According to Shellenberger, the co-founder of a think tank called Environmental Progress, becoming a vegetarian actually reduces one’s emissions by less than four percent while “free range” beef — usually claimed to be more eco-friendly than the intensively farmed variety — requires 20 times more land and produces 300 percent more carbon emissions.Gets more and more interesting . . .
As for starvation fears, we produce 25 percent more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter. Meanwhile, switching to 100 percent renewable energy is unfeasible — the U.S. would need to devote between 25 and 50 percent of its total land to energy generation, compared with the 0.5 percent it takes up now.
He also attacks the “myth” that plastics linger for thousands of years in the ocean, saying they’re broken down by sunlight and other forces. As for the whales, they were saved not by Greenpeace as many believe, but by industry switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil, he says.
Again and again, says Shellenberger, the Greens have actually made things worse rather than better with their misguided views. …
Regarding whales.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2010/11/05/the-man-who-saved-the-whales/#7d50f23a596f
In the last half of the 19th century, whales were facing extinction. They were hunted in large part because their oil was the best, most affordable illuminant available to growing western nations. One man more than any other headed off their extinction, a man whose picture should be in on the wall of every Greenpeace office: John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company.
Long before the proliferation of the automobile created a market for gasoline, the main use for petroleum in the 19th century was to make kerosene, which was an illuminant for lamps. Due in large part to Standard Oil, over these decades the price of kerosene dropped from 30 cents to 6 cents a gallon, while production increased astronomically and the quality of the product steadily improved.
Through Rockefeller’s work, kerosene became both cheaper and safer to use than whale oil, and quickly began to replace it in the marketplace. By 1890 the American whaling fleet had already dropped from a peak of 735 ships to just 200, and was still falling, in large part due to low cost kerosene produced by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.