If we can't eat them, can we use them for fuel?
« If animals don't want to be eaten, they should stop being made of meat | Main | People power » Watch out, animals rights activists24 Aug 2007 09:56 am Comments (5)
As long as it doesn't raise the price of steak. 
this must be a joke? using the sun with today's technology here and now could cover 5 times the energy consumed by the whole world here and now! The problem with cows is that they require too much land to live... The Amazon forest has been cleared for pasture mostly. Only 18% are used for livestock-feed production (of which most is soy and of which 80% is for cows. Soy is not as healthy for cows as it is for humans btw). When it comes to resources such as land, water, etc. - nothing is less economical than cow livestock agriculture. Using some of their fluids for fuel would not change and outweigh these natural laws. It is more like a rounding error. (See WWF Living Planet Report 2006) Because cow manure is made for an Middle-Eastern environment (not like the one of deer - round hard balls...) and because of many other livestock pasture related distortions of ecology - nothing causes more soil erosion.. In other words - squeezing and optimizing our plan-ecologics approach will never yield the benefits of a free-market ecology! This is innovation has the ideological stamp of a communist engineer - but not a biologists, ecologist, economist... There are more than enough good, clean and economical energy sources today. With current PV technologies we could eg cover today's energy consumption 5 times over. It is economical if one calculates the costs of the grid and transportation - even compared to nuclear. Only because we can use the manure of black slaves as fertilizer does not mean we should continue along the path of slavery and plan-economics? Animals have evolved by nature as free agents of ecology. They produce and consume to keep the marketplace rich and vibrant which guarantees human survival on earth. we should leave them do their job for us?
E.O.Wilson in the Scientific American: Stretched to the limit of its capacity, how many people can the planet support? A rough answer is possible, but it is a sliding one contingent on three conditions: how far into the future the planetary support is expected to last, how evenly the resources are to be distributed, and the quality of life most of humanity expects to achieve. Consider food, which economists commonly use as a proxy of carrying capacity. The current world production of grains, which provide most of humanity's calories, is about two billion tons annually. That is enough, in theory, to feed 10 billion East Indians, who eat primarily grains and very little meat by Western standards. But the same amount can support only about 2.5 billion Americans, who convert a large part of their grains into livestock and poultry. There are two ways to stop short of the wall. Either the industrialized populations move down the food chain to a more vegetarian diet, or the agricultural yield of productive land worldwide is increased by more than 50 percent. The constraints of the biosphere are fixed. The bottleneck through which we are passing is real. It should be obvious to anyone not in a euphoric delirium that whatever humanity does or does not do, Earth's capacity to support our species is approaching the limit. We already appropriate by some means or other 40 percent of the planet's organic matter produced by green plants. If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people. If humans utilized as food all of the energy captured by plant photosynthesis on land and sea, some 40 trillion watts, the planet could support about 16 billion people. But long before that ultimate limit was approached, the planet would surely have become a hellish place to exist. There may, of course, be escape hatches. Petroleum reserves might be converted into food, until they are exhausted. Fusion energy could conceivably be used to create light, whose energy would power photosynthesis, ramp up plant growth beyond that dependent on solar energy, and hence create more food. Humanity might even consider becoming someday what the astrobiologists call a type II civilization and harness all the power of the sun to support human life on Earth and on colonies on and around the other solar planets. Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to explore in order simply to continue our reproductive folly.
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Delicious and useful! Watch out cows, the end is nigh!
Posted by Timothy | August 24, 2007 10:10 AM