Posted on 04/04/2019 5:50:45 AM PDT by SJackson
Wannabe regulators such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have a tendency to get distracted by the small stuff when it comes to combating climate change. The rollout of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal offered a glimpse into the strange priorities of the environmental Left in Congress. The proposals have been widely mocked, from the suggestion we move away from air travel, to phasing out combustion engines for cars, to the now-deleted language about limiting “cow farts.” Here’s the thing though: Those farts, AKA methane gas from livestock flatulence, are a large and serious contributor to climate change.
But the government doesn’t have to do anything to curb consumer demand for meat. A San Francisco company called Impossible Foods just announced a partnership with Burger King to offer an alternative to animal meat on the burger menu, and besides being delicious, it could be huge for the fight against climate change.
Impossible Foods is essentially making test-tube meat. It looks like ground beef, smells like ground beef, and bleeds like it too. What makes this innovation so unique in a country that produces 50 billion pounds of meat annually is that it doesn’t actively condemn the learned habit of eating meat. Moral condemnation and finger wagging is considered a trademark of our vegetarian and vegan friends, along with rubbery and tasteless alternatives such as tofu and frozen veggie burgers.
It’s an attempt to modify behavior without engaging what content meat eaters have innocently learned to enjoy. You can’t get smokers to quit by giving them candy straws, you have to replicate the experience they crave with something safer. This is no different.
To fend off radicalism such as that of the Green New Deal, there has to be a reckoning with the reality of climate change and a movement toward innovation, not intense regulation, to address it. Young voters in particular are very animated by this issue, and in my personal experience the indifference from Washington to their concerns is having a radicalizing effect. When you have only one political party raising the alarm on climate and the other dismissing it, voters are going to have nowhere to place their concerns about rising temperatures and severe weather events except but with the Ocasio-Cortezes of the world. I recently spoke with a young voter who was so alarmed by climate change that the guardrails of democratic norms seemed somehow unimportant. We’re talking about the supposed end of the world here.
The Impossible Burger has been around for a few years building proof of concept and interest in the media. I first had one in Washington, D.C., at Founding Farmers. Putting aside the extra $2 in price, it was a great experience. Everything you want in a burger is there, with the added benefit of no concern of animal suffering or cruelty. For some, that will be worth the extra money. Burger King's “Impossible Whopper” will be $1 more than the standard burgers, so it will be the product's first larger test of the product to see if semi-guilty meat eaters will put their money where their mouth is. Eventually, the price will probably fall, as with all new technology over time. It could even become less expensive than an animal-based burger.
To unleash this product's potential and the environmental benefits of lab-grown meat, the government will actually need to do less, not more. Regulation of “cell cultured” meat is onerous, and it may only get harder as proponents of the status quo work to push Congress and the FDA to get involved. Despite what the alarmists say, there are reasonable solutions to climate change and reducing the United States’ share of carbon emissions. We have no way of knowing what the future holds or when our brightest minds will invent products that can change the world, but the growing presence of these artificial meats is evidence that innovators are working tirelessly on these problems. We don’t have to accept emergency limitations on personal liberty, massive government expansion, or frivolous crackdowns on planes, trains, and automobiles.
Keep an eye on game-changing companies such as Impossible Foods. If we let them, they could render the radical ideas of Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Socialists useless. Let's face it, we already knew they were antiquated ideas.
Forget cow farts, how many cows in the world? (1.5 billion)
How many termites in the world? Hard number to pin down but, “Termites release an estimated 176 billion pounds of “greenhouse gas” per year.”
176 billion POUNDS of a GAS.
Ask yourself, what does a termite fart weigh?
How many termite farts does it take to weigh 176 billion pounds?
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