2 fascinating pieces on veg*nism and its environmental benefits

One from a British publication, the Society Guardian, entitled Hard To Swallow. Basic point: becoming a vegan is a lot better for the environment than trading in your regular car for a hybrid. Key excerpt:

Researchers at the University of Chicago have calculated the relative carbon intensity of a standard vegan diet in comparison to a US-style carnivorous diet, all the way through from production to processing to distribution to cooking and consumption. An average burger man (that is, not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year.

The other is the foreword to a report from Compassion in World Farming on the Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat. it's written by Jonathan Porritt, a meat-eater, who decides to focus his foreword on the excesses of current farming practices,  even though he realizes that as a meat-eater hed doesn't quite have the elegant leg of veg*nism to stand on! Key excerpt:

And this is where the reality behind the huge growth in meat consumption begins to kick in. Up until this point in the argument, few politicians would dissent from the underlying analysis, though they would probably harbour some sad residual belief that technological progress will get it all sorted out somehow sometime in the future. But to suggest that the sacred cow of cheap meat (which has been a 50-year, cross-party policy priority) should be not just reappraised, but humanely put down, would have them all spinning in mock populist alarm.

But put down it must be. Hardly any of the meat we eat today is as "cheap" as the price on the pack might lead us to believe. It's just that its true costs are hidden, both in terms of the unsustainable drawing down of our natural capital and of the intolerable levels of cruelty to which so many of the 22 billion farmed animals in the world today are subjected. Factor in all the health and food safety impacts of excessive meat consumption, and the notion of cheap meat is revealed as the sick joke that it really is. The truth of it is that we should all be eating a lot less meat and we should all be paying a lot more for it.

But there's more, so read the whole thing.