Cats and Dogs Contribute Significantly To Climate Change, Says UCLA Study (patch.com) 430
New submitter Zorro shares a report from Patch.com: When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found. That's the equivalent of driving 13.6 million cars for a year. The problem lies with the meat-filled diets of kitties and pooches, according to the study by UCLA geography professor Gregory Okin. Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin. Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts. The study has been published in the journal PLOS One.
How about people ? (Score:5, Interesting)
How much CO2 does an average person produce, compared to a dog ?
Re:How about people ? (Score:5, Informative)
A brief check suggests the total CO2 generation of the US is around 5.3 Billion metric tons, which would mean cats and dogs account for 1.2% of the total CO2 generated by the US.
Don't have kids, don't have pets, just die lonely? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's some kind of pitiful argument. No wonder they're losing.
Re:Don't have kids, don't have pets, just die lone (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding.
Limiting people to a bland, tasteless nutrient-rich food paste of exactly the right quantity and monitoring them 24/7 so they don't take risks or do anything "wrong" would also help prolong life, but it would also be a living-hell not worth living in....
Re:Don't have kids, don't have pets, just die lone (Score:5, Insightful)
Soylent Green meets 1984.
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What? Who is losing? What are they losing? Researchers tried to quantify the impact of pet ownership on climate change and published their findings, and thus someone is losing? Who are you, Trump?
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In recent decades, cats and dogs have been the only exposure people - especially children - get to non-human animals on a regular basic.
Even sadder, fewer and fewer children have any exposure to non-human animals. One big reason for this is that more and more children are being over scheduled into organised activities, leaving too little time to engage with a pet.
Call us "crazy cat people" if you insist, My girlfriend, daughter and I feel more human for having our feline friends. And most of our relatives a
Depends on diet (Score:3)
TFS mostly compares CO2 output caused by diet.
From that point of view :
- cats are strict carnivore. They can't skip meat in their meat (they'll miss tons of stuff). They can't do anything but eat other animals.
(Well for now. By the time the "million-dollar-bugger" process can be perfected and be scaled industrially, they will be also able to eat food that was grown in a VAT).
Humans have a very variable diet,
- ranging from only eating plants (lots of traditionnally mostly-vegan diest accross culture + the cu
Cats in a car (Score:2)
TFS mostly compares CO2 output caused by diet.
...for the very obvious reason that cats and dogs don't drive cars.
Re:How about people ? (Score:5, Insightful)
And who is going to enforce that? How? Crippling economic sanctions on countries that are already at desperation levels of poverty? Invasion? Recolonialization?
The surest way to drop the birthrate in poor countries, proven to work time and time again, is to raise the standard of living. Richer people have fewer children - it holds true for every level of "rich" outside of the multimillionaire class. Children are an important resource to subsistence farmers and it's natural to have many of them when there is a high likelihood that many of them will not survive to adulthood (even though, in aggregate, many do).
Children are an enjoyable burden to urban and middle class people - when women work outside the home, there is a huge incentive to have fewer children.
The down side, of course, is that richer people use more resources, but we can work on that from a technology perspective. But if you want fewer people, make them rich(er).
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Except that developing countries tend to, you know, develop, and then all that burgeoning population starts to drive cars and all the other carbon-heavy things. Better to control the population growth while the development is happening, if you can.
Except that (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that developing countries tend to, you know, develop {...} Better to control the population growth while the development is happening,
Except that demographic transition IS A THING.
And as the countries are developing, the birth rate is getting lower.
So better control of the population is auto-happening and has been measured everywhere.
(Basically, as society develops, children aren't an advantage - helping hands in the farm - but are a burden - need education, etc.
So overtime parent have less incentives to have as many as possible,
which in turn compensate the fact that modern medicine is having less of the them dying of diseases.
That's an actually observed phenomenon)
So "one child policies" aren't the best method.
Having them access education, better jobs, even better farming equipment will accelerate the transition.
Re:Except that (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that leads to less kids in the most "modern/industrial" societies, that final mile if you will, is parents being overworked. Working 40+ hours a week, and then the commute, and then the hour lunch which often is just wasted time hanging out at work and eating for half of it. And both parents being forced to work to be "normal". I see my kids a few hours each evening. I see my coworkers ... well, nearly 40 hours a week.
