Month: July 2019

Johnstone: What Progressives Hopefully Learned From Russiagate

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Robert Mueller hearing on Tuesday was widely regarded as a humiliating disaster, not just by critics of the establishment Russia narrative, but by mainstream Democratic pundits. We haven’t seen a US official look so befuddled and disorganized during a congressional hearing since that time John McCain started babbling gibberish at James Comey, and he had a tumor eating his brain.

“A frail old man, unable to remember things, stumbling, refusing to answer basic questions,” tweeted liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore after the circus had ended. “I said it in 2017 and Mueller confirmed it today — All you pundits and moderates and lame Dems who told the public to put their faith in the esteemed Robert Mueller — just STFU from now on.”

“Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster,” tweetedvirulent Russiagater Laurence Tribe. “Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced.”

“On the optics, this was a disaster,” summarized NBC’s Chuck Todd.

As you’d expect, this widespread sentiment is shared by Trump himself, who told reporters after the hearing that “We had a very good day today.”

It is entirely possible that the Democrats and their allied media outlets handed Trump a re-election in 2020 with their nonstop fixation on a fact-free conspiracy theory that was doomed to failure, and many progressives have been pointing this out.

“This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up,” former MSNBC host Kristal Ball said after the hearing. “Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don’t know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers’ movement, whether we’re going to war with Iran?”

“It’s a self-soothing fantasy that makes people like Hillary Clinton and her allies feel better, but in reality all of this stood to help Trump, which is why from the very beginning I thought that this was such a disaster,” journalist Aaron Maté told CGTN America’s The Heat regarding the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

“It’s great to see more leftists & liberals recognizing that channelling the anti-Trump Resistance into a stupid conspiracy theory was a massive mistake, but for next time: let’s try harder to voice that when it’s actually happening for 2+ years, not after it finally collapses,” tweeted Maté, whose unparalleled reporting on the gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative won him an Izzy Award earlier this year.

Maté can reasonably be described as today’s leading authority on the Russiagate narrative and the arguments for and against it, and he is right not to only single out liberals in his criticism. It is true that there have been plenty of leftists and progressives who’ve continuously opposed Russiagate right from the get go, at least in part for the reasons Maté offers, but it is also true that it wasn’t just liberals who got lost in the conspiratorial haze of Trump-Russia hysteria.

I always get people on the left arguing with me about this, but it’s true. Being involved in progressive circles in 2017 was like watching a zombie apocalypse, with more and more leftists and Berners contracting the mind virus with every shrieking “bombshell” mass media Russiagate report. Maybe in your own small circle you didn’t see anyone succumb to the zombie outbreak, but everyone who interacted with a large and diverse cross-section of America’s true left in early-to-mid 2017 knows exactly what I’m talking about. Not everyone hopped on the Russiagate bandwagon, but many did, likely due in no small part to the fact that Bernie Sanders himself was continuously and forcefully pushing the collusion narrative on American progressives.

But it wasn’t even that they all necessarily bought into the propaganda. When Russiagate first started I pushed back against it hard on social media, especially on Facebook, and during that time I had a few Bernie people (who comprised a majority of my audience back then) admit to me that they knew the Russia stuff was probably fake, but they were helping to push it in the hope that it could hurt Trump. They didn’t honestly believe he’d get removed from office for Russian collusion, but they hoped that pushing for an investigation would help turn up impeachable evidence of corruption, or at least cause him political damage.

What do such people have to show for that strategy now? A new cold war reignited by a president who has been able to escalate world-threatening tensions against Russia with no resistance from his ostensible opposition whatsoever, and a 2020 election that now looks orders of magnitude harder to win than it ever should have been.

There are a couple of lessons that I hope progressives have learned from all this.

Firstly, I hope progressives have learned that we’re never going to manipulate our way into progressive reform. Truth is the one and only weapon we have. Trying to use a deceitful narrative to manipulate toward a desired end is something establishment loyalists do, but if progressives try it it will bite us in the ass every single time. If we try to manipulate the establishment away, we’re pitting our fledgling manipulation skills against manipulators who have generations of mastery in that field under their belt. You’re never, ever going to manipulate desired ends out of an establishment that is teeming with master manipulators. Truth is the only way.

