Newsweek Has Proclaimed That Eating Meat is NOT Destroying the Planet. Yes, That Needed To Be Said.
By Jim Mundorf
On Thanksgiving day Newsweek posted this article written by Sydney Pereira: Is Turkey Better Than Beef For the Environment? Is nothing sacred anymore? Can we not sit down to a meal with our family without contemplating which animal has the most harmful shit? Good news, according to Newsweek we can.
I started reading this prepared to be enraged by another attack on the beef industry. What I found was a wonderfully pleasant surprise. The article contains a lot of studies and research showing just how stupid that question/headline is. Of coarse they don't just come right out and say that, but if you read the whole article you can come to one conclusion, and that is that meat production is a key ingredient to a healthy diet as well as a healthy environment. Yeah, they wrote that in Newsweek.
Over the last few years militant vegans have been trying hard to convince the world that the real cause of global warming comes from cow belches. For them there is only one way to save the world and that is to stop eating meat. To most people with rational brains this makes no sense at all, but there are a lot of people in the world that don't have any brains, and with them this argument has been gaining steam.
BS like this is currently being shared all over the internet without questions like: Are these magic beans that will stop cattle from belching? Do the cattle simply disappear when we start eating beans? Where do you find enough beans to replace the billions of pounds of beef? How many people would kill themselves if this was forced upon them?
This has caused, Robin White, an assistant professor of animal and poultry sciences at Virginia Institute of Technology, to study the issue. As well as a number of other professors that the article uses as sources. They all come to the same conclusion. "Research suggests that cutting beef or all types of meat products from your diet as a way to reduce your carbon footprint may be an oversimplified approach to a complex issue." While the average reader is probably saying to themselves, "No shit Sherlock." What everyone needs to know is that giving up meat is being vigorously promoted as being healthy as well as good for the environment. This article plainly states that both of those arguments are false.
White published a study in September 2017 that modeled the impacts of removing all animals from U.S. agriculture, and the findings showed that agricultural greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 28 percent, but the overall change in total U.S. emissions would only decline by 2.6 percent. This is because leaving animals out of the food supply would require an increase in crops to replace meat in the country's diet, as well as the production of synthesized fertilizer to replace manure. Nutritional deficiencies in people were also a consequence in the simulation.
Sounds good to me, but how on earth you can calculate what would happen if, "you remove all animals from U.S. agriculture," is beyond me. It would be the greatest change in food supply in the history of the world. I'll let Professor White do the figuring while I rely on common sense that says, if you remove the worlds number one source of protein the affects would be disastrous. Right now the few lunatics that do decide to give up eating meat for whatever reason are able to survive through supplements (what a miserable existence) but it would be impossible to supplement the whole world giving up meat. Its simply impossible, we would all starve!
As far as the environmental impact goes, apparently, as soon as everyone stops eating meat these vegans are going to go out and shoot all of the animals. That's the only way I know of to stop them from belching. Has anyone thought of that? Animals just don't disappear if we stop eating meat.
The idea that man-made global warming is actually cow bu global warming has made its way into the mainstream media in the past couple years. One of the organizations that has been reporting on how harmful the meat industry is to the environment is Newsweek. I did a quick search on their website and found three articles written in 2015 about how the beef industry is destroying the planet. One of the articles was actually headlined, If We All Eat Beef We're Doomed . Now they have changed their tune and it should be a breath of fresh air for everyone in the meat industry and everyone that enjoys the fruits (or steaks) of their labors. Newsweek is constantly reporting on the effects of climate change and how to stop it. Whether you believe or agree with them is not important. The fact is that many of their readers do believe and agree with them. Now those readers are being told that the meat industry really isn’t that bad after all. Of course they did it with a misleading headline and put it on the website on Thanksgiving Day when almost no one would see it, but hey, it is a step in the right direction and that should be celebrated. Thank you Sydney Pereira of Newsweek.