The climate change clock is ticking. Our brilliant eco writers here at Daily Kos have written eloquently about the evidence that now is of a catastrophic nature There are myriad solutions and of course we have to accomplish all of those solutions if we are even to stabilize our current situation.
The reality is that fully revving up green manufacturing will require many years of public and private investment.
We have had many consciousness rising catastrophic events including: Katrina, BP oil spill, coal mining disaster etc. and yet we wait while the water in the pot gets hotter. We wait for the silver bullet to arrive which will take away all of this nonsense so that we don't have to change our lives.
We are Waiting for Godot when in reality This is us. This is on us. No one will rescue us.. Our personal addiction to oil in our daily lives, our personal consumption of fossil fuels on every level from the oil we eat to our information technology to our societal mobility are all dependent on oil. We bemoan our participation in wars when in reality it is our personal choice of the resources we use which motivate our government to move to protect our interests so that we can continue to abuse the use of this finite resource.
The solutions most discussed including green technology, green manufacturing etc. are all solutions that as mentioned above will take some time to implement. And they need to be implemented on a mass scale. Our politics just about guarantees that will not occur. The time it would take to get the special interests out of our politics so that our political system works to our benefit is time we do not have. I don't intend to imply that we should stop fighting as we must continue to fight and there will possibly be some movement toward solving at least some of the major abuse that has occurred but we need a plan B.
There is a solution that is gaining traction and does not require that we surgically insert an iron rod in our congress members back. All it requires is that we change our diets to eliminate or reduce meat/animal products. Pretty simple huh? This is the most efficient, fastest and less economically disruptive remedy available
shifts in diet lower greenhouse gas emissions much more quickly than shifts away from the fossil fuel burning technologies that emit carbon dioxide. The turnover rate for most ruminant farm animals is one or two years, so that decreases in meat consumption would result in almost immediate drops in methane emissions. The turnover rate for cars and power plants, on the other hand, can be decades. Even if cheap, zero-emission fuel sources were available today, they would take many years to build and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon today.
I have been writing about this for almost three years in my series Macca's Meatless Monday and have started a group Meatless Advocates for those reducing our consumption of meat and meat products. We invite you to join us to spread the word that indeed we can be the change we all seek.
Chinese writer Lu Hsun:
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said to not exist
It is just like roads across the earth
For actually there were no roads to begin with
but when many people pass one way a road is made