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We totally could if no one minded living without electricty, oil, hot water, meat products etc, for several months. Most of the factories and facilities that are causing the biggest problems are the most difficult to move away from in our modern lives.

For example. mills for chicken, beef and pork. PETA thrives on the cruelty and the disgusting conditions these places have. They concentrate on the pain and suffering of the animals. Then they tell people like me to stop eating meat and switch to soy and other proteins like nuts and such. Trouble is...I have food allergies to all the alternatives they have. PETA also forgets to mention the toxicity and the pollution these farms produce. The toxins and poisons range from the hormone induced diets, animal wastes, fertilizers if they grow their feed, the blood that results in the slaughter. These wastes high phosphorous, high nitrogen and many more, kill plants, contaminate fields and our ground water. how would we stop this?

By going to your suggestion, boycotting the foods, it would make PETA happy, it would also drive these farms out of business and those that are connection with them. But the boycott would only be effective if people practiced it on a large scale and if the people who needed to eat these foods had access to more 'friendly' meat, like the local chicken and duck farm who sells to local butchers and supplies these birds fresh if you're looking for some fresh chicken roast. Unfortunately the price if you live in the city for these birds or meat is high especially when all these foods are stamped with the eye catching guilt suppressing "ORGANIC" or "FREE RANGED"

The Amazon rosewoods are being cut down for lumber, furniture, and instruments, poor workers are paid less than 3 US dollar for their work a day. That rose wood guitar sitting in that music shop is ~166% more than the pay of a worker. The rose wood is obtained by illegal logging, illegal purchasing, and mislabeling, so whoever buys that guitar, never knows the wood came from protected areas of the rain forest and therefor unknowingly pays for the continuation of the logging.

What I'm saying is to boycott effectively would mean as a consumer we would have to informed of the entire line of work that resulted in the product. And for us to have an alternative to turn to if we boycott these products. And when people mention about biofuel as an alternatives these people need to be aware that unlike other countries where the carbon sequestration process is more equal in it's carbon production than oil production for corn oil, for the US the sequestration of carbon in corn versus the production of carbon dioxide for the production of corn oils is still by-far the largest difference compared to say Europe or China. So far corn bio fuel benefits in the US is very small, but no one wants to put money in bio fuel produced by algae.

icebergs aren't glaciers yo.,....try agian

Also, a vacuum has neither CO2 nor O2. The person you were arguing with claimed a high CO2 concentration was bad for plants, and you responded by telling him to try to grow plants in a vacuum.

Wow there are some people with very loose grasps of reality arguing here...sheesh.

@ Hugel--I was thinking of the power plants that are using cellulose, not sugar, to produce fuel. That can be any plant, like the switchgrass in the little video, which grows in marginal areas. It's not a plant that would be replacing a food crop, it's using a plant that is naturally occurring in areas not suitable for normal agriculture. This would still leave those marginal farming areas usable for grazing and providing habitat to the animals that live in that environment already, and give the farmer another "crop."

It's common in this part of the country to see landfills with methane wells. After the landfill is capped, the methane is used to produce electricity, and the land is developed at the end of its methane-producing lifespan. Since many of these landfills are municipally owned, quite often they become public parks.