Secondly, I hope that progressives are beginning to see that you can’t collaborate with the establishment to defeat the establishment. The oligarchic empire isn’t going to cooperate in its own destruction. Believing that you were going to be able to use an empire lackey like Robert “Iraq has WMDs” Mueller to bring the Executive Branch of the US empire to its knees was very foolish. If there’s any strength left in what remains of America’s progressive movement to effect real change, that change will come solely from grassroots populism, and it will be met with extremely forceful opposition from the Democratic establishment. If what you’re doing isn’t giving Nancy Pelosi literal night terrors, it’s worthless.

The establishment narrative managers are not done trying to herd America’s political left back into the establishment fold. New attempts to manipulate the mind of the American progressive are being workshopped currently, and they will likely be more subtle and devious than Russiagate was. Here’s hoping progressives learn their lesson and grow from it enough to prevent the next manipulation from succeeding.

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Rand Paul Takes an Unpleasant Cue from Trump, Offers Rep. Ilhan Omar Flight to Somalia

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) took a cue from President Donald Trump on Saturday, telling Breitbart News that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.)—who has been critical of American foreign and domestic policy since being elected to the House in 2018—should visit her birth country of Somalia in order to learn a thing or two.

“While I’m not saying we forcibly send her anywhere, I’m willing to contribute to buy her a ticket to go visit Somalia,” Paul said. “I think she can look and maybe learn a little bit about the disaster that is Somalia—that has no capitalism, has no God-given rights guaranteed in a Constitution, and has about seven different tribes that have been fighting each other for the last 40 years. And then maybe after she’s visited Somalia for a while, she might come back and appreciate America more.”

Paul’s comments are a sanitized version of remarks recently made by President Trump, in which he insinuated that the “Squad”—made up of Reps. Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.)—should go back whence they came.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he mused in a subsequent tweet. Except, every congresswoman in that bunch, with the exception of Omar, was born in the U.S.

The insinuation that the “Squad” should abstain from criticizing America simply because they have foreign ancestry drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Which makes sense: Go far enough back, and all of us are descended from people who were born outside the U.S. Yet we never hear modern presidents or members of Congress tell their political opponents that they should “go back” to Ireland, Italy, Poland, or Germany.

You’d think Paul, himself a longtime critic of American domestic policy on matters both economic and social, would know better than to boost a xenophobic line of attack. But the formerly libertarian-leaning senator has increasingly cozied up to Trump.

Born in Somalia, Omar immigrated to the U.S. at age 12. She is now 37. Her criticism of American capitalism does not make her less of a patriot, it just makes her wrong. The “love it or leave it” argument deployed by Trump, and now Paul, is a cheap tactic for marginalizing people who say things we don’t like. While Trump appears unshameable, Paul should remember what it’s like to have his patriotism questioned over policy: When he was running for Senate in 2010, the Kentucky Senate passed a resolution declaring him “outside the mainstream of American values” over his critique of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In that sense, Paul and Omar have a bit in common. Both are students and critics of American power. “She was almost like a cliché of a civic-minded new American,” Larry Jacobs, one of Omar’s professors at the University of Minnesota, told The New York Times in December. “She would quote the Declaration of Independence, he said, asking, ‘Why have we come up short?'”

Omar, of course, is not above firing off incendiary tweets and making her own boneheaded comments. On Monday, for instance, she retweeted a message expressing support for Paul’s assaulter, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison after attacking him at his Kentucky home.

Endorsing physical assault over a difference of opinion is its own brand of crass. Yell at Omar for that. But don’t forget to yell at Paul, who knows where the moral high ground is, and once upon a time, sought to stand on it.

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Rand Paul Takes an Unpleasant Cue from Trump, Offers Rep. Ilhan Omar Flight to Somalia

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) took a cue from President Donald Trump on Saturday, telling Breitbart News that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.)—who has been critical of American foreign and domestic policy since being elected to the House in 2018—should visit her birth country of Somalia in order to learn a thing or two.

“While I’m not saying we forcibly send her anywhere, I’m willing to contribute to buy her a ticket to go visit Somalia,” Paul said. “I think she can look and maybe learn a little bit about the disaster that is Somalia—that has no capitalism, has no God-given rights guaranteed in a Constitution, and has about seven different tribes that have been fighting each other for the last 40 years. And then maybe after she’s visited Somalia for a while, she might come back and appreciate America more.”

Paul’s comments are a sanitized version of remarks recently made by President Trump, in which he insinuated that the “Squad”—made up of Reps. Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass.)—should go back whence they came.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he mused in a subsequent tweet. Except, every congresswoman in that bunch, with the exception of Omar, was born in the U.S.

