Feed your dog sweet potatoes to get nicer weather for the great grandchildren you shouldn’t have

It took 12 “researchers” to discover that the best way you, personally, can change the future global climate is to avoid having kids. If you do have kids, you can make up a bit, apparently, by all going vegetarian.

If that’s too hard, consider swapping your dog for a hamster. But if you have to have kids, dogs, and eat meat, at the very least, assuage your green guilt for living in the easiest, most bountiful time and place on Earth by feeding your dog some sweet potatoes occasionally instead of Chum.

Got that? How many tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds did it take to discover this, while not ever once google-searching for “reasons climate models are wrong/skill-less/barking fairy failures?

Marvel at the Washington Times sentence construction — this study comes with cows?

The study comes with livestock, notably cows, already targeted by the environmental movement for their prodigious methane production, prompting calls for people to reduce their beef consumption in order to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

This news is popular with all vegetarian, childless, dogless lizard owners:

 His study, which found that dogs and cats have a significant impact on carbon emissions as a result of their meat-based diets, met with howls from pet owners and a lukewarm reception even from some environmentalists who also happen to love dogs.

So, did the study calculate how many degrees foregoing all dogs in the US would cool the planet by? It doesn’t seem to say…

In his paper published last week, UCLA professor Gregory S. Okin found that meat-eating dogs and cats create the equivalent of 64 million tons of carbon dioxide per year based on the energy consumption required to produce their food, or the same impact as driving 13.6 million cars.

There is great care to package this message as the height of reasonableness, as if the people suggesting the climate-changing effects of dogs were all amicable, flexible, and sensible.

Readers can find an option that suits their level of penance: everything from not having kids at all down to occasional sweet potato snacks for your 250-pound mastiff. (Remember it’s not the outcome that matters when it comes to the planet, it’s the intent…)

“I like dogs and cats, and I’m definitely not recommending that people get rid of their pets or put them on a vegetarian diet, which would be unhealthy,” Mr. Okin said in a statement. “But I do think we should consider all the impacts that pets have, so we can have an honest conversation about them. Pets have many benefit,s but also a huge environmental impact.”

What they are really afraid of is that the Chinese will get as many pets per capita as the US:

“Americans are the largest pet owners in the world, but the tradition of pet ownership in the U.S. has considerable costs,” Mr. Okin said in his Aug. 2 paper, published in PLOS One. “As pet ownership increases in some developing countries, especially China, and trends continue in pet food toward higher content and quality of meat, globally, pet ownership will compound the environmental impacts of human dietary choices.”

It’s only the Earth at stake, so don’t put yourself out too much:

What’s the answer? Mr. Okin suggested making the transition from dogs and cats to smaller animals including hamsters, reptiles, and birds, or herbivores such as horses.

For a moment, I had an image of him studying dogs that are bigger than horses.

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