We need less of a population, but I'm not sure working people into bad health, unhappy relationships, and fucked up families is the way to do it. Sending babies to daycare at age 2 months is NOT FUCKING NORMAL!!! Yet 99% of the people around here do that. Kids being at some before and after care thing during elementary ages is not perfect either. Hell one of my kids is more attached to the worker at the day care than to the kid's grandparents. WTF?!
Anyway... I can rant about this forever, please excuse me. You had good points, but I hate seeing the population overworked. I was reading something about a billionaire the other day, and it occurred to me if you took his billion dollars and spread it out to a thousand people, they'd all be millionaires. Wow, wealth is really not distributed too well is it?
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ending babies to daycare at age 2 months is NOT FUCKING NORMAL!!! Yet 99% of the people around here do that.
Wet nurses, nannies, boarding schools, etc. have been normal for the upper class for hundreds of years. And if you are a two income family in America, then you are part of the global upper class.
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... What if it's 0.71? Or -0.16?
How do you have -0.16 children? Does every sixth couple go find someone else's baby and kill it?
Re:How about people ? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't fully buy this studies claims.
It appears to be a PETA Propaganda.
Issue 1: Pet food including the expensive high quality stuff that doesn't have meat bi-products has what we would call meat meat bi-products, from the cuts of meat that we normally do not want to eat, or from scraps that are too small to package.
Issue 2: The carbon foot print of raising livestock has a high variance. Cattle if next to a pond, stream or river. May be getting their water without the needs of electricity. Also there is a big difference between beef and poultry.
Re:How about people ? (Score:4, Informative)
There is no such thing as a cyanide atom.
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Re: How about people ? (Score:5, Funny)
I suggested to my cat that she become vegetarian. She was not amused.
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Well clearly you need to virtue signal more so people on social media can know you're a GOOD PERSON. What use are all those "good things" if no one knows HOW GOOD YOU ARE? Precisely.
Leftovers (Score:5, Interesting)
Pets used to eat mostly left-overs from their owner's plates. Then we started producing food specially for them, which is one of the main reasons hat they live about twice as long as they used to.
Having said that, the stuff in cat and dog food tens to be the stuff that humans don't want. Mechanically recovered head meat, the kind of stuff that only KFC would try to feed you out of one of their buckets.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
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Cats are carnivores, not omnivores like humans and dogs. You should not feed your cat fruit and vegetables.
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Untrue. Cats eat plants in nature. There are even plants named for them, ie. cat grass and catnip.
My own cat loves to nibble on spearmint, cat grass and catnip plants. He also loves puree of pumpkin.
Cats do eat plants in nature, but they don't get their nutrients from them. Plants are more of a treat. You can give your cats many types of vegetables, such as carrots and pumpkin, but they shouldn't be more than 10% of their diet.
Cats eat meat. Meat based protein and fat makes up nearly 100% of their nutritional needs and it cannot be replaced with plant based substitutes. Cats can have other treats, but meat is the core of their diet.
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Cats and dogs eat plants *because* they are indigestible.
It is how they purge themselves. It comes out mostly unaltered, along with whatever is causing trouble.
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Re:Leftovers (Score:5, Informative)
Cats are obligate carnivores, they have to eat meat because they need the ready nutrients only meat can provide.
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication. In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available. The occasional browsing of grasses and plants may have some digestive benefit for canines but almost no caloric value. Their caloric intake would be animal flesh.
Re:Leftovers (Score:5, Insightful)
All true, but modern pet foods can provide the nutrients without the high meat content. And the other stuff like fruit, gravy and jelly just provide some extra volume and flavour/smell. Keep in mind that modern meat has a lot more nutrients than what those animals would eat in the wild too.
Obviously we want pets to keep eating meat, it's good for them. I was just suggesting that the reason why it's becoming a problem in terms of emissions now could be due to the changing nature of pet diets, which are generally designed to appeal to pet owners as the primary consideration. Maybe they can be designed to be more sustainable and still provide a good diet.
Re:Leftovers (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it's a problem now is that someone decided to publish a study on its impact. Regular pet food hasn't changed significantly in years.
In the grand scheme of things, pet ownership is barely a blip on the radar. This is just another "sky is falling" study - overhyped nonsense that obscures the real work that needs to be done in terms of decarbonization.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Leftovers (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously we want pets to keep eating meat, it's good for them.
I tried this with the last three rabbits I had. None of them lived very long, so I'm considering changing diet for the next one. I'll try fish next.
Wolf subspecies and vegetation (Score:5, Informative)
Dogs have a higher tolerance for carbohydrates, but really, this is an accident of domestication.
