A thick slab of beef browning in a skillet of oil could make way for braised quinoa or a tempeh confit. But don’t expect meat lovers to chain themselves to bridge pylons in protest. The conversion to a country of beany-boilers will arrive slowly, just as a warming climate crept unawares.
Gone will be the days when shoppers shook hands with beef, but join the queues of grass-holes and tree-huggers in the Republic of Vegantopia—formerly known as the misfortunes of accidental vegans.
Gundi Rhoades is a veterinarian caring for livestock in northern NSW for the last 22 years. In an article published in the Brisbane Times, she writes of the devastation she sees daily caused by a changing climate.
“Cattle that sold for thousands (of dollars) are now in sale yards a $70 per head,” she said.
Magnificent bloodline stock going for a song? It made me think what a fantastic marketing opportunity for a fast-food franchise: Not just a beef patty, but a pedigree burger.
The vet’s point is that bulls, or more specifically their unmentionables, are overheating in 40C/100F temperatures in what has in the past been a mild climate.
A bull with hot private parts can’t do what a bull has to do, which could mean cattle herds going the way of the dinosaur.
Rhoades went on to say about the prolonged hot and dry conditions in that part of Australia, “Piglets and calves are aborting.”
The vet’s point is that the food chain, especially the animal protein part, is deserting us and facing extinction from dinner plates. The finger of blame cannot be leveled solely at the rise of vegetarian Indian restaurants. A thing more sinister is at hand.
Meat Lover’s pizzas will disappear from menus as quickly as the Tasmanian Tiger vanished from a concrete zoo in 1936. A child of the future may ask the awkward question, “What is a meat lover?” To which the vegetarian parents scramble to Google or ask Siri to find a photo of a grease-stained menu.
Thomas Edison, who invented electricity, was one of the first to raise concerns that generating electricity to power the light bulb could, to say the least, be a bit tricky. Perhaps he guessed back in 1930 that his invention would see hundreds of household devices needing electrical power from coal-fired power stations. These power stations pump CO2 into the biosphere, which in turn heats the atmosphere.
Billions of households sweating it out, cool down by turning up the air conditioner. More coal is burned to make more electricity to power the air-cons, but the Earth is heating up. The flustered masses drop the thermostat to notch up more cold air…and you get the picture.
By the 1990s, computer models predicted an increase in temperature of around 2C. Everyone thought, be serious! Two degrees ain’t so bad, it’s nothing.
What the computer models didn’t tell scientists because data entry clerk Maybell Rutledge from Jackson Hole Wyoming forgot to put a comma between mind-boggling big sets of numbers was, a warmer climate means hotter summers.
Hotter summers means less rain. Less rain plus hotter summers means the countryside bursts into mega catastrophic, really, really, really big firestorms!
The world witnessed the tragic loss of uncontrolled fires.
The computers also forgot to mention that farm animals will die. One climate scientist did observe that menus in the future will offer big slabs of tofu on thin and crispy-crust pizzas.
Here in Australia, when large tracts of the country started to burn, politicians acted quickly booking Christmas holidays before queues got big at the airports.
One politician looked to the skies and declared the disaster was from a higher authority, and there is nothing we can do about it.
The current fires could be interpreted as God’s message much the same way he impressed Moses with a burning bush.
God, “Like, um, you better do something about this. And don’t even think to question the Lord.”
Mark Eggleton reporting in the Financial Review quotes the chief executive officer of the Clean Energy Council Kane Thornton as saying, “The technology’s proven, and we are seeing this around the world, so very clearly we can transition (from fossil fuel) much faster now than people had anticipated.”
This fire crisis in a country with no national energy policy makes Australians look like a mob of half-baked cow-pat kickers.
As the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison rummages through eggplant and lentils in a bain-marie in the parliament house kitchen hoping to find the last pork sausage to beef-up his flexitarian diet, he might think about renewable technology:
It changes as quickly as voters change their mind.
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