Climate Change: Don't Panic-Go Organic
As leading scientists warn us, global warming is a real and growing threat. Unless we immediately reduce fossil fuel consumption (oil, gas, and coal), conserve energy, switch to clean renewable fuels, and slash CO2 emissions by 10% within three years, and 90% by 2050, our climate crisis will become a climate catastrophe. Waging trillion-dollar wars to gain control over the world's dwindling oil supplies will not stop global warming. If the US doesn't stop handing over $700 billion a year to the military-industrial complex, we may not have sufficient resources to shift into a post-carbon economy.
Energy-intensive industrial agriculture, long distance food transportation, intensive food processing, over-consumption of meat, and the destruction of tropical rainforests and wetlands to make way for giant soybean, corn, palm oil, and cattle plantations is generating a whopping 40% of all greenhouse gases. Even if all coal plants were shut down, gas-guzzlers were replaced by hybrids, and industry and utilities adopted conservation and renewable energy measures, business-as-usual industrial agriculture and agriculture-related deforestation would still be releasing enough greenhouse gases to wreck our future. We will never stave off global warming without an organic food and farming revolution. Local organic farms supplying healthy whole foods for primarily plant-based diets use at least 50% less energy and conserve or sequester in the soil enormous quantities of greenhouse gases.
Pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into inefficient and energy-intensive corn-based ethanol and soy-based biofuels is a dangerous delusion. First of all, conventional corn-based ethanol and soy-based biofuel use almost as much fossil fuel to grow and refine as the energy they ultimately generate. Second, even the more efficient biofuel feed stocks, like sugar cane and palm oil, actually produce more, not less greenhouse gases, since planting additional fields of these crops almost always involves cutting down tropical forests, which, when left intact, safely sequester a massive amount of carbon dioxide. Finally, biofuels programs, including those that promise more efficient fuels via genetic engineering, lull the public into believing that the government and corporate agribusiness are taking care of the problem, when in fact they are the cause of the problem. Our greenhouse crisis is real and getting worse. We have a narrow window of opportunity to keep the climate from spiraling out of control. We need to go organic and make major political changes before it's too late.
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