Not true. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Even wolves routinely supplement their diet [wikipedia.org] with fruits and vegetables in the wild.
In any wild setting, all canine species would eat a diet almost entirely of meat because that's what's available.
Also not true. All wolf subspecies (including dogs, coyotes, dingoes) have an evolutionary preference for meat but will voluntarily eat vegetation in substantial amounts and if necessary can live without meat indefinitely. The Maned Wolf [wikipedia.org] has a diet that is approximately 50% vegetation. With certain exceptions most of what you eat is also readily digestible by your dog too. Dogs are omnivores in actuality.
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Newsflash, In the wild catching prey is hard. wolves will eat fruit and veggies as a 'desperation move' they biologically get very little nutrition out of it. this doesn't mean you should feed fido your strict vegan diet.
cats are strict carnivores and only eat grass to induce vomiting. which in a side note is an interesting case of animal self medication..
Dogs are not wolves (Score:2)
Newsflash, In the wild catching prey is hard. wolves will eat fruit and veggies as a 'desperation move' they biologically get very little nutrition out of it. this doesn't mean you should feed fido your strict vegan diet.
Who said anything about feeding a dog a vegan diet? Certainty not me. All I said is that it is a proven fact that dogs (and evidently wolves) can live healthfully without eating animal flesh if necessary. Nobody is recommending this as something anyone ought to do as a routine matter. Wolves are apparently able to do so too and some types of wolves like the Maned Wolf eat nearly 50% of their diet from plant matter. They are well evolved to live on meat but unlike cats they can actually digest plant mat
Re:Wolf subspecies and vegetation (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure why you and a few other people thought I'm not feeding my cat meat. I eat meat, my cat eats mostly meat with vegetables and fruit mixed in. Just little chunks. It's proper cat food, out of a tin.
He catches birds and mice sometimes, but never eats them.
Was it the wording I used, or do people just assume I'm a vegan, or what?
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Not true. Dogs are not obligate carnivores. Even wolves routinely supplement their diet [wikipedia.org] with fruits and vegetables in the wild.
I think you need to lookup the verb "to supplement".
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Fruits and vegetables in the wild are seasonable at best and unobtainable outside their season, especially in winter months. While I'm sure they can eat them, I would imagine the preference is for animal flesh, especially for the essential fatty acids which only they can supply.
The willingness and ability to eat plant foods may be higher in tropical latitudes, but in seasonal latitudes the amount of wild vegetables and fruits would be extremely limited, especially vegetables. Even fruit trees aren't very
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In fact, even cats don't eat meat exclusively, if by meat we mean muscle tissue. Most predators, if I'm not mistaken, will eat the gut and its contents before they eat muscle, thereby benefitting from whatever half-digested plant material the prey has eaten.
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Re:Leftovers (Score:4, Informative)
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables.
At the very least you should ensure that your cat's diet is fortified with Taurine. Much like humans need to eat fruit and veg in order to avoid scurvy, cats need meat and fish in order to get Taurine. (Cats produce their own vitamin C so do not need it in their diet. Ditto for humans and Taurine)
I'm surprised that your cat "loves fruit and vegetables." That might indicate that it's a very successful hunter and is getting plenty of fresh meat from birds and small mammals. Whether that is a bad thing probably depends on the environment that you live in.
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My cat eats plenty of meat, including fish and chicken/turkey meant for humans. He likes milk too, I guess he's one of the minority that isn't lactose intolerant.
When I say he loves fruit, I meant he likes cat food that is mostly meat, some gravy and some bits of fruit mixed in with it.
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He likes milk too
That's perfectly normal.
I guess he's one of the minority that isn't lactose intolerant.
Huh? That double negatives means you wrote "he's one of the minority that is lactose tolerant", and there are too many cats who love (cow's) milk for that to make sense.
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Huh? That double negatives means you wrote "he's one of the minority that is lactose tolerant", and there are too many cats who love (cow's) milk for that to make sense.
I have no idea about cats but it's perfectly possible for them to be lactose intolerant and also to like milk.
You will have no trouble getting a dog to eat normal chocolate - but it will kill the dog.
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It makes complete sense. Loving something doesn't mean you can tolerate it in large quantities (see every heroin addict who has ever overdosed for proof).
Dairy products have a lot of protein and fat, so most cats love them. Most cats can tolerate small amounts of dairy products, but a large bowl of milk will give the majority of them explosive diarrhea.
