to trash. I really don't have much more to say on this one, other than grow up and take responsibility for your actions, people. Sheesh.

But hell, why trust me? Here are some links on climate change
David Suzuki
Climate Feedback
IPCC
Royal Society

Oooh. And I also talk to The Angry Hippie about climate change on his latest podcast. Yup. I'm Science Dude.

If you're not ready or are unwilling to change to a vegan diet, try to at least eat a few vegan meals a week. While I don't think this solves any of the ethical problems with animal exploitation, it *does* have some impact on your carbon footprint. Start with breakfast. Yes, every breakfast. Then, when you're okay with that, move on to Breakfast + Dinners. Then add in lunch. If you're reading this, you've discovered that vegan food isn't boring or hard, and that there are about a bazillion vegan food blogs out there. For tips on transitioning to vegan diets, or having more vegan meals in you diet, try the PCRM site. Also awesome is Compassionate Cooks.

If at first you don't love things like soy/almond/rice milk, then think of breakfasts that don't involve them. And give it three weeks. You need time for your tastes and habits to change. A lot of how much we like a food is our percieved idea of how it "should" taste. If you're 30 years old and have been eating cereal with cows milk for 28 of those 30 years, your expectations of how your cereal "should" taste are going to be skewed to cow's milk. Give yourself a few weeks to adjust to other milks if you want to eat a vegan version of your omni breakfast. Try different plant milks. Be gentle with yourself and have fun. Maybe the transition would be easier if you had a week or two of chocolate soy milk on your cereal, or made a big batch of vegan pancakes on the weekend and then reheated them in the toaster so that breakfast is decadent. Keep in mind that you probably already eat some vegan foods (toast and jam, spaghetti with tomato sauce, curries, vegetable soups, fruit salad etc.). Make and effort to put the vegan meals that you already know and love on your table more frequently. No one is asking you to be in the least deprived. Just responsible.

Finally, if you kinda sorta wanna go vegan, or have thought about it but not done it, tell me why. Yup. Leave a comment, and if there's info you need or recipes you want, I'll post them. If you want lists of beginner cookbooks, I'll do it. If you need me to veganize your favorite comfort food for you, I'll have a go at that. If you want my top-secret soy/almond/coconut mik making method, I'll divulge. Tell me what it would take to make you more vegan than you are. C'mon. You know you want to spill the beans.

stupid human tricks and grumpy hummous

This is a great article. It's George Monbiot covering a Channel 4 "documentary" about how climate change might not reeeeeeeeeeeally be our fault. Uh... I think his statement about watching a preview of a film called The Age of Stupid is particularly astute, even if it's the kind of accusation that people will rile against (as they slurp their $5 mocha in a disposable cup on the way to their air-conditioned car to drive 6 blocks):

The most powerful story of all, endlessly narrated by the hired hands of the fossil fuel industry, just as it was once told by the sugar slavers, is that we are both all-important and utterly insignificant. We are too important to be denied any of the delights we crave, but too insignificant to exert any impact on planetary processes. We fill the whole frame of the story when it suits us and shrink to a dot when that scale is more convenient. We are capable of occupying both niches simultaneously.

This is pretty much how I see people's carnism. I often hear from omnivores "oh, I like cheese too much to ever be vegan", or "I like leather too much to not use it". Yup. In other words "I am so important that I kill needlessly for my palate and kinks". This is often coupled with a denial of the atrocities committed by the animal-industrial complex... "oh, I only buy free-range/organic meat" or "I don't eat that much meat/dairy/eggs/insert random animal product here". If you ask, it's pretty rare that omnis who consume these "ethical" animal products have actually gone through any trouble to find out how the animals are treated, choosing instead to believe whatever the propaganda mill of the company that stands to make a profit from said products tells them. Because a company would never lie to you in order to make money, would they?

People are good at denial and ego. Yay us.

And those of us who "like meat too much to go vegan"... apparently people can't actually tell the difference between meat and vegetarian (vegan?) sausage anyway. So give up the lame excuses, okay?

The urge to bang my head on the wall is so strong, I can't even post a bad food picture. Here, have a pictureless hummous recipe:

For pomegranate hummous: Blend a whack (2 cups) of cooked chickpeas with about 2 tbs of pomegranate molasses, 1.5-2 heads of roasted garlic, salt, a few tbs of nutritional yeast, a tbs or so of tahini, a whole lemon worth of juice, and 1-2 tsps of dry-roasted ground cumin. If it's too stiff, use water or olive oil to make it the consistency you want. I use water. This goes really really well with red peppers. In fact, I may have eaten an entire red pepper, using this hummous as dip, while I wrote today's rant.

climate change, meat, and "personal choice"

Last week Rajendra Pachauri, who is the head of the UN scientific panel on climate change said something rather radical out loud at a press conference in Paris. He asked people to "please eat less meat". You see, it's old news that livestock production creates lots of greenhouse gasses. And I'm not talking cow farts here. Livestock needs land, feed, water and transportation. Lots of it. So greenhouse gas emissions from livestock total more, in fact, than all forms of transport combined. And guess what? We've known this for a long time, yet it is rare to hear any sort of public debate about whether or not people ought to eat animal products daily, and whether or not participating in something that contributes to environmental destruction on a global scale can really be considered a personal choice.

I find it fascinating that there is broad social support for smoking bans pretty much anywhere. After all, smoking is a personal choice, no? I mean, it pollutes the air in restaurants and annoys the people around you, but is it really so different than the personal choice to eat a steak that requires cutting down rain forest, using underpaid labour, and then has to make an international journey to end up on your plate? In both cases, you are taking an environment that is meant to be a shared one, and needlessly polluting or destroying it because it makes you feel good. Oh yeah, and there's the bit about killing a sentient being for no reason other than taste and convenience. One can make the argument that smoking is also harmful to the person doing it. Well, diet-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart conditions are on the rise, and the last time I checked, those were bad for your health too. I'm sorry, but in what way is that kind of behaviour a personal choice? Shouldn't a personal choice be something that primarily affects the person making it and doesn't gratuitously hurt others?

Despite the ethical and environmental reasons not to consume animal products, most environmental groups and private individuals who are concerned about equality and environmental issues are loathe to suggest that people should consume less meat or, heaven forbid, stop using animal products altogether. Even when one totally ignores the possible health benefits of a vegan diet consisting of something other than fries and sugar, there are compelling reasons to reduce or eliminate animal products from our lives. I sometimes imagine being an old woman and having to say to a teenager "Dude, sorry we left you a trashed planet, but you understand that my love of ice cream and my right to drive the suv to the store to buy it is infinitely more important to me than you and your future, right?". Put that way, no one would say that the ice cream is more important. Sadly, our actions say otherwise.

We know that the animal killing industry is bad for the planet, bad for the underpaid workers, and bad for our health. And we know that we don't need it in order to survive. So why oh why won't anyone talk about it? People seem determined to keep up our willful ignorance about how our "personal choices" are going to eventually "fuck up the planet that we rely on for such luxuries as air, water and food", and our public figures are pandering to our childish insistence of living in a fantasy where our choices about what and how much we consume are ethically neutral. Some days I meet people who give me hope that people will change, but when I see someone with a Nobel prize suggesting the western world to cut meat consumption to only 5 times a week, and the western world balking at this incredible "sacrifice", I want to crawl under my bed and cry.

rant track: the chairman dances.

more reading about animal products and the environment