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May. 11th, 2006 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aprilstarchildI've been reading an interview with Peter Singer on salon.com, and this bit really stuck out at me:
"Second factoid: 284 gallons of oil go into fattening a 1,250-pound cow for slaughter?
That's a figure from David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist. The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.
So even if we all started driving Priuses we'd still have these cows to worry about.
Yes. In fact, there's a University of Chicago study that shows that if you switch from driving an American car to driving a Prius, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by one ton per year. But if you switch from a typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, to a vegan diet with the same number of calories, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 1.5 tons per year."
The rest of the interview is very good and thought-provoking as well--he talks about how it's actually better for the environment to buy your rice from Asia than it is to get it from California, and why, among other things.
"Second factoid: 284 gallons of oil go into fattening a 1,250-pound cow for slaughter?
That's a figure from David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist. The fossil fuel goes into the fertilizer used to fertilize these acres of grain, which are then harvested and processed and transported to the cattle for feed. We get back, at most, 10 percent of the food value of the grain that we put into the cattle. So we are just skimming this concentrated product off the top of a mountain of grain into which all this fossil fuel has gone.
So even if we all started driving Priuses we'd still have these cows to worry about.
Yes. In fact, there's a University of Chicago study that shows that if you switch from driving an American car to driving a Prius, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by one ton per year. But if you switch from a typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, to a vegan diet with the same number of calories, you'll cut your carbon-dioxide emissions by nearly 1.5 tons per year."
The rest of the interview is very good and thought-provoking as well--he talks about how it's actually better for the environment to buy your rice from Asia than it is to get it from California, and why, among other things.