The insinuation that the “Squad” should abstain from criticizing America simply because they have foreign ancestry drew criticism from across the political spectrum. Which makes sense: Go far enough back, and all of us are descended from people who were born outside the U.S. Yet we never hear modern presidents or members of Congress tell their political opponents that they should “go back” to Ireland, Italy, Poland, or Germany.

You’d think Paul, himself a longtime critic of American domestic policy on matters both economic and social, would know better than to boost a xenophobic line of attack. But the formerly libertarian-leaning senator has increasingly cozied up to Trump.

Born in Somalia, Omar immigrated to the U.S. at age 12. She is now 37. Her criticism of American capitalism does not make her less of a patriot, it just makes her wrong. The “love it or leave it” argument deployed by Trump, and now Paul, is a cheap tactic for marginalizing people who say things we don’t like. While Trump appears unshameable, Paul should remember what it’s like to have his patriotism questioned over policy: When he was running for Senate in 2010, the Kentucky Senate passed a resolution declaring him “outside the mainstream of American values” over his critique of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In that sense, Paul and Omar have a bit in common. Both are students and critics of American power. “She was almost like a cliché of a civic-minded new American,” Larry Jacobs, one of Omar’s professors at the University of Minnesota, told The New York Times in December. “She would quote the Declaration of Independence, he said, asking, ‘Why have we come up short?'”

Omar, of course, is not above firing off incendiary tweets and making her own boneheaded comments. On Monday, for instance, she retweeted a message expressing support for Paul’s assaulter, who was sentenced to 30 days in prison after attacking him at his Kentucky home.

Endorsing physical assault over a difference of opinion is its own brand of crass. Yell at Omar for that. But don’t forget to yell at Paul, who knows where the moral high ground is, and once upon a time, sought to stand on it.

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Iran, Russia Planning Joint Naval Drill In Contested Gulf Waters

Russia and Iran are planning a joint naval exercise scheduled within the next year, commander of Iran’s Navy Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi announced Monday, according to state media. Semi-official Fars has reported it will take place by March 2020 in the Indian Ocean, and will be staged as far north as the strategic and increasingly tense Strait of Hormuz. 

“A coordination meeting will be held between the two sides in this regard,” he said while on a three day visit to Russia. “When we speak of the Indian Ocean, perhaps the most important part of which is the northern region where it’s linked to the Sea of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz and also the Persian Gulf,” Khanzadi said from Saint Petersburg.

File image of prior Russia-Iran naval drills in the Caspian Sea. 

The Iranian naval chief is in Moscow to sign a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the Russian Ministry of Defense for expanded mutual ties, and to observe a Russian naval parade. “This is the first MoU of its kind and can be regarded as a turning point in Tehran-Moscow military relations,” Khanzadi said of the largely symbolic agreement.

This is expected to include further development of military cooperation in the Caspian Sea, though nothing specific was indicated regarding the world’s largest inland body of water between Europe and Asia. 

Iran is also trying to shore up the support of powerful allies as it’s preparing to resist US and UK military pressures in the vital Strait of Hormuz, and as it attempts to weather Washington’s economic and energy sanctions storm.

This comes further as a weekend report in UK media said London is mulling offering Russia a seat at the table on its European-led maritime coalition to safeguard tankers from Iranian attacks, something Moscow would likely rebuff, or alternately Moscow could actually consider such a proposal in order to have a hand in ensuring the avoidance of escalation. 

Iran and Russia have going years back held joint naval drills in the Caspian Sea, however, wide-ranging drills in the Indian Ocean stretching up through the Persian Gulf would certainly gain the Pentagon’s attention and hold the potential for conflict as the region gets increasingly crowded with western naval assets to protect international shipping lanes. 

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Take a Deep Breath

Today’s post revolves around a subject I’ve been thinking about since early 2017, when I noticed much of the population separating into pro-Trump or anti-Trump factions that were becoming increasingly tribal, vitriolic and hostile. I wrote about it in the piece, Lost in the Political Wilderness, and things haven’t improved much since. Fortunately, around the same time I came across the theory of Spiral Dynamics which provided me with a useful framework through which to understand consciousness and the importance of guarding your mind and emotional state in a world that encourages fear, tribalism and anger.

