Save our Planet

We may not be aware of it but there is a new species of refugees, climate refugees. Who are they? Why aren’t anything done for them? As a result of the changing climate, sea levels are rising and many island nations are sinking. The consequence? Inhabitants of these islands have to flee their home since it’s no longer safe to live there. They are the new species of climate refugees. And what’s worse, the number is increasing day by day. The website World View of Global Warming documents this terrible tragedy that’s happening to the people in India:

Asia’s largest rivers, the Ganges and the Bramaputra, join in the world’s most extensive delta and flow into the Bay of Bengal. There lies Bangladesh, a nation of 140 million people beset by poverty and the floods of the rivers, and now also affected by rising sea level. Gary Braasch visited to document this threat, traveling by boat south from Dhaka and speaking to villagers, fishermen, and scientists. Already a million people a year are displaced by loss of land along rivers, and indications are this is increasing. Villagers spoke of losing a town mosque to unexpectedly fast erosion, even in a time of good weather in the dryer season. The one meter sea level rise generally predicted if no action is taken about global warming will inundate more than 15 percent of Bangladesh, displacing more than 13 million people and cut into the crucial rice crop.

The governments are not doing enough to help their people. In fact, climate refugees are not officially recognized as refugees since they are not a result of political instability. Check out this video about the climate refugees from Carteret Atoll off the coast of Papau New Guinea . Another eye-opening video about the crisis of climate refugees, Submerged Islands , is produced by Supreme Master Television.

Most of us know by now that global warming is real, and it’s happening all over the world. Humankind industrial revolution has done a great deal of harm to the planet for many decades. But scientists have discovered that the number one contributor to climate change is the production of meat for human consumption. The number one emitter of methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat, are cows. It’s not their fault though. It’s just a natural process for them to burp and pass methane as a natural process of their bodily function. The main problem is that there is an explosion of the number of cattle on the planet as a result of factory farms. Billions of cows are burping and passing gas at the same time, and all that gas is going up in the atmosphere, trapping the heat which results in the warming of the planet.

We can stop the tragedy of climate refugees, and it begins with our fork at our breakfast, lunch, dinner table. Each one of us can do it, reduce our meat consumption, thereby reducing the number of cows that are producing methane from both ends.  We can make a difference, not only to our lives, the health of the planet, but we are also making a difference to the lives of the cows that are brutally killed for our palate every day. Let’s do our bit, save ourselves and save the planet by cutting down on our meat consumption. Or try going veg.


SupremeMasterTV.com

This is hot off the press - or the airwave: Richard Greene, a radio show host on K-TALK AM 1150, has just asked all of his listeners to go meatless once a week every Monday. Whoo-hoo! What’s the reason? He cited that the number one cause for global warming is from cows. This is a fact that not everyone knows. The reason is that the gas that cows emit through the natural process of belching and passing gas is methane. Methane is a greenhouse that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (or 72 times more potent over a 20 years span). What exactly does that mean? According to Richard Greene, that means that methane traps carbon dioxide 20 times more effectively than carbon dioxide itself. That is bad. What’s more, the meat diet waste a number of vital resources, like water, animal cruelty, economy, health, the unsustainability of the diet that may eventually lead to the destruction of our planet, and a bunch of other problems.

He even had David Cromwell on the show to talk about vegetarianism, spirituality, and Earth. David Cromwell is an actor who acted in the movie Babe (LA Confidential, Deep Impact). After his close interaction with the animals during the shooting, the guy went vegan. Wow. That’s pretty cool. During the show, Richard also revealed that he has been a vegetarian for 25 years. That’s pretty amazing!

Way to go, Richard! Thank you for launching Meatless Monday to help stop the climate change crisis. That’s a great start. Let’s join the campaign and go meatless on Mondays, everybody!

Photo by: Rex

An article by James Gill published by New Scientist  pointed that if we cut back on our meat consumption, about $20 trillion could be saved off the cost of fighting climate change. That’s quite a huge amount of money. This information is based on a study called “Climate benefits of changing diet” published in the Climate Change journal.

The researchers involved say that reducing our intake of beef and pork would lead to the creation of a huge new carbon sink, as vegetation would thrive on unused farmland.

The model takes into account farmland that is used to grow extra food to make up for the lost meat, but that requires less area, so some will be abandoned. Millions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, would also be saved every year due to reduced emissions from farms.

The researchers also pointed out that the raising of livestock is particularly harmful to the environment since factory farms are the number one source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a span of 20 years. Hydrogen sulfide and nitrous oxide, 2 other extremely toxic greenhouse gases that can cause death at certain levels, have been attributed to factory farms.

The article also points out that eating less meat would free up a lot of land which would enable vegetation to grow. This is important since vegetation helps to absorb carbon dioxide that’s hanging around. Otherwise, we may be facing planetary disasters.

Let’s do our part. Save the planet for ourselves. Reduce our meat consumption to save our future. Be vegetarian.

Some good green news from China: Dr. Huang Yunbao, the nation’s policy advisor, is recommending less meat. It’s pretty great that people higher up in the government are taking acknowledging that climate change exists. What is even better is that they’re doing their jobs to protect the lives of their citizens.

As a member of China Democratic League and associate professor in mathematics from the School of Science at the Hangzhou Normal University, Dr. Huang Yunbao spoke at the city of Hangzhou’s Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference where he linked meat consumption with climate change. He advised the government to launch a campaign to encourage citizens to reduce meat consumption as part of the city’s Energy Conservation and Emissions Mitigation Plan. Walking the talk, the good doctor is a vegan. He was quoted as saying: “From the scientific point of view, we should be vegetarians. From the health point of view, we should be vegetarians. From the economic point of view, we should be vegetarians. From the spirit of the slogan ‘Save the Planet,’ we must be vegetarians.”

Well said, Doctor.

Source: Supreme Master Television

This is a very cool youtube video: Save the Human - Don’t Eat the Planet. It’s a very engaging and very relevant at this time of our planet. We  need to work together in order to save the only planet that all of us call home - Earth. Going green is not fast enough. It’s one of the good solutions, a gentle way of living, but it’s not quick enough to stop the greenhouse gas emissions. I heard somewhere that although methane is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20 years span, but it disappears quicker from the atmosphere, while carbon dioxide hangs around for years and years. And the number one source of methane? Factory farms where cattle are raised for human consumption and where every day billions of these gentle animals let out gas from both ends since it’s a natural process for them.

The quickest solution and most effective to halt climate change? Boycott the meat industry by reducing or cutting meat from your meals to “save the humans”.