Sunday, August 30, 2009

The Cow Turns Green

Found at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214110

Few creatures would seem as beneficent as the cow. Properly grazed and groomed, it gives us burgers and brie, boot leather and fertilizer. Lately, however, radical green groups and celebrity vegans like Paul McCartney have made cows out to be weapons of mass destruction: not only has their meat caused an epidemic of hypertension and heart disease, but they also trample rainforests, trash the soil, and foul the air with greenhouse gases. Scientists say that every year the average Holstein produces up to 180 kilos of methane, which traps 25 times more heat than does carbon dioxide. All told, bringing meat from the pasture to the griddle produces 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the United Nations. Last year, Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called upon everyone to give up eating meat at least one day a week, giving birth to the global meatless Monday. "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat," McCartney famously said.

Perhaps. But since 1960, worldwide production of meat has quadrupled to more than 280 million tons a year. Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, driven by the protein-hungry rising middle classes of China, Brazil, and other developing nations. For this reason, serious environmental planners have recently focused not on eliminating the meat industry but on turning it green.

It's a tall order. Making beef, pork, or chicken can be an environmentally devastating process, from felling forests for pastures to the fossil fuel required to produce fertilizer for feed crops. Compared with tofu production, meat-making gobbles up 17 times as much land, 26 times as much water, 20 times the fossil fuels, and 6 times as many chemicals, according to Plenty magazine. And among animal proteins, beef is the real hog; producing a kilo of beef takes up seven times more farmland than it does to produce a kilo of chicken and 15 times the area needed for a kilo of pork. Yet scientists, herders, and green groups are convinced they can curb the damage by making adjustments all along the supply chain, changing the way we farm and feed livestock and building a cleaner cow through modern genetics. Suddenly, the search for what food activist and author Michael Pollan calls "green meat" has become a worldwide effort.

The effort starts with the beast itself. When a cow eats, its stomach produces methane as a byproduct. Cows are pretty efficient at eating grass, but the soybeans and corn that most industrial livestock farms feed them make the bovine stomach rumble with excess gas. To fight this, some farms in Vermont and France have begun to roll back the clock. The owners of the Stonyfield Farm in Vermont found they could improve health and boost milk production in the herds, and reduce methane emissions, by eliminating the soybean- and corn-based feed that became popular during the bumper harvests of the Green Revolution. Instead, they give their cows old-fashioned flax and alfalfa, which are packed with nutrients and benign fatty acids. This tactic, widely used in France, is now being replicated elsewhere in the U.S. In Canada, where cattle grazing accounts for 72 percent of total greenhouse-gas emissions, scientists are tinkering with the chemistry of feed—adjusting the balance of key nutrients such as cellulose, ash, fat, sugar, and starch—as another way of lowering the cow's carbon footprint.

The more ambitious projects involve tinkering with the cow's genetic code. Researchers at the University of Alberta are examining the DNA in cows' four stomachs to identify the genes responsible for making them burp and regulating how much gas they produce. In time, they hope to be able to breed cleaner cows, which could reduce emissions from cows by 25 percent, says Stephen Moore, professor of beef-cattle genomics at Alberta. Researchers at Colorado State University have identified DNA markers that they believe will help them selectively breed animals to digest their food more efficiently and so produce less methane.

Cutting down forests to make room for livestock farms is another big reason meat is environmentally unsound. Brazil has in recent years risen as an agricultural power-house, but it now ranks as the fourth—biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, thanks mainly to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Though the pace of felling has dropped, 12,900 square kilometers of rainforest (an area larger than Jamaica) were destroyed last year, releasing 160 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. As national leaders prepare to make a new pact in Copenhagen for curbing climate change this December, international green groups have criticized Brasília for its plans to build roads through the Amazon and for bowing to the farm lobby, which has expanded its frontier to the lip of the rainforest.

Many leaders in business and government are embracing the green agenda. Brazilian meatpackers like Marfrig, food sellers like Wal-Mart, footwear companies such as Timberland, and thousands of ranchers have signed on to a moratorium on using beef from recently deforested areas. "For years, the way to produce cattle was to chop down the forest to plant pastures," says Ocimar Vilela, head of environmental sustainability at Marfrig. "Now customers are demanding we change, and these demands are here to stay."

Still, the livestock industry has a long way to go. Many of the reforms are just getting started and are only being tried at a few farms, and many advances are still in the testing phase. No matter how green the business gets, meat will still weigh heavily on the planet. But going green seems to be the only realistic path. Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, thanks to the burgeoning middle classes of China, Brazil, and other nations. Brazilians today eat 89 kilos of red meat and poultry a year, nearly triple the per capita consumption of 15 years ago, while the average Chinese citizen consumes close to two and a half times more meat than he did in 1990. Even India is getting a taste for red meat—its beef consumption jumped 36 percent in the past decade. Overall meat consumption in poorer countries is growing by more than 5 percent a year, twice the world rate, making meat the most coveted agricultural commodity in recent history. The global recession has surely slowed the trend, but appetites once whetted are hard to blunt. Although meat is a health problem in the West, to many poor nations it's a boon. "Even small additional amounts of meat and milk can provide the same level of nutrients, protein, and calories to the poor that a large and diverse amount of vegetables and cereals could provide," concludes a study by the International Food Policy Research Center in Washington. "Who is going to tell the developing world's new consumers, 'Sorry, you can't eat beef'?" says Paulo Adário, an expert in the livestock industry at Greenpeace. Of course, with green beef, you might not have to.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

They walk among us

'Millionaire' Contestant Makes Worst Use Of Lifelines Ever

NEW YORK - Idaho resident Kathy Evans brought humiliation to her friends and family Tuesday when she set a new standard for stupidity with her appearance on the popular TV show, 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.'

