There's nothing wrong with believing in man-made global warming. However, its hard to ignore the fact that the people who are convinced that human activity is warming our planet, have a habit of forcing their lifestyle choices on everyone else. At a certain point they stopped trying to convince everyone that global warming is a man-made threat, and started dragging everyone into their low-carbon foot print world, regardless of what they believed.
The Oakland school district in California has provided a perfect example of this lefty presumptuousness in action. They've teamed up with an environmental group called Friends of the Earth (FOE), to concoct a new school menu that has a lower carbon foot print. They vastly reduced the amount of meat and cheese, and replaced it with vegan stir fry and tostadas, as well as reduced the portion sizes. What little meat and cheese is left comes from organic cows. By their own admission, this change only reduced the school's food budget by 1%.
According to Jennifer LeBarre, the head of nutrition for the Oakland Unified School District,
"We were so excited to see how the data showed that we could reduce our carbon and water footprint by serving healthy, delicious food - - like the vegetarian tostadas with fresh made in-house salsa, that kids absolutely love - - all while saving money."Uh huh. I'm sure your students just love eating your glorified rabbit food.
It's not clear if the FOE or the school district consulted with parents on the menu change, or if they provided any studies that proved that their new lunch menu was actually healthier.
What is clear, is that the Oakland School District is following in the footsteps of countless green authoritarians before them, who want to impoverish and starve us in the name of saving the planet.
I bet the researchers for this article failed to take in account the CO2 produced growing the grains and vegetables fed to cattle that could otherwise be fed directly to humans. It’s basic maths. Estimates vary, but it takes around 7 kilos of grain to make one kilo of beef. Pigs are about 4:1 and relatively thrifty chickens are around 2:1. Then there’s the vast water consumption (15,415 litres for a kilo of beef, some of which goes into growing the feed) and the CO2 emissions (27kg for a kilo of beef). If, however, humans were to eat the kilo of grain themselves, that would be that. A kilo of lentils creates only 0.9 kg of CO2.
Have a search around yourself you could start here.[Link]