Warning: This post is not a funny story, but true. It is some facts that should scare you if you care about your grand children.
Actually, "meat" made from vegetable sources is now being sold. Meat is protein, oil, fibers, and two other classes I forget - all available from plants. At one grocery store selling this synthetic meat for a few weeks, by accident, the hamburger paddies sold were made with the synthetic, not animal derived, meat and not one complaint was received. When store discovered the error, they corrected it as the synthetic meats was more expensive per pound. Mainly the financially well off vegetarians are intentionally buying it but some "health nuts" do too as the oil used is much better for your health than the fat of beef.
http://www.peta.org/features/vitro-meat-contest/#ixzz38rzBwpYN said:
UPDATE: Although the March 4, 2014, deadline for the prize {1 million dollars} has now expired, PETA’s in vitro chicken contest was a smashing success! Since we announced the prize, laboratory work on in vitro meat has come a long way, and a commercially viable beef hamburger or pork sausage are bound to happen in the not-too-distant future.
Synthetic meat is also made from cultured (greatly expanded in volume) stem cells of animals. See:
http://io9.com/meat-made-from-stem-cells-is-the-food-of-the-future-1579003346 but that approach is, at present, many times more costly per pound.
None of these sources has tapped a funding source, AFAIK, they could use: "carbon credits" (which are available for reduction of any green house gas, including methane, which is a much more damaging GHG). Rudiments, like beef cattle, daily discharge huge volumes of both CO2 and CH4 (out the front end mainly in belches). I am investigating how many times more credit should fairly be given for reducing release of a Kg of CH4 than a Kg of CO2. The correct answer with a 10 year time horizon is more than 100. At least two CH4 reduction programs at coal mines are now receiving carbon credits - I'm just too busy now to follow up and learn what greater than unity credit they are getting.
Brazil where I live has the world's largest herd of beef cattle and gets ~85% of its electric power from hydroelectric dams plus an additional nearly 5% for burning crushed sugar cane. (The heat released is much greater than needed for alcohol distillation.)* Also now at least half of the cars on the road used alcohol fuel which is slightly "carbon negative" due to cane roots left in the ground and the alcohol always in large storage tanks and a several hundred thousand car fuel tanks. All that stored alcohol has had its carbon removed from the air. The only economically way to do that is via growing green plants.
Thus by far the largest source of GHG in Brazil is the large cattle herd. If all the world stopped eating beef and used sugar cane alcohol fueled cars, Brazil would be slightly "carbon negative" and a major source of CO2 - tail pipes of gasoline fueled cars - would be eliminated.
When Greenland's ice cap melts as it is now with considerable rate of acceleration, NYC will be flooded (sea surface will be ~20 feet higher). Parts of Antarctica's floating ice sheets are both thinning and breaking up, moving northward into warmer water and melting; however, the warmer oceans are increasing the snow falls in Antarctica, so it will only add an additional 25 foot to the sea rise (not the more than 200 feet if it all melted.)
The economic loss of only a 30 foot sea rise is more than civilization can stand, if it happens in a few decades, as expected. Thus, perhaps you should consider becoming a vegetarian, not for PETA's reasons, but so your grand children don't try to survive, hungry in a restored stone age. Sea water permeates the soil far inland from the coast line. Why there is no fresh water to drink in many islands like Curacao, which imports all its drinking water from Venezuela. Curacao also cannot grow any crops, except for salt tolerant "key limes" grown in the Florida key islands for the same reason. The Heineken beer factory on Curacao uses distilled sea water. I know as I was there for their first independence day celebration eating the free goat stew and drinking very cheap (that day) Heineken beer. Only goats can live on the salt tolerant grass that will grow there so goat stew is the national dish.)
Not in the US, but globally this reduction in arable land (by salt inundation) will starve to death more than the total US population as in rice growing Asia more than half of the rice fields will be lost.
* This a major part of the reason why sugar cane alcohol has an ERE (Energy Return on Energy used) of nearly 10 while Iowa's corn based alcohol has an ERE of 1.5 at best (some studies, including one by Cornell) show that ERE is less than unity as normally natural gas provides the distillation heat. Also to accelerate growth in short growing season Iowa, many time more Nitrogen Fertilizers is used. Most of which is converted by soil bacteria in the very damaging NOx. In fact, from a green house gas POV, just using gasoline in your car is LESS damaging than using "gasohol" made with Iowa corn. Governments often do exactly the wrong thing if the ignorant masses that vote can be told lies that make more money for some (in this case a few already very rich Iowa industrial scale farms).
