If you think my reference to our obesity is made in a purely mean spirit, unrelated to the issue of climate change, consider the conclusions reached by a 2008 United Nations report on global warming. Meat production and factory farming contribute more to the emissions problem than transportation. The chair of the UN panel on climate change, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, suggested that people should eat one meat-free meal a day if they wished to make the most meaningful contribution to fighting greenhouse gases.
Despite the relative simplicity and sanity of this suggestion, I never hear it discussed on television by Al Gore or any other faux-environmentalist. Perhaps this suggestion makes most American environmentalists feel like total phonies many aren't making the most basic change they possibly can. India, on the other hand, has a historically huge vegetarian population. They have been fighting climate change for millennia.
The Obama administration's contention that India, while struggling to raise most of its one billion people out of poverty, should take on this extra environmental burden, is utterly absurd. Forty percent of the Indian population 399 million people, more than the entire American population is vegetarian, compared to only 3.2 percent of American people, according to The Vegetarian Times. As reported in The New York Times, Jairam Ramesh, Indian Minister of the Environment and Forests, observes that India has one of the lowest rates of carbon emissions per person, at 1.3 metric tons each year. The average American produces 19 metric tons. The U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center lists the U.S. as number nine on the list of top per capita emitters, whereas India is number 139.
These statistics expose the rank hypocrisy of the American government, and compounded with our lack of vegetarian commitment, cast the gravest aspersions on our moral posturing. As revealed by a simple Google search, neither Al Gore nor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are vegetarians, and they supposedly lead the environmentalist movement. (Al Gore might have a few optional veggie entrees at his celebrity galas, just so people don't think that he's you know full of crap). Bothering others to change their lives even if they already are living more decently than you is more fun than being one of those Greenpeace oddballs, who actually puts their ideals into practice.
To paraphrase George Orwell, it seems that the American people are just a bunch of bags for packing more and more meat in. Since no one ever sacrifices any trivial pleasure be it a second Hummer or a meat entree in order to improve life on Earth, I hardly see how America can be the world's guiding light. Obama speaks of regaining our moral authority, but the truth is that we have no more than anybody else certainly not more than India. How can we? Moral authority is determined by what you do and not by the self-righteous pose you assume. And if that is true, India (perhaps our most unappreciated ally) is undoubtedly our moral superior.
The pompous hectoring on the part of Clinton and Obama completely perplexes me. I don't understand how someone who represents a country of unrepentant polluters can walk up to the representative of a dynamic country of industrious people and say with a straight face, "change." Though I do not question whether carbon taxes and so forth are effective remedies for the problem, I do question whether they should be the only solution we take upon ourselves. It is better to be a nation of committed citizens than of passive acceptors of legislation. The famous vegetarian who led India to freedom insisted that, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world," and we cannot but follow his example if we wish to be real human beings and not just bags of meat.
