Don't blame cows for emissions
OPINION: From burping cows to grazing sheep, when it comes to global warming, the finger of blame is invariably pointed at the livestock farming industry these days.
We need energy to survive; energy to produce food; energy to provide a home; energy to keep warm; energy to better our lives.
The Stone Age man needed energy in the way of fire to keep warm and to cook their meat. Imagine if we only used wood as our energy source; didn’t use gas, coal, or fossil fuels of any sort. How many trees would be left now and where would we be now? Stone Age man evolved into using fire energy to heat metals to make tools to help make their lives easier.
Currently we use various minerals to process into metals to be able to make the tools, machines, computers, to produce the medicines we need to sustain our growth – and all these processes need energy to undertake.
We use electricity in many processes and we need energy to generate that electricity. We use electricity in many ways in our homes, factories, hospitals and even in Parliament to allow our politicians to debate, whether for better or worse.
The majority of our energy has over time been produced using fossil fuel but we now see people wanting to stop us from creating energy by using fossil fuels to protect the environment, yet they still use the resources that the energy has provided for all of us to use.
Everyone wants a better health system, more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses, but to achieve this we need more buildings, and to do this we need more resources to use to build these, but we also need more energy - either to mine the products or to produce the equipment that goes into the hospitals.
Whatever we do, it takes energy and without energy we won’t survive. Even those people who talk carbon neutral businesses don’t seem to take into account the energy used in the first place to produce the office, house, factories etc which we currently have.
We use water, gas, coal, fossil fuels, wind, sun, geothermal, and nuclear energy to provide us with better lives.
We in the western countries tend to take energy as a god-given right but think we should halt any further use of fossil fuels to produce energy as it’s going to stop climate change.
Yet in the world’s developing nations they want what we have and need energy to reach a better standard of living.
Why can’t those people in the world’s developing nations have what we have, which took energy to create? They need the energy to get those resources and products that we have already and in most cases the fossil fuel they use is mainly coal.
Even though you may think that we don’t need energy daily, in fact we do. We all need energy for health, warmth, travel, survival; in actual fact we need it for most everything.
- Peter Buckley is an executive of the Primary Land User Group (PLUG).
