Animal agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of climate breakdown and the destruction of natural habitats, but European leaders have made little effort to steer diets heavy in meat and milk to whole grains and plant-based sources of protein. The report did not set targets for meat production, such as culling herds, but called for support to help shift dietary habits, such as free school meals, more detailed labels, and tax reductions on healthy and sustainable food products.
Government that tells you what you pay eat.
A certain tension there.
But you’ve bought into all this ‘climate breakdown’ (first time i’ve heard that one) nonsenseTim, as you keep telling us Stern is the answer to one aspect of it, so it surely follows that we have to consider every other supposed solution to other areas of it……….
Once you accept as reality someone else’s delusion, you’ve lost.
‘steer’ fnarr fnarr
’Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognised the need to eat less meat…’
Surrendering without a shot being fired…
“Climate breakdown” is a ridiculous phrase. If things break down they stop working. How the hell does the climate stop working? Are farting cows going to totally strip the atmosphere from Earth, leaving us in a vacuum?
Even taking it at face value, it’s bollox. Beef, lamb and dairy that are fed on pasture are just about the most “green” uses of land going. No pestides, herbicides or fertilisers (other than manure produced in situ) nett removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, minimal energy usage, no diversion of drinking water to irrigation and short distances from field to fork.
Your avocado has stolen a brown person’s drinking water, used a load of those agri-chemicals that you claim are poisoning the planet, and then taken a long-haul flight.
Go and have a grass-fed steak, relax in the knowledge that it’s the most environmentally friendly food out there. Enjoy something tasty and satisfying for once rather than Puritan Quinoa For One. And realise that life isn’t a competition against your fellow-travellers as to who can maximise human misery.
’Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognised the need to eat less meat…’
Surrendering without a shot being fired…
More like (vegan) gravy-train time.
Oh yes Mr Blob, we agree with you. The thing is it will be expensive… but as you say it’s really important that it happens. So we’ll need a lot of money. Mostly for the Farming Lobby, but a little bit for the farmers too.
We’ve never raised creatures for eating except for the summer we ate our own garden snails. Not bad – they tasted just like escargots viz of garlic, butter, and rubber.
We had lamb sweetbreads for dinner last night. It’s been ages. Lovely!
I look forward to the Two Tier diet: bugs for bog standard people, beer and beef for our rulers. Unless the machine-gunners get the bastards first.
Culling herds is not setting a target, it’s *enforcing* a target.
Checks link…. ah yes, Guardian. Where you have to prove that you have failed all and any sort of literacy test before being allowed to be employed there.
Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognised the need to eat less meat after hammering out a shared vision for the future of agriculture with green groups and other stakeholders.
I have a vision of the future where we hammer out green groups and other stakeholders with hammers.
The wide-ranging report calls for “urgent, ambitious and feasible” change in farm and food systems and acknowledges that Europeans eat more animal protein than scientists recommend.
They’re going to try to starve you and make you eat insects. The Greens want your entire society to be a concentration camp.
@Steve
Just make sure to eat your Greens and it’ll solve all your problems
jgh it’s not just literacy, there’s a comprehensive list of failures their writers have to have achieved. Science is the number one.
I find it funny (as in peculiar, the reality of the “fight against climate change” makes me weep bitter tears) that in an epoch when there is a severe shortage of CO2 the politicians have seized on the essential gas as the weapon to cow (sorry!) the populace. We desperately need farting cows (just not near me!) to provide the CO2 vegetation needs to live. No plants, no life on earth…
Animal agriculture? New terminology to add sinisterness to livestock farming.
Europeans make up a bit less than10% of the world population. Does the other 90% share the idiocy? Fat chance.
.
“support to help shift dietary habits, such as free school meals”
Textured soya protein: so tasty they have to give it away. And I speak as someone who has been vegan most of my life.
Matt: ’Beef, lamb and dairy that are fed on pasture are just about the most “green” uses of land going.’
Only beaten by venison. And don’t we have a deer overpopulation problem?
I have a vision of the future where we hammer out green groups and other stakeholders with hammers.
Indeed Steve. The surest way to stem this shit is to make green activism perilous pass time. Confront it everywhere you encounter it. But of course the craven curtain twitching generation. Hardly the generation stormed the beaches of Normandy. They wouldn’t storm the beaches of Frinton without a full health & safety risk assessment. It is entirely in your hands. You do not have to accept it. But you will.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-front for the urge to rule it.” – usually attributed to Mencken
Starmer never had any intention of running a government which treads more lightly on anyone’s lives – he wants a government which treads more heavily on its opponents’ throats. That was always, er, trivially obvious.
