Children’s lives are ruined by climate change

A prominent barrister in the United Kingdom says us eating meat is a crime against humanity and likens it to ‘ecoside’. Apparently cows emit a lot of methane. Other animals do as well but the levels emitted by bovines are far higher. On average just a single cow releases between 70 and 120kg of methane gas a year. Now, like carbon dioxide, methane is also a greenhouse gas but its greenhouse effects are 23 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Therefore, according to environmentalists and advocates of us going vegetarian, or at least consuming less amounts of meat, the more meat we consume, the more farmers will want to meet our demands for meat and a greater number of animals will emit between 70 and 120kg of methane every year. Apparently, if farmers didn’t breed cows for human consumption and they were left to breed in the natural way, their annual methane production would be less harmful, the way it was intended to be by God.

However, that being said, why blame just the cows and their consumption? For instance, even though agriculture, in general, is responsible for 18% of the total greenhouse gases that are released worldwide, there are other causes and sources of gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Everyone blames China for being the largest contributor to climate change because of its unending industrial activities. Notwithstanding this, in America alone, the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions is from human activities such as burning fossil fuels, like coal and petroleum products, for the production of heat, electricity and transport.

But whether or not you believe that climate change is real, you have to admit that there is really something weird going on with our weather patterns? Yes in Britain we had harsh winters and yes we had scorching summers but in the old days the years when they occurred were the exception and not rule. Yes there are certain pockets of the planet where it is inordinately hot or cold or particularly flood prone but there they are the rule and not the exception since we’ve always known about them.

Similarly with the Gulf temperatures, where it is generally very hot in the summer months, it is the rule and not the exception. But the frequently occurring extreme heat, extreme flooding, extreme hurricanes, extreme droughts and extreme glacier melts around the world, the new weather patterns seem increasingly to be a rule and not the exception. Scientists now claim that they are here to stay and will become more fierce and more frequent.

Last week at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York, 16-year-old Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, gave an impassioned speech about how the negative consequences of climate change were going to affect her generation and those generations after hers. Every other sentence was, ‘how dare you’, ‘with your empty words’ and that her childhood had been stolen. In fact, her speech went viral with many hailing her as the only hero who could persuade climate change deniers to concede to what is happening and for governments around the world to take action. However, there were many on social media who called her an actor, a drama queen and schooled by the left. They even scoffed at her tears which they likened to an Emmy Award exception speech, and one prominent leader sarcastically remarked, “She seems very happy.”

Even if she’s wrong about everything, she is right about one thing. Children’s lives are being ruined by climate change but more so for children in developing countries. In terms of numbers, more than 80% of the world’s pollutants come from industrial activities in only 20% of the nations and these nations are highly developed. So it seems that 20% of the rich world is causing so much pollution that 80% of the world, who are mostly poor, starving and struggling for everyday sustenance, are being negatively impacted by climate change, and all because of money.

So whether or not you like climate change activists, regardless of who they are or where they come from, you should really think rationally about what is being told to you.  Even though you might be living in a highly developed country with all the mod cons at your disposal, don’t forget that somewhere in a Third World country, a child could not eat or drink, maybe because of what you just threw out and how your mod con came about.