Though we live in a time where more diverse information is available at our fingertips than at any other period in human history, we’re still presented with news and narratives via specific channels; whether that be an alternative media figure, a mass media outlet or a tech giant algorithm. The news and commentary that somehow gets in front of us on a daily basis shapes our view of the world just as it always has, and this in turn triggers certain emotions – joy, sadness, anger, fear, inspiration, etc. There’s space for all that in a human life, but the ones I’m most interested in for the purposes of this piece are fear and anger.

continue reading

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Over 80,000 Quakes Have Hit California Since July 4th, Aftershocks Headed “Toward The Garlock Fault”

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The recent seismic activity in the state of California has taken a strange turn.  According to the Los Angeles Times, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state since July 4th, and most of those quakes were aftershocks of the two very large events that hit the Ridgecrest area early in the month.  Over the past couple of weeks, however, a very unusual pattern has begun to emerge. 

We have started to see aftershocks creep toward two of the largest fault lines in southern California, and this is making seismologists very nervous.  The fact that we are seeing aftershocks “approaching the Owens Valley fault” is definitely alarming, but of far more concern is the fact that the Ridgecrest aftershocks are also headed “toward the Garlock fault”. 

The following comes from a local California news source…

According to a Los Angeles Times article , aftershocks of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake near Ridgecrest have been creeping into areas close to two major earthquake faults which is concerning for some seismologists on whether it could trigger another huge temblor.

“Some aftershocks have rumbled northwest of the Searles Valley earthquake, approaching the Owens Valley fault. That fault triggered an earthquake of perhaps magnitude 7.8 or 7.9 in 1872, one of the largest in California’s modern record,” the article explains. “The Ridgecrest aftershocks have also headed southeast toward the Garlock fault, a lesser-known fault capable of producing an earthquake of magnitude 8 or more. The fault along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert can send shaking south and west into Bakersfield and Ventura and Los Angeles counties.”

In the end, this could turn out to be nothing, but there are a couple of reasons why we want to keep a very close eye on the Garlock fault.

First of all, the Garlock fault is the second largest fault line in the entire state of California, and it is a major threat to southern California.

Secondly, the Garlock fault runs directly into the San Andreas fault, and many believe that a major quake along one could potentially trigger a major quake along the other.

If you are not familiar with the Garlock fault, the following is some basic information from Wikipedia…

The Garlock Fault marks the northern boundary of the area known as the Mojave Block, as well as the southern ends of the Sierra Nevada and the valleys of the westernmost Basin and Range province. Stretching for 250 kilometers (160 mi), it is the second-longest fault in California and one of the most prominent geological features in the southern part of the state.

The Garlock Fault runs from a junction with the San Andreas Faultin the Antelope Valley, eastward to a junction with the Death Valley Fault Zone in the eastern Mojave Desert. It is named after the historic mining town of Garlock, founded in 1894 by Eugene Garlock and now a ghost town.

So exactly what would a major quake along the Garlock fault look like?

Here is how the Los Angeles Times described what a “worst-case scenario” would look like…

A worst-case scenario would be a magnitude 7.7 earthquake that begins on the eastern end of the Garlock fault in eastern San Bernardino County and unlocks the fault to the southwest, bringing severe shaking to towns such as California City and Tehachapi; Edwards Air Force Base and Lancaster would see very strong shaking. Even Santa Clarita and the San Fernando Valley would see strong shaking, with much of the L.A. Basin and the San Gabriel Valley seeing moderate shaking — worse than what L.A. encountered last week.

No, that is definitely not a “worst-case scenario” for the Garlock fault, but without a doubt a major quake along the fault would be far more destructive than the earthquakes that we just witnessed on July 4th and 5th.

We were told that those earthquakes “did not cause much damage”, but now we are learning that those quakes actually “caused an estimated $200 million in damage”…

The powerful earthquake that rocked California earlier this month caused an estimated $200 million in damage.

The cost of damage from the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that hit southeastern California on July 5 and foreshocks that came a day earlier was estimated by catastrophe modeling business Karen Clark & Company.

So if relatively minor earthquakes can cause that much economic damage, what would an earthquake 1,000 times more powerful do?

Because someday “the Big One” is going to hit the San Andreas fault, and it is going to release so much energy that the quakes that we witnessed this month won’t even be worth comparing to it.  In fact, if a magnitude 9.1 earthquake were to hit southern California, it would be exactly 1000 times more powerful than the magnitude 7.1 quake that happened back on July 5th.

