by Hallu » Mon 15 Apr, 2013 6:15 pm
Yeah but that doesn't mean we should stop eating meat. The key is to diversify our food. With all the feral animals in Australia, we should eat more goat, wild pig, camel and donkey. Those are delicacies in a lot of countries. The next step is insects. It needs to be presented to the Western public (quite a bit of Asian countries already eat them) as a good source of food, and good food altogether. I wouldn't mind eating fried crickets, stir fried larvae (apparently the ones from hornets taste like almonds), etc... Same thing with birds : Aussies only eat chicken, where are the pigeons, the partridges, pheasants, etc... ? A goose is so rare here it costs 100 $ at the QV market in Melbourne... The only domain where Aussie is "ok" compared to Europe or America is seafood. We have so much that our waters aren't as over-fished as the Atlantic. But fish farming should be stopped, it's very polluting. Again, the focus should be variety, if there aren't enough barramundis or shrimp, just eat something else instead of increasing the prices or starting to farm them.
Btw, with methane being a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, it is worse to have a cow farting all year, than driving your SUV 75 000 km a year... If you combine all the cattle stations in Australia, I'd estimate it's about as bad for the environment as having a second 5 million people city like Sydney in Australia. Do that in the US or Argentina, where they have smaller stations but a greater number of cattle, and it's even worse.
And regarding the coal power plants in China, well at least some of their electricity is nuclear. And their plan is to be more and more nuclear (which is actually a good thing, unless they botch up the security like they're usually prone to do...). Australia could have ditched their coal power plants a long time ago, they sell a huge amount of uranium to France, which in turn could have provided them the expertise and technology to build nuclear plants in Oz. Instead they still haven't given the ok to shut down the oldest and most polluting plant in Australia near Traralgon... Way to go Australia...