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Cain Marko wrote:
Actually, the above dairy products are always recommended to be used sparsely by most ayurvedic vaidyas I have dealt with. Usually for special occasions or as naivedya/prasadam. Or it was seasonal.... Yogurt for example is mainly recommended only during summer and that too only during day time..
And direct consumption of milk is almost never recommended, especially for grown ups. Too many restrictions, for example, milk shouldn't be consumed with fruit.
No wonder many Indians are lactose intolerant.
Meat itself was rarely consumed and only few traditions, normally associated with Shakti forms sacrificed animals. And these were never large animals like cattle or pigs, which when farmed on large scale, are major contributors to warming.
In any case my point was that India was almost vegan or at least vegetarian.
I don't know about almost vegan. Curd and rice is very common. In many places curd/yogurt is served along side with vegetables. Drinks like lassi are also very common too.
I've not dealt with Ayurvedic vaidyas directly, but dairy consumption from ancient times has been a source of necessary fat and protein. I do agree used less often. I've not come across milk restriction for adults either. As it stands today, India is the largest producer of bovine milk in the world by far, and IMHO, that shouldn't change for the sake of climate change.
Meat consumption in the west is too high due to industrial slaughter which has political patronage. The biggest problem with buying meat in India, including chicken, is that much of it is from Halal butchers. Aside from that, I don't see a problem with meat consumption in India as large scale industrial slaughter is something most people will frown upon.
^ yes. Thankfully most of the problems of industrial dairy farming haven't flooded India. Most milk is still provided by locals esp. rural areas and even smaller towns.
I recall that Danon the mighty French yogurt maker couldn't break into the Indian market because of this.
Btw, what are the issues with halal butchers wrt climate change?
Cain Marko wrote:^ yes. Thankfully most of the problems of industrial dairy farming haven't flooded India. Most milk is still provided by locals esp. rural areas and even smaller towns.
I recall that Danon the mighty French yogurt maker couldn't break into the Indian market because of this.
Absolutely. Local dairies, some of which are elaborate operations, have the market for yogurt, ice cream, cheese/paneer/butter/ghee. Amul is the big one in India and nowadays, Patanjali ghee is also available in India and overseas. I personally enjoy Indian dairy products and will purchase Patanjali and Amul even in the US. India produces over 61 billion Kg of cow milk (2nd after the US at 91 billion Kg), but overall bovine milk production is somewhere near 150 billion Kg. The Indian water buffalo's milk has lots of protein and fat. Drink a few tumblers of that and it's better than a 1/2 pound beef-burger.
Halal is environmental mess, the animal is flailing around when it's throat is cut, with blood and excrement everywhere. Much more fresh water has to be used. Plus the meat is tough as the animal stiffens up due to shock - you've got to use more energy to cook it. Most halal slaughter houses in Europe are exempt from environmental laws and many European slaughterhouses have switched to halal to please the peacefuls, but more importantly to improve their bottom line.
Thank you for that article, definitely a more sophisticated view. I think it's pretty irresponsible of people, especially celebrities, to post pictures from years ago (as much as 20 to 30 years ago!) or from a different place and setting altogether, and add on the tag of "Amazon rain-forest is burning!!!" just to whip up hysteria. And like the author points out, all the hysteria makes it that much harder to actually engage with farmers in conservation efforts.
People in general love these generic quotes and platitudes like "the Amazon forest is the lungs of the world," and these quotes are repeated mindlessly, regardless of truth - when combined with headlines like "20% of the Amazon forest is gone already this year!" - we have a lethal combination. As the author of the article points out, this year is much worse than last year (forest-fire-wise), but not half-way bad compared to 10 to 20 years ago. It seems Amazon deforestation is already down 70% from the peak in 2004. But one hardly gets to hear those facts.
Cain Marko wrote:^ yes. Thankfully most of the problems of industrial dairy farming haven't flooded India. Most milk is still provided by locals esp. rural areas and even smaller towns.
I recall that Danon the mighty French yogurt maker couldn't break into the Indian market because of this.
Absolutely. Local dairies, some of which are elaborate operations, have the market for yogurt, ice cream, cheese/paneer/butter/ghee. Amul is the big one in India and nowadays, Patanjali ghee is also available in India and overseas. I personally enjoy Indian dairy products and will purchase Patanjali and Amul even in the US. India produces over 61 billion Kg of cow milk (2nd after the US at 91 billion Kg), but overall bovine milk production is somewhere near 150 billion Kg. The Indian water buffalo's milk has lots of protein and fat. Drink a few tumblers of that and it's better than a 1/2 pound beef-burger.
Halal is environmental mess, the animal is flailing around when it's throat is cut, with blood and excrement everywhere. Much more fresh water has to be used. Plus the meat is tough as the animal stiffens up due to shock - you've got to use more energy to cook it. Most halal slaughter houses in Europe are exempt from environmental laws and many European slaughterhouses have switched to halal to please the peacefuls, but more importantly to improve their bottom line.
Completely agree with purchase of amul or patanjali ghee. Pretty good stuff. However, can you or anybody confirm that this is real ghee, made from yogurt/dahi and not directly from butter? As I understand it a lot of commercial ghee production simply creates butter from cream and clarifies it through heat, which is not real ghee. The real deal is a result of culturing the cream with yogurt, churning it and then heating the solids, while the whey is separated as chas. I hear oiropean butter is more conducive to this.
