I can fix health care and global warming without costing most of you a penny.
December 13, 2009
– Comments (24)
Ok, I'm not advocating this plan, I'm just trying to show what is possible when you put actual thought behind a problem without a politician in the room.
I'm going propose one change that will lower your healthcare costs and reduce global warming and it won't cost most of you a thing.
How would we do it? Create a global law to make it illegal to eat meat. Well it's pretty obvious how this would help lower health care costs, but how would it help global warming? The simple answer is methane.
Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2 and while CO2 emmisions have risen 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Global meat consumption has increased 500% in the last 50 years and 85% of animal produced methane being released into the atmosphere is through the digestive processes of livestock. The other 15% is due to animal waste being stored in lagoons. Methane produced by livestock is the #1 source of Methane and far more than the Methane produced by mining, or by landfills.
Since Methane only has an 8 year cycle in the atmosphere we would show a much quicker climate response.
We would also be much healthier!
We would reduce carbon emmisions because we would need to plant more crops that would soak up more CO2.
We don't have to shell out a couple of trillion dollars for each program to find out that it doesn't work either.
The only losers I can see in this are the ranchers and fast food companies. Since ranchers have fertile land in most cases, they should be able to switch to farming easily.
I might actually even be able to take being forced to give up cheeseburgers. At least it's less likely to kill me than the other 2 ideas they are trying to force on me.
If I could think of this one idea, how many do you think that the world's brightest could come up with if the politicians weren't involved?