Time to eat the dog, (but not the cat)...

...from PKH, this gem...the carbon footprint left by domesticated animals is out of proportion to the size of their paws. A medium-sized dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf. But rabbits and chickens are eco-friendly because they provide meat for their owners while a canary or a goldfish has little effect on the environment. At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same damage as running a plasma television, suggests the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. New Zealand based authors Robert (Bunty) Vale and Brenda Vale base their findings on the amount of land needed to grow food for pets ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs. They say an average Collie eats 164kg of meat and 95kg of cereals a year, giving it a high impact on the planet. But a pair of rabbits can produce 36 young annually, which would provide 72kg of meat and help decrease the owner's carbon footprint. Mr Bunty Vale, (right) an architect who claims to specialise in sustainable living, (for everything other than edible animals of course) said: "There are no recipes in the book. We're not actually saying it is time to eat the dog or the pussy. "We're just saying (farting loudly) that we need to think about and know the (ecological) impact of some of the things we do and that we take for granted." He explained that sustainability issues require us to make choices which are "as difficult as eating your dog". Mr Vale added: "Once you see where cats and dogs fit in your overall balance of things, you might decide to keep the cat but not also to have the two cars and the three bathrooms and be a meat-eater yourself." ...or have the private jet and fleet of Hummers and an open cast coal mine and participate in intensive rabbit farming. And while we're on the topic, what about the CO2 added to carbonated drinks, and belched out with gusto every day ? When will green left groups target Pepsi, Coke, and all the international brewing giants and demand that they replace their CO2 in our beverages with a non-greenhouse gas? When do the fun police start stepping in ?


Stop Press !!...Just weeks before an international conference on climate change, the United Nations signaled it was scaling back expectations of reaching agreement on a new treaty to slow global warming. Janos Pasztor, director of the secretary-general’s Climate Change Support Team, said Monday “it’s hard to say how far the conference will be able to go” because the U.S. Congress has not agreed on a climate bill, and industrialized nations have not agreed on targets to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions or funding to help developing countries limit their discharges... Copenhagen most likely won’t produce a treaty, but instead will push governments as far as they can go on the content of an agreement...more from WuWT here...

...and anyway, what is Copenhagen really all about ? A columnist in the Australian tells all here...