After weening, all cats (and almost all mammals, in fact) produce much less lactase and some stop producing at all. The amount of lactase the cat can prod
Re:Leftovers (Score:4)
Most cats like milk but can't tolerate much lactose, so can't drink much. You can get "cat milk" with reduced lactose.
Cats are carnivores (Score:3)
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
While you can feed cats vegetation successfully, they are in actuality obligate carnivores. Their digestive systems are really designed to break down cellulose, they lack the proper teeth for mastication, and their metabolisms are unable to synthesize certain nutrients which are only found in animal flesh unless you are really breaking out the chemistry set. Your cat might willingly eat fruits or veggies but for the most part they aren't especially good for them. One of my cats years ago loved Doritos bu
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Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
Seafood isn't meat? You must be, or were raised, Catholic.
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Seafood isn't meat? You must be, or were raised, Catholic.
Can't speak for other countries but this language permeates all of the US, certainly not just Catholics (only ~20% of population here). There is often a strong association of meat only coming from mammals. Even sometimes, sometimes, blasphemously even excluding chicken! Heretics. Human language can be such an odd, and very imprecise, thing.
This is why we should all speak in binary moving forward.
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In Texas, they don't even consider chicken to be meat.
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Pets used to eat mostly left-overs from their owner's plates. Then we started producing food specially for them, which is one of the main reasons hat they live about twice as long as they used to.
yes, and by that reducing the waste produced by humans, because their (pet) animals ate it all. for some animals you even get something in return, for example chickens, give them your left over waste food and you get eggs in return.
Having said that, the stuff in cat and dog food tens to be the stuff that humans don't want. Mechanically recovered head meat, the kind of stuff that only KFC would try to feed you out of one of their buckets.
And my cat loves fruit and vegetables. Western cat food seems to be mostly meat, but Japanese cat food has a lot more fruit, vegetables and seafood in it.
right, as if any fast food or processed meat products contain high quality meat...
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side note:
Fish are living creatures (as are shrimp, lobsters, and other seafood). Why is their flesh not considered "meat"?
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Byproducts are the high-nutrient part of the meat. Not my fault you don't like haggis.
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Mechanically recovered head meat, the kind of stuff that only KFC would try to feed you out of one of their buckets.
Well, they do say as much in their current advert here in UK: "The Chicken, the WHOLE chicken, and nothing but the chicken".
usual sky is falling claptrap (Score:4, Insightful)
64 million tons eh? That sounds like a big scary number. Oooh scary. That should get the panic merchants panicking. Of course since the atmosphere contains 2.996×10^12 tonnes already, one might imagine that an additional 0.002% is really not going to make much odds.
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What total denial is that? For at least 10 years (I recently found a post from back then) my position ha been that all things being equal more CO2= more temperature, and that the increase in atmospheric CO2 strongly correlates with the burning of fossil fuels in the last 200 years, if you work out the masses involved, about 60% of what we put up there hangs around. So where's the denial AC?
Libraries of Congress? (Score:2)
"In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts."
But how many Libraries of Congress does that correspond to? If we only count the shitty books...
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5.1 million tons of feces in Libraries of Congress is hard. Let's just do congress. Let's assume the average Congressman to be about 80kg, this times 535 is 42.8 tons... roughly 120 Congresses. But only if all the members are in.
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I don't know, but the summary mis-characterizes what Okin wrote ("[dog and cat] feces would be equivalent to the total garbage produced by 6.63 million Americans, or approximately the population of Massachusetts"), which is in turn wrong. According to the Massachusetts government [mass.gov], household waste was about 3.5 million tons in 2006 (about 2.98 pounds per capita, versus 4.4 pounds per capita in the EPA numbers for 2013).
However, that household waste number is a pretty small fraction of the total solid garbag
Anything Else... (Score:4, Informative)
...someone wants to invent to worry about?
To hear other doomsday sayers talk, the cats only eat wild birds. But anyway, nobody can or would want to do anything about this, so its not worth considering. We'll either live or die with our cats and dogs, and these "studies" aren't going to change a thing.
This has to be from The Onion (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps that this story will cause the SJWs to start unsuccessfully trying to retrain their little obligate carnivore companions to go vegan. While the rest of the world is laughing their heads off at Brooklyn and Berkeley, perhaps the rest of us can get caught up on our vaccinating.
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I once rescued a Royal Python (python regius) from a vegan who had spent the past year trying unsuccessfully to feed the snake vegetables.