Not sure about the halal method being any more or less messy/humane than others. The scientific literature seems to be divided. Personal experience shows that both methods can be mighty messy.
While idling across youtube I came across many climate change skeptic posters . They turned out not to be climate change skeptics but more of skeptics of Anthropogenic or human induced climate change Global warming. They base their arguments on research paper by Valentina Zharkhova of Northambria University . Here is the link :-
Climate Change/Ocean warming/Rise in CO2/melting of ice caps etc is real, very real. And this requires
However nonsense from plants like Greta Thunberg, herself a very well resourced kid talking about climate change and depriving benefits to developing countries reeks of hypocrisy and does not help. Of course she is being used. And no she is no hero. Or as much a pseudo-hero as malala.
Pseudo-ecologists and eco-terrorists are using fools like Greta as their tools. And it does not help solve this issue.
Mention “carbon capture and storage” — the process of trapping carbon dioxide produced in fossil-fuel burning or other industrial processes and burying it underground — in polite company, and you’re likely to be pounced on. It’s absurdly expensive. It can never be rolled out en masse. Storing massive amounts of CO2 below ground sounds risky. And it’s too late: Wind and solar have left it in the dust. The clear unassailable death knell, say the critics, is that even the fossil fuel industry, the biggest beneficiary, hasn’t embraced the technology.
It’s hard to find a friend for carbon capture and storage. Regulators and governments — though eager to subsidize solar or wind power — offer no such encouragement to capture carbon. Last November, the U.K. government, a one-time champion, stuck in the knife by cancelling a billion-pound (US$1.4 billion) fund earmarked for rolling out CCS.
That’s the tough reality for the chemists, geologists and engineers developing CCS for the past 20 years. When they began they were tarred as collaborators of the fossil fuel empire or as Don Quixotes chasing an impossible dream. Now their ugly duckling technology is ready to fly. And it’s having a very tough time spreading its wings.
But that may be changing. The lead-up to the Paris climate talks last year produced many road maps designed to steer the planet away from the cliff of 2 °C (3.6 °F) of warming. In each one, nestled among the windmills and solar farms, was the ugly duckling. Take it out of the equation and the costs of meeting the 2°C (3.6 °F) target would more than double.
Besides, as most of the road maps pointed out, even without coal- or gas-fired power stations, industrial processes, including steel and cement manufacturing, generate 15 percent of CO2 emissions. And combusting biomass, rather than coal, in a CCS power station could create “negative” emissions.
In report after report, fossil fuel industry groups and green non-governmental organizations supported CCS. “CCS could deliver 13% of the cumulative emissions reductions needed by 2050 to limit the global increase in temperature to 2 °C,” declared the International Energy Agency, a support group for energy-producing nations with a commitment to sustainable solutions.
At the very least, Paris seems to have made CCS a respectable topic.
“CCS plays a vital role as part of an economically sustainable route to meet climate mitigation goals with the 2050 time frame,” noted Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, in a recent Global CCS Institute report. Even a coalition of climate non-governmental organizations with impeccably green credentials released a report titled Closing the Gap on Climate: Why CCS is a Vital Part of the Solution.
One way to use the CO2 (after scrubbing of particulate matter) is to grow algae which then can be used to produce biogas. A completely closed-loop biosphere habitat can be set-up with only water and sunlight going in and heat coming out - in theory.
AFAIK, the only large scale experiment of CCS near Charleston, Illinois, did not come to fruition. The project fizzled out and the resources were shifted to setting up hundreds of windmills. There are not even prototype CCS projects (the one in Illinois was supposed to capture CO2 and store in deleted mines that abound in mid-east Illinois) leave alone full-fledged industrial size types.
Coupled to that CER market crashed. Here is the Wikipedia link.
In August 2008 prices for CERS were $20 a tonne. By September 2012, prices for CERS had collapsed to below $5. This was in response to the Eurozone debt crisis reducing industrial activity and the over-allocation of emission allowances under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. The Economist described the Clean Development Mechanism as a "complete disaster in the making" and "in need of a radical overhaul".[3] The Guardian also reported the prolonged downward trend in the price of CERs, which had been traded for as much as $20 (£12.50) a tonne before the global financial crisis to less than $3.[4] In October 2012, CER prices fell to a new low of 1.36 euros a tonne on the London ICE Futures Europe exchange.[5] In October 2012 Thomson Reuters Point Carbon calculated that the oversupply of units from the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation would be 1,400 million units for the period up to 2020. Point Carbon predicted that CER prices would to drop from €2 to 50 cents.[6] On 12 December 2012 CER prices reached another record low of 31 cents.[7]
There is more on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a body of UNIFCC that registers and certifies ARE producers as to how many CERs they can get and can sell.
And combusting biomass, rather than coal, in a CCS power station could create “negative” emissions.
A better way is to use tidal wave energy for CCS power station in the sense that there is limit to how much can it be done. What is needed is transport all the CO2 producing fuels to refineries on coastal areas and treatment of exhaust there itself while giving credit to biogas producers in terms of hydrogen fuel quantity.
This can be way to avoid penalizing helpless population for tighter emission controls; while maximizing efficiency of refineries + emissions treatment at coasts.
