Norfolk Town's Schools First To Be Heated By Burning Cattle 83
A "trailblazing" Norfolk town has begun heating many of its buildings - including the schools - by burning oil made from melted-down cow and pig carcasses. The strategy is described as "equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas." Should schools have to offer vegetarian heating?
Re:Possibly... (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, cattle are renewable.
-Peter
Could be worse... (Score:1, Interesting)
...at first, I'd assumed it was a truncated headline, with the word "dung" left off of the end.
That would be nothing new at all, anyway.
What an outlandishly boneheaded statement. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Equal or lower in carbon footprint than natural gas."
Is someone here trying to tell us that prepping farmland, sewing and growing crops on it, feeding it to cattle which then ist slaughtered and/or dies of natural causes and blended into a pulp in order to get oil out of it has a lower carbon footprint than natural gas? And what about turning just the crops into biogas and skipping the cattle all together? Is this cattle-industry PR for the extra-stupid, or what?
Lower carbon footprint ... Give me a f*cking break! Everybody with more that 2 braincells knows that modern livestock agriculture has about the worst eco-balance you can get, apart from maybe burning coal for electricity or something. From entire state-sized patches of rainforest being uprooted each year for argentiniean beefsteak and Mc-Donalds Burgers, south-american soy being shipped halfway across the globe to austria to be fed to their cattle while the people there are starving all the way to long-chained uber-pesticides for chowcrop monocultures that seep into the groundwater and polute the entire foodchain for decades to come, industrial mass livestock is one of the cornerstones of our current enviromental problems and ought to be taxed heavyly worldwide. 30% VAT on every livestock - dead or alive - crossing international borders just to cover the eco-balance is what we really need. I strongly suspect the linked article to be some PR rubbish launched by a meat industry in recession.
Bottom line: Complete and utter bullshit. Mod accordingly and move along.
Re:Possibly... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a good reason for this. If you had read the article, they said that proponents of burning animal carcasses admitted that, by itself, it's a very inefficient method of heating, since so much energy has to go into raising these animals to maturity; you end up getting less energy from burning them than you did getting to that point.
However, the animals' primary use is for food, not heat. The carcasses burned are just a leftover waste product normally, so burning them for heat makes sense because otherwise the carcasses would just be trash.
Babies, unlike farm animals, aren't normally used for food. So, applying the logic above, it wouldn't make economic sense to raise them just to burn them.
I hope this answers your question.