Meaty campaigns
Animal rights groups are asserting that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving a car, touting evidence from various scientific studies including a November report issued by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Groups are parading the message in PR and ad campaigns, and going it alone due to a failed to recruit environmentalist big boys such as Al Gore, according to The New York Times.
[PETA] plans to send billboard-toting trucks to the Colorado Convention Center in Denver when Mr. Gore lectures there on Oct. 2. The billboards will feature a cartoon image of Mr. Gore eating a drumstick next to the tagline: “Too Chicken to Go Vegetarian? Meat Is the No. 1 Cause of Global Warming.”
The group will also dispatch a Hummer, to a White House-sponsored climate forum, displaying a driver in a chicken suit and a vinyl banner proclaiming meat as the top cause of global warming.
Budget-starved (no pun intended) groups such as Vegan Outreach are spending for the cause. The group will run ads and links to its Web page on 10 blogs.
Environmentalists deem the effort unrealistic.
“We’ll encourage companies to make more efficient S.U.V.’s, and we’ll encourage consumers to buy them,” [Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club] said, “but we do not find lecturing people about personal consumption choices to be effective.”
Animal rights groups may realize that using environmentalists’ refusal to get involved provides effective publicity. However, we’ll have to wait and see what the groups display on billboards if/when they cut their losses on the environmental recruitment effort.
[...] However, the UN is held in high esteem by people around the globe. The last paragraph of that report includes suggestions for how to change the farming process that, along with lowered meat and dairy consumption, could work towards easing greenhouse gas emissions. If the connection between meat-eating and global warming were made more loudly by the UN, it would probably convince more people. For Alex Bruell’s take, click here. [...]
Great post!
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