Needless to say the snake never ate under her care, and while it ate like mad under mine, never recovered from the abuse and died. One of the very few snakes I have ever lost under my 30 years of rescuing injured and unwanted reptiles.
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Specifically, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sM8pDH-HMc [youtube.com]
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That was a joke. Now it's a serious proposal.
equivalent to the trash production of Massachusett (Score:5, Funny)
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I once heard a comedian put it this way: People from Massachusetts are the French of America. They think they're better than everyone, but nobody else can see why.
Re:equivalent to the trash production of Massachus (Score:5, Insightful)
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like reusing things rather than throwing them out
Hey, how about me? I've rebuilt and kept four pre-emmissions control cars running rather than continually buying new models. Where's my environmentalists love?
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I actually AM from Massachusetts, and having worked all around the country it's not really a mystery to me. It's educational attainment. Over 40% of residents here have a bachelor's degree, and 18% have a graduate degree. We also have -- going by test scores -- the best K-12 schools. Consequently a lot of things just work better here because people are somewhat better prepared for their jobs.
Which is not to say an educated person in Massachusetts is better than an educated person in Arkansas. Or even th
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Ok so (Score:2)
Ok so, in order to save the plant for their kids, all rational, liberal people will not have kids because it increases their footprint like nothing else and now won't have pets...
I sense an oncoming wave of depression driven suicide attempts culling the herd to make way for Idiocracy.
A rounding error (Score:2)
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons [wri.org] per year. Even if we take the numbers given at face value (and we should not) that's substantially less than 1% of all CO2 emissions.
Dogs and cats are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of the impacts of meat production in the United States, said Orkin.
Yeah they eat a lot of the nasty stuff we turn our noses up at. What? You thought Fluffy was getting top sirloin?
Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found. And what goes in, must come out. In terms of waste, Okin noted, feeding pets also leads to about 5.1 million tons of feces every year, roughly equivalent to the total trash production of Massachusetts.
Evidently they are unaware that while cats are obligate carnivores [wikipedia.org] dogs actually are omnivores [wikipedia.org] and can eat and thrive on most of the same foods you
Tons of Carbon dioxide = 3 times tons of carbon (Score:2)
When it comes to global warming, Fido and Fluffy are part of the problem, a new study by UCLA indicates. Pet ownership in the United States creates about 64 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, UCLA researchers found.
That's a weird definition of "significant" given that fossil fuel emissions of CO2 alone are around 10 billion tons [wri.org] per year.
That's ten billion tons of carbon, which comes out to about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. (Increased to about 40 billion (metric) tons now.)
https://www.livescience.com/47... [livescience.com]
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If you do a little research, you'll note that livestock is a primary source of methane, which is a lot more potent than C02.
My qualm is that pets are somehow consuming more meat than the humans in the US. There are over 325 million humans, and the article claims 164 million cats and dogs and consuming 25-30% of the meat..but they're a lot smaller than humans, and I'd imagine consume less meat than a typical person. Not to mention their food is also often largely plant-based, and the meat used is often such
get real (Score:2)
More twaddle (Score:5, Interesting)
The meat we feed to animals are cut-offs that don't make it into hotdogs. It has its own separate grade, "canning grade".
Meat is not grown *for* pets, although I'm sure there's some fru-fru company that does it. As such, the pets are eating waste, and the CO2 budget is zero.
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I'm sure there's some fru-fru company that does it
And I'm sure that fru-fru company is lying. Just don't look behind the curtain.
I wonder in their research. (Score:2)
Did they come across the fact that both dogs and cats are carnivores. Both can eat plant based foods but it causes them long term health problems..
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So? (Score:2)
And the purpose of telling us this is? Cats must eat meat, exclusively. They are true carnivores. And if humans weren't around, there would probably be just as many in the wild (plus tons and tons and tons more animals of every species). I am not giving up my pets nor going to force them to die young by feeding them food that they can't digest. And I don't plan on "offing" myself, either.
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Well, if your cat lived on wild critters, they'd have no carbon impact. It's feeding them meat that is produced by energy-intensive concentrated feeding operations that generates CO2.
You could reduce a lot of the carbon impact of your pet by feeding it from a locally produced beef, e.g. a meat share from a local farmer's co-op. You could also feed it less popular cuts that are essentially by-products of producing steaks. I hear dogs really like beef heart, and organ meats are actually an important part o
Study is dead wrong - waste (Score:5, Insightful)
This study is completely wrong. Cat and dog food are made with the offal, the meat by products that humans don't want to eat. Thus the cat and dog food contribute 0% to the impacts of meat production in the United States.