And even though it isn’t likely, scientists did admit that the large earthquakes that happened earlier this month could trigger a quake on the San Andreas fault…

Scientists knew almost immediately that two large quakes that hit near Ridgecrest earlier this month did not come from the San Andreas. But ever since, they’ve been studying whether the quakes could cause more seismic activity from other faults — including the San Andreas nearly 100 miles away. A new calculation conducted in recent weeks at the U.S. Geological Survey showed that there’s an extremely remote chance the San Andreas could be triggered from the Ridgecrest quakes.

Hopefully it will not happen any time soon, but seismologists assure us that it is only a matter of time before “the Big One” strikes California.  They have repeatedly warned us that the San Andreas fault is “locked and loaded” and that it has the potential to “unzip all at once”.  And when that day finally arrives, scientists have determined that the ground level could drop by up to 3 feet, and that would result in vast portions of southern California suddenly being covered by the Pacific Ocean.

We live at a time when our planet is becoming increasingly unstable, and we are witnessing major earthquakes and enormous volcanic eruptions all over the globe on a daily basis now.

For a long time the United States had been spared, but on July 4th and 5th that suddenly changed.

Since that time, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state of California, and this is just the beginning of the shaking that is coming.

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16-Year-Old Fortnite World Champion Wins Record-Breaking $3 Million Prize

16-year-old Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf of Pennsylvania has won a record-breaking $3 million prize in the Fortnite World Cup finals. 

Giersdorf pwn3d 99 other opponents, earning a total of 59 points over six matches. The runner up, ‘Psalm’, racked up 33 points, according to IGN. 

“Words can’t even explain [how I feel] right now,” said Giersdorf, speaking from the Champion’s circle. “I’m just so happy. Everything I’ve done, the grind, it’s all paid off. It’s just insane.“

Epic Games set aside a total of $40 million in prize money for the Fortnite World Cup, of which $10 million was awarded over the 10-week qualifying stage, and $30 million reserved for the New York City finals, according to Statista.

As the following chart illustrates, you could win the Tour de France, the Hawaii Ironman, the New York Marathon and the Masters Tournament in Augusta and still walk (or limp) away a poorer person than the world’s best Fortnite player. The tournament is part of Epic Games’ campaign of making Fortnite the most lucrative game in esports. Last year, the company pledged to put up $100 million in prize money for Fortnite events through the end of 2019. –Statista

So to all the Fortnite players who can’t seem to put the controller down, just tell Mom you’re working on your retirement when she yells at you to turn off the game and come upstairs for dinner. You’ve only got 250 million players to compete with. 

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“All-In!”

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

As outlined this weekend put call ratios are fairly low and benign going into this week’s Fed meeting. No worries.
Investor positioning? All in long it appears.

One indicator combination of interest, RYDEX account positioning as well as money flows. During times of market stress we can observe shifts to more bearish positioning and the RYDEX ratio moves higher, this last observed in larger size in 2015/2016. But the times of stress or fear are apparently over. Even last December’s 20% drubbing produced a much lesser spike during a big correction than ever before.

Indeed December’s 20% drop produced barely a blip. The reason? One can only speculate of course, but I suspect the massive switch to passive investing has a lot to do with it. Corrections don’t last anymore, that is been the investor lesson over the past 10 years. There is no reason to fear any longer.

Central banks always step in and after a few days the correction low is made. And investors have been right to take on that attitude. So far.

Indeed we saw the government step in with liquidity calls during Christmas and the Fed switching policy leading to the expected rate cut this week. The end result: A 0.04 ratio on RYDEX, indicating fully long account positioning.

But note that MFI (Money flow index) in the lower part of the chart. It shows a negative divergence. In early 2016 is showed a positive divergence on the new $SPX lows which firmed a major bottom. In October 2018 money flow showed a negative divergence on new highs, now another negative divergence. These divergences appear to be solid signals when the RYDEX ratio is at extremes. Last fall RYDEX also showed fully long positioning ahead of the 20% correction. What”s more extreme than 0.04? 0.03? 0? Everybody all in? Everybody all owning the same few stocks via index funds and ETFs.  Nobody ever selling because markets are risk free?

That’s called intelligent investing these days:

What happens if everybody long suddenly wants to sell for whatever reason? One has to wonder.

