PUTTING 2 AND 2 TOGETHER
It's amazing to me how many people now accept that global warming is a real phenomenon, and are all in favor of years of research into various alternative fuels that may slow our increase in greenhouse gases, but won't do the one thing that can most affect climate change - opting out of the livestock industry. Similarly, while it's no surprise the President didn't mention anything about beef in his "momentous" State-of-the-Union sentence acknowledging the "serious challenge" of man-made climate change, it's hard to believe more people aren't scratching their heads over this passage:
- There is a constraint, and that is the ethanol use today comes from corn, and we've got hog growers and chicken growers that need corn to feed their animals. And therefore, it's going to be kind of a strain, at some point in time, on the capacity for us to have enough ethanol to be able to make us less dependent on oil.
Seems like kind of an obvious question to me.
1 comment:
Obviously this was written by someone with the agenda of no animal usage by humans. That's alright with me, I respect your right to your opinion and I hope you will keep an open mind to mine. There's only so much corn that a person can eat before they became sick and tired of it. Human digestion of plant fiber is much less efficient than an herbivore animal's and for humans to access the protein stored in corn it must be soaked in lie, i.e. turned into hominy. I for one can't stand the taste of it. The corn used in the ethanol process mainly loses its' starch content and still retains the oil,(fat) and protein, and so it is still good for feeding animals, as I understand it. Ruminant animals are fed grass and hay that would have almost no nutritional value to humans, thus converting an abundant material into useable human food if a human so chooses. The manure generated from this can still produce methane. The obvious major factor contributing to CO2 in the atmosphere is burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity generation. At the same time trees which are a major capturer of CO2 and generator of O2 (oxygen) are being decimated planet wide, not just in the rain forests. World population increase magnifies the effect as we each add our drain on the Earths' finite resources and take more than our share, ignoring that we are not the only life forms that have a right to live here. I so wish that people would think about this before they produce a huge family. It is a complicated issue, but please think about it. We are all living longer and our turn on this Earth is costing it much more than it did a generation or two ago.
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