From the New York Times...

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Eat Less Meat

Juliet Schor is a professor of sociology at Boston College and co-chairwoman of the board of the Center for a New American Dream.

A simple choice — one that isn’t too inconvenient but delivers a large ecological bang for the behavior change buck — is to reduce meat consumption. Livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

Until now, most of the discourse on climate change has focused on how we heat buildings, power appliances and drive vehicles. These are all important, but the impacts of producing certain types of food are more damaging than most people realize.

According to R. K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, livestock production accounts for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The animals are fed large amounts of grain, which is energy-intensive to produce, and they emit methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas which stays in the atmosphere far longer than CO2.

If the average American were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent, that would be the equivalent of switching from driving a Camry to a Prius.

Rosamond Naylor, a researcher at Stanford, estimates that U.S. meat production is especially grain intensive, requiring 10 times the grain required to produce an equivalent amount of calories than grain, Livestock production, which now covers 30 percent of the world’s non-ice surface area, is also highly damaging to soil and water resources.

Compared to producing vegetables or rice, beef uses 16 times as much energy and produces 25 times the CO2. A study on U.S. consumption from the University of Chicago estimates that if the average American were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent, that would be the equivalent of switching from driving a Camry to a Prius.

Americans currently rank second in world in meat consumption, weighing in at 271 pounds a year, up from 196 pounds 40 years ago. And that doesn’t include dairy. We get an estimated 75 grams of protein a day from animals, and 110 grams total; the government recommends only 50 grams a day.

Mr. Pachauri took a lot of heat for advocating vegetarianism, and it’s not a change most American environmental organizations have pushed for yet. But it’s a key part of a transformation to a healthy, sustainable economy for humans and the planet.

I used to be an avid carnivore, but gave up all meat and fish more than 20 years ago, and went near vegan (I eat eggs) two years ago. Eating meat seems like a hard habit to change, but I’ve found that making the change was a boon to my health, culinary life, carbon budget and conscience.

The nice thing is, every little bit helps — and you can make change gradually. According to Mr. Pachauri, if I’d become a vegan at age 12, I’d have prevented the discharge of more than 100 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere before I die. Vive les legumes!

Conspicuous Nonconsumption

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist.

When people tout the environmental benefits of a personal consumption decision, whether it be using cloth diapers, eating organic produce, or buying recycled paper products, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am glad they are using persuasion instead of force to get their way (although today’s voluntary gesture of environmental consciousness has a way of becoming tomorrow’s government mandate).

On the other hand, I am doubtful that the allegedly green choice will amount to much, either because its benefits do not really outweigh its costs, because few people will adopt it, or because the consequences of even broad adoption will be trivial in the grand scheme of things.

As the long-running diaper and grocery bag debates illustrate, calculating the environmental impact of a particular product choice can be a complicated business, involving an analysis of production, transportation, use and disposal. Recycling makes sense when its full cost is outweighed by the price the recycled materials fetch and/or the cost of disposal. When this is not the case, recycling actually wastes resources.

Sometimes, as in the case of air pollution, price signals do not take into account a product’s full environmental impact. One solution is to tax the pollution, thereby giving the people generating it an incentive to reduce it.

Another approach is to impose an overall cap on each pollutant, auction off a fixed number of pollution permits, and allow businesses to buy and sell the permits. In either case, the aim is to achieve pollution reductions as efficiently as possible by letting each individual or business weigh the cost and adjust their behavior in the way that makes most sense to them, as opposed to dictating a specific pollution control measure for everyone.

Both of these approaches have been proposed to address global warming, and they would make sense if we knew enough about the likely consequences of climate change, the effectiveness of feasible reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, and the cost of achieving them to set an appropriate tax rate or cap.

But carbon dioxide reductions may prove to be so expensive or ineffective that it makes more sense to invest in measures aimed at ameliorating the impact of climate change, as opposed to retarding or preventing it. Either way, recycled toilet paper will not be a significant part of the solution, although it may soothe people’s consciences as it abrades their behinds.

