Good Move Officials Urge Chinese to Cut Meat Consumption


Chinese officials have announced dietary guidelines designed to reduce the country’s meat consumption by 50 percent. The campaign includes a series of billboards and advertisements featuring American celebrities Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron. “China’s move to cut meat consumption in half


would not only have a huge impact on public health, it is


also a massive leadership step towards drastically reducing carbon emissions and reaching the goals set out in the Paris agreement,” says Cameron.


Source: EcoWatch.com


Extinction Scenario Humans an Endangered Species


The UK-based nonprofit Global Chal- lenges Foundation’s annual report on global catastrophic risk (Tinyurl.com/ GlobalExtinctionReport) has found that the risk of human extinction is high- er than we might expect. The Stern Review (Tinyurl.com/The-Stern-Review), the British premier government report on the economics of climate change, estimates a 0.1 percent risk of human extinction every year. “We don’t expect any of the


events that we describe to happen in any specific 10-year period. They might—but on balance, they proba- bly won’t,” says Sebastian Farquhar, director of the Global Priorities Project. United Nations-approved climate mod- els estimate that temperatures might rise six to 10 degrees Celsius, which pushes the probability of extinction beyond 3 percent, even with a considerable decrease in carbon emissions. Nuclear war, natural disasters such


as volcanic eruptions, genetic engineer- ing gone awry and pandemic plagues figure in too, but the biggest threat might be the ever-increasing human population. According to a paper pub- lished in the journal Nature by Elizabeth Hadly, a professor of environmental biology at Stanford University, such growth has followed the trajectory of a typical invasive species and suggests there may be a looming global pop- ulation downturn. Still, humans are capable of exponentially growing their population several times over through the invention of new technologies and cultural shifts, regardless of Earth’s natural carrying capacity.


natural awakenings December 2016 9


Solar Sidewalk Missouri Debuts Energy-Generating Pavers


Missouri is rolling out a set of energy-generat- ing photovoltaic pavers along a section of the iconic Route 66 highway in a sidewalk pilot project—the first on a public right of way—in the U.S. The street pavers were developed by Solar Roadways, a company created by inven- tors Scott and Julie Brusaw, which raised more than $2.2 million in crowdfunding in 2014 to bring their technology to market.


The Brusaws claim that replacing all of America’s roads and parking lots with


their solar pavers would generate more than three times what the country con- sumed in electricity in 2009. The Missouri Department of Transportation considered their own crowdfund- ing campaign to support their energy experiment; plans called for the hexagonal solar panels to be fully installed and operational by the end of this year.


Source: NBC


iurii/Shutterstock.com


Vladimir Zhoga/Shutterstock.com


courtesy of Solar Roadways


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