Tuesday, June 1, 2021

 RIDING HERD ON THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF THE GODS

Can the Gods reduce their carbon footprint by demanding burnt sacrifices of Beyond Burger instead of beef ?  

But Netflix has superceded Hesiod, and its cthonic Gods belong to a more bloodthirsty pantheon. According to the Sacred Script of Lovecraft Country,  Cthulhu's kindred spirits devour galaxies like hors d'ouvres, which could complicate the carbon capture debate:

If Cthulhu heeds Megan Markle's counsel, and goes Vegan, will Yog Sothoth devour an infinite number of galaxies? 

Or will the Destroyer of Worlds achieve apotheosis as the avatar of galactic carbon capture? 
 
Moral philosphers at the beyond climate blog Astral Codex Ten are at work on these perplexing questions

Scott Alexander writes :
"... meat-eaters concerned about animal welfare should try to eat beef, not chicken. The logic goes: the average cow is very big and makes 405,000 calories of beef. The average chicken is very small and makes 3000 calories of chicken. If you eat the US average... eating chicken exposes 160x more animals to that suffering than eating beef...
Imagine a world where Yog Sothoth was constantly devouring galaxies full of intelligent life forms, an atrocity beyond your ability to imagine. But there was a charity that could stop him at a cost of $1 per galaxy…Someone thinks:
"I could eat chicken and offset it with $1, or I could eat beef and offset it with $2, I'm not actually going to do the offsetting, but the market has said chicken is less morally costly than beef".
Then that person eats chicken and destroys a galaxy, when they could have eaten beef and produced a few extra pounds of carbon.. "

In the end, it may boil down to the cost of a solar mass of Beyond Burger.