Go Ride a Bike

Katharine Wroth, a senior editor at Grist.org, is the co-editor of “Wake Up and Smell the Planet: The Non-Pompous, Non-Preachy Grist Guide to Greening Your Day.”

Once upon a time, I was a smug advocate of driving less. My partner and I shared a car, we bought a house near a town center and I even biked to appointments. But then I got pregnant.

Among the many changes that condition wrought, it made our one-car existence impractical. My partner couldn’t get time off from work for the frequent doctor’s visits. And I couldn’t very well heft my swelling body onto a bike to ride 10 miles to see my obstetrician, whose office wasn’t accessible by public transportation. We decided to buy a second car. Goodbye smug, hello reality.

Save the world, sell your car — unless you’re pregnant.

That purchase put us squarely in the ranks of the typical American household, which owns an average of two vehicles. And two vehicles emit about 10 tons of carbon annually. Overall, transportation contributes a third of United States-based greenhouse-gas emissions.

Driving less fights climate change and saves money. Everyone has a distinct daily reality, but consider the possibilities:

If you can stop driving entirely, you don’t need a car. Right there you’ve saved a few thousand dollars.

If you can decrease your driving (shop online, bundle errands, carpool, telecommute once a week), that adds up too: You’ll buy less gas. Your insurance company should offer a low-mileage discount. You might even reduce related health costs.

If you absolutely can’t drive less, you can still save. Keep your car tuned, as humdrum as it sounds. And drive smart: no idling, no extra weight, no speeding.

Now that I’m a mother, reality continues to crash in on my ideals. Just today, I drove my son to day care so I could do my job, including writing this piece. But I try to keep in mind that no one’s asking for perfection — just a little more thought about how, and how much, we get around.

The Rich Man’s Dilemma

Christopher C. Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is the author of “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism).”

Personal hygiene preferences and biases masquerading as harbingers of environmental crises remain a puzzle to me. I first encountered this in 2002, at the World Environment Summit in Johannesburg. There, a colleague of mine shared a panel with a heavily decorated environmental activist who decried the pernicious introduction of indoor sanitation as the greatest environmental catastrophe of the past century.

Next I observed an earnest college student from Minnesota being interviewed, having traveled to Johannesburg to decry how paper towels threatened ecological doom. This was all of a piece with one prominent politician who famously compared our failure to recycle with Kristallnacht in a best-selling book. Reaction: My goodness we’ve become wealthy.

Instead of fretting over toilet paper, buy products from the developing world.

So wealthy that the turmoil over toilet paper is back. My very first experience in the world of public policy was to assist unwittingly a public affairs campaign by the maker of one sort of pesticide, whose interests were aided by public suspicion about other kinds of pesticides. So please forgive my suspicions about such endeavors.

Allow me to offer an idea of “everyday environmentalism” from the perspective of a classical liberal who believes that wealthier is healthier and cleaner, that private property rights did a good job of protecting resources, for obvious reasons, before state actors began claiming resources as “for the public use.”

I believe that if we buy more – not fewer – products from the developing world (eschewing “fair trade,” for which I sadly have no space in this missive). This improves their environmental stewardship, saving millions of lives at the same time. Dogma aside, history is clear that once a society becomes sufficiently wealthy that their first-order needs are satisfied people then place a specific value on “the environment” and begin paying for its protection. You’ll be surprised who agrees.

DISCLAIMER:

Please do not take the "intro" to this post as an indication that CAT Tracks is anti-environmentalism! Nothing could be further from the truth.

The editor even has "a thing" about those who litter...especially when he sees the result along the road between Cairo and Wickliffe when the water rises! Do the world's coffee drinkers go out of their way to use that area to dispose of their styrofoam cups???

I have often felt the urge to pull a Gomer Pyle on those who litter...drive up along-side their vehicle and scream "Citizen's arrest...citizen's arrest!!!)

NO, this CAT is just as "environmental" as the next cat...although, sadly, that's not saying much.

My effort above was solely intended to "lighten your day"...

I hope that I succeeded.