It seems that Evans, a 32-year-old wife and mother of two, got stuck on the first question, and proceeded to make what fans of the show are dubbing 'the absolute worst use of lifelines ever.' After being introduced to the show's host Meredith Vieira, Evans assured her that she was ready to play, whereupon she was posed with an extremely easy $100 question. The question was: 'Which of the following is the largest?'

A) A Peanut B) An Elephant C) The Moon D) Hey, who you calling large?

Immediately Mrs. Evans was struck with an all consuming panic as she realized that this was a question to which she did not readily know the answer. 'Hmm, oh boy, that's a toughie,' said Evans, as Vieira did her level best to hide her disbelief and disgust. 'I mean, I'm sure I've heard of some of these things before, but I have no idea how large they would be.' Evans made the decision to use the first of her three lifelines, the 50/50. Answers A and D were removed, leaving her to decide which was bigger, an elephant or the moon. However, faced with an incredibly easy question, Evans still remained unsure. 'Oh! It removed the two I was leaning towards!' exclaimed Evans. 'Darn. I think I better phone a friend.' Us ing the second of her two lifelines on the first question, Mrs. Evans asked to be connected with her friend Betsy, who is an office assistant. 'Hi Betsy! How are you? This is Kathy! I'm on TV!' said Evans, wasting the first seven seconds of her call. 'Ok, I got an important question. Which of the following is the largest? B, an elephant, or C, the moon. 15 seconds hun.' Betsy quickly replied that the answer was C, the moon. Evans proceeded to argue with her friend for the remaining ten seconds. 'Come on Betsy, are you sure?' said Evans. 'How sure are you? Duh, that can't be it.' To everyone's astonishment, the moronic Evans declined to take her friend's advice and pick 'The Moon.' 'I just don't know if I can trust Betsy. She's not all that bright. So I think I'd like to ask the audience,' said Evans. Asked to vote on the correct answer, the audience returned 98% in favor of answer C, 'The Moon.' Having used up all her lifelines, Evans then made the dumbest choice of her life. 'Wow, seems like everybody is against what I'm thinking,' said the too-stupid-to-live Evans. 'But you know, sometimes you just got to go with your gut. So, let's see. For which is larger, an elephant or the moon, I'm going to have to go with B, an elephant. Final answer.' Evans sat before the dumbfounded audience, the only one waiting with bated breath, and was told that she was wrong, and that the answer was in fact, C, 'The Moon.'

Caution...they walk among us! ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Caution... They Walk Among Us!

----------------------------------------------------------------------- Some guy bought a new fridge for his house. To get rid of his old fridge, he put it in his front yard and hung a sign on it saying: 'Free to good home. You want it, you take it.' For three days the fridge sat there without even one person looking twice at it. He eventually decided that people were too un-trusting of this deal. It looked too good to be true, so he changed the sign to read: 'Fridge for sale $50.'

The next day someone stole it!

***They walk amongst us!***

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*One day I was walking down the beach with some friends when someone shouted....'Look at that dead bird!' Someone looked up at the sky and said...'where?'

***They walk among us!!***

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While looking at a house, my brother asked the estate agent which direction was north because, he explained, he didn't want the sun waking him up every morning. She asked, 'Does the sun rise in the north?' When my brother explained that the sun rises in the east, and has for sometime, she shook her head and said, 'Oh, I don't keep up with that stuff'

***They Walk Among Us!!***

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My colleague and I were eating our lunch in our cafeteria, when we overheard one of the administrative assistants talking about the sunburn she got on her weekend drive to the beach. She drove down in a convertible, but 'didn't think she'd get sunburned because the car was moving'.

***They Walk Among Us!!!!***

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My sister has a lifesaving tool in her car it's designed to cut through a seat belt if she gets trapped She keeps it in the trunk.

***They Walk Among Us!!!!!*** ------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was hanging out with a friend when we saw a woman with a nose ring attached to an earring by a chain. My friend said, 'Wouldn't the chain rip out every time she turned her head?' I had to explain that a person's nose and ear remain the same distance apart no matter which way the head is turned...

***They Walk Among Us!!!!!!! ***

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I couldn't find my luggage at the airport baggage area. So I went to the lost luggage office and told the woman there that my bags never showed up. She smiled and told me not to worry because she was a trained professional and I was in good hands. 'Now,' she asked me, 'Has your plane arrived yet?'... (I work with professionals like this.)

***They Walk Among Us!!!!!!!!***

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While working at a pizza parlour I observed a man ordering a small pizza to go. He appeared to be alone and the cook asked him if he would like it cut into 4 pieces or 6. He thought about it for some time before responding. 'Just cut it into 4 pieces; I don't think I'm hungry enough to eat 6 pieces.

***Yep, They Walk Among Us, too.!!!!!!!!