Earth's recent climate spiral.

[arewethereyet]

If you wanted to really make a debt in your carbon footprint...don't worry about your car or your tv.  Get rid of your pets.  

Personally, I think this is a big part of why environmental messaging has failed.  Every bit of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room with the notion that we must have less, and give up much.  Even going so far as to apply it to people.  That's a losers pitch, and wildly untrue.  We could go from one natural disaster to the next preparing ourselves for natural disaster, making our systems more resilient, more productive, and increasing access for those traditionally left by the wayside in this massive orgy of waste, fraud, and abuse.  It would be a good idea even if there were no climate change - it's an even better idea because there is.  

So, for example..rather than getting rid of our pets - we could provide them with a better quality feed in a regimented feeding plan, and the ingredients could be sourced sustainably (important, because the little fucks might be eating up to a fifth of the worlds meat and fish - the latter as wild stock collapse, no less).  That would require a local industry, and people to do it.  A (10lb) cat needs just shy of 16lbs of protein a year in a 30%feed.  2g per pound of body weight.  Humans, for reference, need .36 g per pound of bodyweight - though some advocate for as much as 1g per (about the same as a dog).  Takes 26g per to raise meatbirds.  Fish can consume half their body weight daily in protein.  The cool thing, is that there's a shitload of money in it.  Pet food costs more than human food by weight even though it's largely made from products that simply aren't marketable to humans here in the us.  

Here in our region, the profitability threshold for tilapia is $9/lb whole weight (and that's assuming you can market directly).  It currently sells for $5.99/lb cleaned and packaged.  This, compared to the $32.55/lb for premium wet pet chow, but closer to $3/lb on the low side of the high end for freeze dried kibble....so there's clearly some market space to position for while helping the planet, pets, and people.   Just changing the way we source fish (and it's happening whether we like it or not as a product of market forces) means that we could create more economic activity while feeding more animals (people included) a better quality diet, conserving all but 2% of water volume daily.  It's not high tech.  It's not a future solution awaiting necessary innovation.  For a bit of relief..if there's any to be had...that 5.99/lb shit is probably only fit for pet consumption, itself - imo.  Tastes like the dirty, shit filled, inefficient, environmentally unfriendly pools in the impoverished areas it's largely raised in...before being shipped halfway around the world....

There is nothing explicitly wrong with boundless consumption when the model is centered on the exploitation of living things..rather than fossil fuels.  Life begets life, and more efficiently begets life, than burning fossil fuels.  Fossil fuels major benefit is time-efficiency.  The short second it takes to release energy that has built up...through biological processes - no less, for quite some time.  I could disk and plow and fertilize (all bad ideas, environmentally speaking) in a day - it takes chickens following pigs following cattle a year to do the same - but they do a better job and with less environmental concern - all while hanging protein in a stable form using no fossil fuel energy whatsoever.  It's more labor intensive, granted - but that's just another way of saying "job creator"...and as the above numbers make clear, human labor is pretty damned good if we're comparing the carbon footprint of protein and carbs as fuel, rather than oil.  

We'll probably never get totally out of combustion fuels in ag - but biodeisel has shown itself to be viable at every scale of operation.  Read that again.  Every scale.  If you have one tractor you use twice a year - you can make biodeisel for it even under current heavily subsidized conditions and it will cost you less than gas.  If you have a fleet of combines that move across the landscape all day every day like locusts...you can fuel -them-  with biodeisel and not lose a bit of profit or utility.

Short version of a long story, we can have more while damaging less.  The reason we don't have that "more" now..is because that more is what someone else claims.  You can't have it, because it's their share, lol.  Never trust a rich fuck when they insist that you, personally, need to do your part by paying more to have less in a doomed world where their environmental costs are fixed and unchangeable while labor is not - and any subsequent allegedly inevitable damage is the responsibility of the public to remedy...not their own.  That's just your owner coopting environmentalism for fun and profit.  Greenwashed money laundering, where starvation and poverty are leverage, and the underlying production model appears to be to set the factory floor on fire while you gaslight it's employees... in order to get out of dodge flush with cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.

/rant (GOOOODDDAMNIT!!!!)

I stopped at 'getting rid of pets'....that may lower my carbon footprint but would certainly help my bank account.