The Green party in Germany said it will ban industrial farming to reduce global warming if it comes to power.
The measure was proposed by Katrin Goering-Eckardt, the party’s leader in the Germany parliament, as part of a massive €100 billion project to finance climate initiatives.
For several years, climate change doomsayers have turned their attention to cattle, as a series of reports demonstrated that “livestock emissions” are more dangerous for the environment than automobiles.
A 2016 article at EcoWatch declared that greenhouse gas emissions from livestock account for a higher percentage of total global emissions than the world’s 1.2 billion automobiles.
Whereas the entire transportation sector accounts for only some 14 percent of global emissions, cows produce a remarkable 14.5 to 18 percent of the global total, the article noted.
Already in 2012, a United Nations report had asserted that the earth’s cattle population produces more CO2 than automobiles, planes, and all other forms of transport combined. Moreover, between belching, defecation, and flatulence, cows produce a third of the world’s methane emissions, which are considered 20 times more detrimental to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Radical greens concluded that it is time to reduce the global cow population, which means dramatically reducing western consumption of meat. As a result, vegans, vegetarians, and animal rights activists have joined climate change agitators in insisting that meat-eating is no longer an ecologically acceptable human activity.
In 2013, Germany’s Green party sought to launch a weekly “veggie day,” a project that reportedly failed to garner much support from ordinary citizens.
Recalling this fiasco, Christian Lindner, the leader of the pro-business Free Democrats, warned last week that the Greens “dream of a meat-less country.”
“Whoever wants to be vegan is free to do so, but the rest of us shouldn’t be banned from eating our schnitzel,” Mr Lindner said.
Nonetheless, Ms. Goering-Eckardt said that public attitudes have changed since then, and she believes that Germans are now more willing to make sacrifices to curb global warming.
“Many people have now understood that things are going to change fundamentally,” she said. “The question is whether we make the changes ourselves or allow ourselves to be swept over by the climate crisis.”
The politician did acknowledge that the “monumental task” of combating climate change would demand “massive investment” over a short time frame.
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