Tag: Environment

You Don’t Have to Be a Vegan to Be a Climate-Friendly Eater

Last October, scientists convened by the United Nations issued a dire warning: Unless carbon emissions fall by about 45 percent by 2030, we will face a world of climate chaos—more frequent droughts and floods, decimated coral reefs, and cities swamped by rising seas. Soon after, the Trump administration quietly released a similarly terrifying report from US government scientists, who estimated climate chaos will cost the country more than $500 billion annually by the century’s end. The president’s response? “I don’t believe it.”

Frankly, all this news made me want to stress-eat a giant steak and succumb to a food coma. But a spate of new studies have argued that cutting back on meat—way back—can help our climate enormously. Americans now eat a staggering 216 pounds of meat annually per person, nearly triple the global average. Even our appetite for beef, which fell during the Great Recession, has crept back up, and we eat more of it per capita than almost any other country.

You Don’t Have to Be a Vegan to Be a Climate-Friendly Eater

No, Lettuce Is Not Worse For The Environment Than Bacon

If you follow the intersection of food and climate change, you know that you can barely swing a reusable grocery bag these days without running into a new study or article bemoaning the environmental damages of a meat-heavy diet.

So imagine the joy that must have leapt into meat-eaters’ hearts when Tuesday, media outlets from around the world ran a story claiming that the environmental villain lurking in your refrigerator is not that salty slab of bacon, but that crisp head of lettuce hiding innocently in the salad drawer.

“Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice!” cried one article in Climatewire.

That celebration, however, should be short-lived. Sorry to break it to you, meat enthusiasts, but bacon isn’t necessarily better for the environment than lettuce.

The issue is that the original Carnegie Mellon study on which the claim was based looked at energy, water use, and greenhouse gas emissions on a per calorie basis.

ThinkProgress

InsideClimate News

InsideClimate News is a Pulitzer prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped. Our mission is to produce clear, objective stories that give the public and decision-makers the information they need to navigate the heat and emotion of climate and energy debates.

We have grown from a founding staff of two to a mature virtual newsroom of ten full time professional journalists and a growing network of contributors. We’re aiming to double in size and come to full scale in the next two years.

Climate and energy are defining issues of our time, yet most media outlets are now hard-pressed to devote sufficient resources to environmental and investigative reporting. Our goal is to fill this growing national deficiency and contribute to the accurate public understanding so crucial to the proper functioning of democracy.

InsideClimate News

How Exxon went from leader to skeptic on climate change research

Throughout much of the 1980s, Exxon earned a public reputation as a pioneer in climate change research. It sponsored workshops, funded academic research and conducted its own high-tech experiments exploring the science behind global warming.

But by 1990, the company, in public, took a different posture.

While still funding select research, it poured millions into a campaign that questioned climate change. Over the next 15 years, it took out prominent ads in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, contending climate change science was murky and uncertain. And it argued regulations aimed at curbing global warming were ill-considered and premature.

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

LA Times