When will the climate change madness end? Surely only with the complete shedding of Western techno-industrial civilisation. The case in point, banning the humble sausage, one of life’s remaining joys, to be cruelly snatched from us by … by … the climate change police!
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/08/wurst-idea-ever-germany-to-tax-sausages-to-fight-climate-change/
“German legislators have proposed raising the sales tax on meat from seven percent to 19 percent to fight climate change and improve animal welfare. Research has shown that greenhouse gas emissions from livestock account for a higher percentage of total global emissions than the world’s 1.2 billion automobiles, a fact underscored by some German Greens who are pushing for higher meat taxes. A United Nations report from 2012 found that the earth’s cattle population generates more carbon dioxide than automobiles, planes, and all other forms of transport combined. Moreover, the cow pies they deposit and the wind they break produce a third of the world’s methane emissions, considered 20 times more detrimental to the environment. According to Germany’s Federal Statistics Office, slaughterhouses in Germany killed 29.4 million pigs, cows, sheep, goats and horses during the first six months of 2019. During this period, Germany produced 3.9 million tons of meat, led by pork, the primary ingredient in German sausages. “I favor abolishing the VAT reduction for meat and using it (the increased revenues) instead for more animal welfare,” said Greens agriculture spokesman, Friedrich Ostendorff. The idea of raising meat taxes would be to reduce livestock numbers — as well as their gaseous output — by discouraging people from eating meat.”
That’s the emerging thing now, eliminate meat eating so the population of the Third World can continue to expand, which is not to say that global ecological collapse is a bad thing. No.
And, then there is plane travel:
http://news.trust.org/item/20190808003737-guliq
“Getting ready to cruise in first class from New York to Beijing? That will be 15.6 square meters of Arctic ice down the drain, thank you. Enjoy your flight. Such statistics detailing the environmental toll wrought by jet setting, or even just business travel, are the stuff of a new website, Shameplane.com, which aims to calculate how much Arctic sea ice melt a traveller's flight causes. Visited by people from 120 countries since its creation in March, shameplane.com is spreading the Swedish-born concept of "flygskam", or "flight shame, by exposing the environmental toll of just one person's plane trip, co-creator Victor Muller said on Wednesday. But Muller said he in fact created the site for himself, to ease his angst over 'flygskam,' and never anticipated its popularity. So far the site has seen 30,000 visitors, from Kyrgyzstan to South Sudan and Martinique. "It was just for me," Muller, 35, who lives in Sweden's capital Stockholm, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding "It was never intended to shame anyone," despite its name. And in fact it's not even only about air travel. Adopting environmentally conscious behaviors such as eschewing meat or living car-free for a year will cut the estimate for that New York-Beijing trip by about a fifth through emissions reduction, according to Shameplane.”
Now we are really getting somewhere. If carbon emissions are a worry then jet travelling will have to go, as it is a bigger polluter than meat. And global free trade is the worst of all, where country x sells a banana to country Y, and Y sells a banana to X. That makes no sense at all, so kiss free trade goodbye, which may not be a bad thing after all.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49181594