To critique a statement such as that as if at face value is to allow and encourage the pretence that there was ever a shred of honour or truth in the initial statement.
I think a lot of people are looking at an entirely novel global economic and political situation through (say) 1970s glasses: it’s like talking seriously as though there is any real or hitherto acceptable or attempted or orthodox solution to the issue of the US’s $35 trillion debt.
There is no course of action founded in traditional economic or fiscal policy – no cuts, no growth, no change of direction – which can ever do anything meaningful at that level of debt, and thus critiques of it from the traditional economic perspective are pointless and meaningless.
Similarly, ‘Starmer is a hypocrite’ is missing the point by a very long distance.
@JuliaM
Round my way we are inundated with Muntjac scared off the fields by solar panel construction. They destroy any garden plantings. Bleeding hearts found an injured one and took it to the vet for treatment.
Meanwhile theres a shortage of CocaPops, Cola and frozen burgers at the FoodBank.
CD – I’m not sure there’s any calories in em. Greenies don’t look clean to me.
BiS – I’m not sure there has ever before been a significant percentage of the public who want to turn the country into a woke concentration camp, but they’re a serious problem and we can’t afford to allow them to stay in power over us. People who support insanities and atrocities don’t have a valid political opinion that needs to be represented, they need mental health care.
Interested – Yarp, but Jesus Christ wins.
Interesting to see that the climate nonsense is now the justification for all their other idiocy.
Your policy of eating your Greens sounds like a good one, Chernyy. After all, cows taste fine when fed on grass. Maybe the Greens would too.
Ironically, C P Snow’s comment about the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems as relevant today in this technological world as it did when he made it in 1959. Physics is still a minority sport so virtually all politicians and much of the populace don’t have the mental capacity to evaluate all this crap and see it for what it is. They may be intelligent enough (though that’s debatable with plenty of politicians) but they never imbibed the necessary information or processes of thought to allow them even to start a realistic evaluation.
Certainly for some of them this is absolutely deliberate misinformation and misdirection, and they know what they are doing, but is that the majority?
Government should not be treading on people’s lives at all.
And while on the subject of just plain weird things he has said, the correct answer to being asked whether a member of your family should go private for healthcare is: it’s up to the family member.
He automatically assumed it was up to him to decide.
TG – I was seven when I learned about the 2nd Law (as well as the first)
because I was prodigiously precociousthanks to Flanders and Swan on our radiogram.Deer are shot as pests in Australia . We have vast numbers of them wandering around, readily available as a source of (very) free range, organic etc meat for any one energetic enough to go hunting.
.
Presumably the bacteria that will digest all that biomass in the absence of large herbivores raised for eating will generate gases which no-one cares about (because they are no longer in the guts of our food animals). So those don’t count, magically.
They’re going to try to starve you and make you eat insects. The Greens want your entire society to be a concentration camp.
Engaged on another thread much to my annoyance as I allowed myself to be drawn in by troll so belatedly acknowledging this.
I expect nothing less from Steve, but I don’t think anyone could crystallise it better than this. The Greens are by far the most dangerous party and, especially given their MPs seem to be as wildly anti-Semitic as the Muslim block, you have to ask whether they should be permitted on the ballot at all. Certainly support of them ought to disqualify one from working in the public sector. The only snag being that almost every party seems to have swallowed this Shtick so you wouldn’t have a lot left…
Round my way we are inundated with Muntjac scared off the fields by solar panel construction. They destroy any garden plantings. Bleeding hearts found an injured one and took it to the vet for treatment.
That will be a problem for the vet as Muntjac are now (rightly) categorised as ‘pests’, and so cannot legally be released into the wild. I live a few miles from Tiggywinkles wildlife hospital and they have a large paddock that’s slowly filling up with treated muntjac.
I’m told that muntjac make very good eating. Having never had any, I couldn’t comment. But shooting them is a bit difficult – you aren’t allowed to shoot deer at night and muntjac are largely nocturnal. Very occasionally in day time if you see what looks to be a dog scooting through a hedgerow in the distance, thats probably a muntjac.
Jim,
Shooting at night is extremely dangerous*, is it a blanket ban or specifically muntjac and possibly other ground based animals?
*I’m thinking about the lengths we went to when carrying out night firing when I was in the army.
The muntjac around here are often seen in the day, heard (barking – another name is ‘barking deer’) at night. There was a very recent obit in The Times of a countryman who could call up muntjac by imitating their calls. I know the local guy who has the licence to cull them (and Roe, too, but they’re in ‘close’ season at the moment because the does are with their fawns), there’s no close season for muntjac because (being tropical in origin) they breed all year round – which is why there’s so damn many of them!