Human genome and, now, algae huckster ($600 million from Exxon) J. Craig Venter opines on global warming.
Greenwire reports:
Eliminating meat as food would help the environment as much as stopping coal and oil use, scientist J. Craig Venter told energy leaders yesterday.
Venter, who first sequenced the human genome and now is working on energy breakthroughs at his company J. Craig Venter Institute (Greenwire, July 14, 2009), said consuming meat taxes the planet as the world’s population expands toward 8 billion.
“All the amount of fertilizer, energy and water that goes into making a kilogram of beef,” Venter said, “is not sustainable as the 8 billion people start to change their standard of living. Funding agriculture, using animals as a source of food, has to be done away with as quickly as possible.
“That’s as important a problem to solve as just changing what we burn in our [engines]”…
Cannibalism would even be better than vegetarianism.
For marginal lands, it is efficient to convert grass that we can not eat into meat that we enjoy eating.