Only way to save the planet is to take the vegetarian option
Well, what did he expect? Budget air travel is a mortal sin these days, everyone knows that. Defending it is the modern equivalent of heresy. They burned people for less in the Middle Ages, and they'd probably do it again if it wasn't for the fear of harmful gases being released.
But of course, O'Leary was dead right. Bovine flatulence is indeed a far greater threat to the world's climate than any number of aeroplanes, or any other form of transport, come to that.
As the Dail squabbles over what cars ministers should drive - Mercedes or Toyota Prius? - the cows go on doing what cows do best (breaking wind), and the planet keeps hotting up. Not that you'd know it to watch the media coverage of the climate-change debate. Every report on the dangers of global warming is invariably illustrated with a clip of a plane taking off, or, failing that, a yummy mummy doing the school run in Rathmines in her SUV, thereby cementing the impression in the public mind that the profligate use of fossil fuels through human travel, rather than Daisy the cow, is destroying the planet.
The propagandists were at it again last week as the EU issued new guidelines ordering car makers to cut CO 2 emissions in all new cars by 18 per cent in the next five years, a diktat condemned by environmentalists as too lenient and by the car industry as too severe. Whoever's right, the viewer was once again left believing that, if only we could regulate car use and plane travel, then the climate would be just tickety-boo.
If only it was that simple. Even if every plane was grounded tomorrow and all the cars permanently clamped, the planet would still get hotter as cows continue to produce gargantuan quantities of methane (100 million tonnes of the stuff annually), a gas with a warming capacity 20 times greater than CO 2 . Terrifyingly, these figures are also only going to get worse as meat consumption rockets around the world.
In 1981, each person on average ate 62lbs of meat a year; now the figure stands at 87.5lbs. In the USA, it's a staggering 275lbs of meat for every single person. In China, the figure is now over 100lbs per person. The world is eating meat in industrial quantities, and to meet that demand it needs to have industrial methods of food production.
As a result, half the water supply of the USA and 80 per cent of agricultural land goes to the production of grain, 70 per cent of which is then eaten by animals, together with 90 per cent of the soy supply and 80 per cent of the corn. In other words, we grow grain that we could eat but instead send it off in trucks to other farms where it's fed to animals which in turn are trucked off to be slaughtered so that we can eat them.
Economically, that doesn't make much sense. Environmentally, it's nothing short of suicidal. When you think about it, the environmental argument for vegetarianism is irrefutable. Intensive farming of the kind needed to sustain the world's snowballing consumption of meat spells ecological ruin.
So here's the point. How come, amid all the hype from the EU and the UN and theclimate-change boffins about cutting low-cost flights and scrapping the ministerial Mercedes and meeting the demands of this protocol and that treaty, does no one draw the obvious conclusion: the only way to really halt global warming is to stop eating so much meat, or, better still, switch to a vegetarian diet?
As a committed vegetarian, I arguably have a vested interest in this issue, but it's not merely an idle inquiry. The scaremongers are fond of apocalyptic warnings about the effects of CO 2 gases on the planet's future, but there's a conspiracy of silence about the profound and immediate benefits to the planet which would flow from mass vegetarianism. It's not like the opinion-formers are shy about playing nanny with people's diets, but vegetarianism still seems to be the philosophy that dare not speak its name in the climate debate.
It's not just the mainstream political establishment, either. The Green Party recently
'The world
is eating
meat in industrial quantities'
put up a 15-metre banner on the Millennium Bridge declaring 'Climate change - it's time to act', before listing what they felt was needed to tackle the issue, including more public transport; funding for renewable energy;environmentally-friendly building regulations and taxing polluters . . . but of practical alternatives to the plundering of the planet's resources to make beef-burgers and chicken nuggets, there was not a word.
On Friday, when Al Gore and Richard Branson announced a $25m prize for the person who comes up with the most innovative solution for removing CO 2 gases from the atmosphere, the Greens' environment spokesman, Ciaran Cuffe, even felt moved to issue a warning against complacency, saying the aim should still be on "breaking our economy's reliance on fossil fuels".
What about breaking our society's even more damaging reliance on meat as well?
The Greens don't even put their money where their mouth is in terms of their own behaviour. Not only is the party's annual convention later this month in Galway, thereby causing the unnecessary depletion of fossil fuels by forcing their largely Dublin-based supporters to travel needlessly across country, the organisers are also cheerfully promoting a menu for the weekend which centres around beef and chicken, the production of which represents a profligate misuse of precious environmental resources. There are vegetarian options on the menu, but it would be so simple for the Greens to lead by example and have the food 100 per cent vegetarian on a point of principle. Instead, they'd rather lash Bertie for having a big limo, or Tina from Tallaght for flying to Majorca for ?2.
Maybe no Green dares tell the voters that vegetarianism is the only sure way to curb global warming because they haven't personally grasped the argument yet. Or maybe it's because they don't want to frighten the electorate by coming across as veggie cranks - though if their silence is as self-serving as all that, they hardly have cause to criticise others for not taking the lead on climate change.
Whatever the reason, it's a perplexing omission in the debate, especially when the health benefits of a vegetarian diet are so indisputable, and the latest outbreaks of bird flu should surely have made consumers more aware than ever that there is something seriously amiss about the way meat is mass-produced in modern farming.
So it's a bit rich to be lectured on the irresponsibility of enjoying cheaper air fares once in a while by people whose own diet is doing more damage to the planet than all the planes put together. When it comes to tackling global warming, the fossil-fuel alarmists would be advisedto remember that old saying about practising what you preach.
- Eilis O'Hanlon