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Why Giving Up Meat Won’t Have Much of an Effect on Climate Change

The idea that giving up meat could help prevent climate change is gaining traction in  American media. “Want to Save the Planet? Go Vegan Study Says,” a Newsweek headline last year. The study, published in Science, found that “moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products has transformative potential,” including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from food production by half.

This past January, CNN declared, “By filling your plate with plant foods instead of animal foods, you can help save the  planet.” Specifically, the cable news operation cited a study in Nature that found that the production of animal products generates about 78 percent of agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions. To take account of the excess greenhouse gases emitted through meat production, the study’s lead author Marco Springmann proposed a food tax that would boost the price of beef by 40 percent and increase the price of other meats by 20 percent.

And according to an April 30 New York Times guide answering your questions about food and climate change, people who currently eat a meat-heavy diet could reduce their food-related greenhouse gas emissions by one-third, or more, by moving to a vegetarian diet. Foregoing dairy would reduce those emissions even further.

But before you give up your animal protein of choice, however, consider what Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has to say in a recent USA Today column. 

Lomborg crunched some numbers and argues that the threat of carnivory to the climate is greatly exaggerated. First, he points out that calculations, for the most part, ignore 80 percent of greenhouse emissions that we each contribute to the atmosphere from transportation, heating, lighting, and manufacturing. Count those sources, and the emissions drop from eschewing animal products becomes commensurately smaller. Second, Lomborg notes that the most optimistic figures result from adopting a totally vegan diet, rather than a mere vegetarian one. In addition, spending less money on meat likely means that a consumer would spend more money on other goods and services that result in the higher emissions of greenhouse gases.

Citing a 2015 Swedish study in Ecological Economics, Lomborg concludes that becoming a vegetarian would cut the average person’s greenhouse emissions by about 2 percent. He puts this reduction in context: Going vegetarian for the rest of your life would reduce your emissions by the exact same amount as spending a little more than $3 a year to buy cap-and-trade emissions allowances through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that operates among nine Northeastern states.

So while hectoring meat-eaters will do almost nothing to slow climate change, the demand for dietary sacrifice and culinary hair shirts could well alienate members of the public from considering more effective ways to address future man-made warming.

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Why Giving Up Meat Won’t Have Much of an Effect on Climate Change

The idea that giving up meat could help prevent climate change is gaining traction in  American media. “Want to Save the Planet? Go Vegan Study Says,” a Newsweek headline last year. The study, published in Science, found that “moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products has transformative potential,” including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from food production by half.

This past January, CNN declared, “By filling your plate with plant foods instead of animal foods, you can help save the  planet.” Specifically, the cable news operation cited a study in Nature that found that the production of animal products generates about 78 percent of agricultural greenhouse-gas emissions. To take account of the excess greenhouse gases emitted through meat production, the study’s lead author Marco Springmann proposed a food tax that would boost the price of beef by 40 percent and increase the price of other meats by 20 percent.

And according to an April 30 New York Times guide answering your questions about food and climate change, people who currently eat a meat-heavy diet could reduce their food-related greenhouse gas emissions by one-third, or more, by moving to a vegetarian diet. Foregoing dairy would reduce those emissions even further.

But before you give up your animal protein of choice, however, consider what Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has to say in a recent USA Today column. 

Lomborg crunched some numbers and argues that the threat of carnivory to the climate is greatly exaggerated. First, he points out that calculations, for the most part, ignore 80 percent of greenhouse emissions that we each contribute to the atmosphere from transportation, heating, lighting, and manufacturing. Count those sources, and the emissions drop from eschewing animal products becomes commensurately smaller. Second, Lomborg notes that the most optimistic figures result from adopting a totally vegan diet, rather than a mere vegetarian one. In addition, spending less money on meat likely means that a consumer would spend more money on other goods and services that result in the higher emissions of greenhouse gases.

Citing a 2015 Swedish study in Ecological Economics, Lomborg concludes that becoming a vegetarian would cut the average person’s greenhouse emissions by about 2 percent. He puts this reduction in context: Going vegetarian for the rest of your life would reduce your emissions by the exact same amount as spending a little more than $3 a year to buy cap-and-trade emissions allowances through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that operates among nine Northeastern states.

So while hectoring meat-eaters will do almost nothing to slow climate change, the demand for dietary sacrifice and culinary hair shirts could well alienate members of the public from considering more effective ways to address future man-made warming.

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