When you use a waste stream you don't contribute to the problem, you contribute to the solution.
This study reads like propaganda. Unfortunately ill-informed people will believe it.
Re: Study is dead wrong - waste (Score:2)
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Probably some group who claims that animals should not be kept as pets.
I agree, they should be kept as family, if they so choose to make your home theirs.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not like a truck full of cows shows up at the typical pet food factory. Pet food tends to be made from human food byproducts.
"The raw ingredients used in rendering are generally just leftovers of the meat, poultry and fishing industries."
- http://www.petmd.com/dog/nutri... [petmd.com]
There is no additional impact from cow farts by using animal already raised for human consumption to begin with. If the study got the manufacturing of the food this wrong, how badly was the rest botched?
Carbon emissions are quite fungible. (Score:2, Funny)
If we weren’t feeding our beloved pets with all those undesirable animal byproducts, we could easily use it to keep school cafeterias and Taco Bell supplied.
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There is also an anti-meat subtext to this article.
Compared to a plant-based diet, meat production "requires more energy, land and water and has greater environmental consequences in terms of erosion, pesticides and waste," the study found.
The message here is not just to get rid of your pets but to go vegan. Of course, this only replaces cow farts (on the farm) with vegan farts (that we all have to put up with standing in line at Whole Foods).
Not much to add (Score:3)
Can't wait for that dog/cat translator thing (Score:3)
So I can tell the dog the real reason he cannot fart in the living room--he is affecting the whole planet, combined with my own private efforts to bring about change on this planet
If pets add CO2, what about humans (Score:2)
global thermonuclear war (Score:3)
I recommend a sustained saturation bombing of the entire planet for at least a few decades. It'll take some serious dedication, but I bet that if we can eliminate all life on earth it would put an end to the consumption of resources and production of waste once and for all.
I assume that the goal here is to put the earth into a steady state where nothing ever changes. It seems that change always upsets someone, so we might as well get it over with once and be done with it rather than listening to constant complaining any time anything changes anything else.
On the other hand, if finding stuff to complain about is a hobby that some people enjoy then disregard this post and continue your regularly scheduled griping about whatever your latest object of rage is.
Living things do not change CO2 levels (Score:3)
Climate change due to CO2 happens because we're digging up carbon which is buried deep underground, converting it to CO2 by burning it, and releasing it into the atmosphere. This is increasing atmospheric CO2 levels far faster than new plants can remove it (and even if they remove it, it mostly gets released again as the dead plant is decomposes or is eaten). That buried carbon (oil, coal, gas) comes from ancient plants which died and were buried. Hence the term "fossil" fuels. They removed the CO2 from an atmosphere which had almost no oxygen and was very high in CO2, eventually converting it into the (relatively) oxygen-rich atmosphere we enjoy today. So burning fossil fuels drives the atmosphere back towards that ancient state where only plants could live and animals couldn't.
This whole "study" is part of a disturbing trend I'm seeing where people (either deliberately or ignorantly) analyze only part of the system to try to make something look good or bad, instead of properly analyzing the entire system. e.g. So-called zero emissions vehicles, which aren't really zero emissions. They just move the emissions from the tailpipe to the power plant which generates the electricity or hydrogen. Since their overall energy efficiency is only about 30% better than that of ICE vehicles (their operating cost is lower because coal is about 10x cheaper than gasoline per MJ), they're still causing a lot of CO2 emissions as opposed to carpooling or public transportation.
Re:how much CO2 does (Score:4, Funny)
It's less the CO2 production, it's more the fact that he contributes to global warming with all the hot air.
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Nobody has succeeded in restraining population growth, even China full out repressive regime didn't manage it.
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Couldn't make it past the 90 second mark due to the horrible voiceover. The narrator is either on drugs or has stupidly confused speaking slowly and adding ridiculous numbers of pauses for being profound.
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Don't feed the trolls. They produce too much CO2 when you do because then they keep on yapping.
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byrd poop (Score:4, Informative)
Been-there done-that. You know there have been wars [wikipedia.org] fought over byrd poop. Mostly because byrd poop (aka guano) was very helpful in making bombs (as well as being fertilizer for food)
Fortunately (unfortunately?), we discovered how to industrialize a process to fix nitrogen straight from the air (haber-bosch), so we don't need to annex and dig up islands [wikipedia.org] for byrd poop anymore. We just need to burn natural gas...