Rachel Premack: "Have Progressive Causes. Will Work for Tofu."

Gary North - August 04, 2016

You have never heard of Rachel Premack. Admit it.

Until July 3, neither had I.

On that day, Ms. Premack got her 15 minutes of fame. These minutes marked her as spokesperson for a Progressive generation that is utterly devoid of common sense.

At about 4:30 a.m., a news story that quoted Ms. Premack in detail was the #3 story on Drudge. It was right there under the bold headline: OBAMA SENT $400 MILLION CASH TO IRAN AS AMERICAN PRISONERS FREED.

That is a true "red meat" headline for meat-eaters, meaning just about everyone.

The story appeared on an otherwise invisible site, www.iceagenow.com. It's here.

Meat should be taxed at the wholesale level to raise the price and deter consumption, says a new report from the UN's International Research

Panel (IRP). This will (supposedly) save the environment and prevent global warming.

"I think it is extremely urgent," said Professor Maarten Hajer of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, lead author of the report. "All of the harmful effects on the environment and on health needs to be priced into food products."

This is the standard Progressive party line. It has not changed in a century. Progressives want to use state coercion to help shape people's behavior in ways deemed suitable by Progressives. The word "progressive" means: "nanny with a gun in a disarmed population." This is why Progressives want gun control. They want a state monopoly of gun ownership. "Nanny has your best interests at heart. You must listen to nanny. You must do what nanny says."

The article went on to quote Ms. Premack as an authority.

"The evidence is accumulating that meat, particularly red meat, is just a disaster for the environment," agrees Rachel Premack, a columnist for The Washington Post's Wongblog. [Actually, it's Wonkblog. It has nothing to do with China.]

"Agriculture today accounts for for one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions that promote global warming," says Premack, "and half of those agriculture emissions come from livestock."

"Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the US -- most of that being for meat, says Premack. "… For a kilogram of red meat, you need considerably more water than for plant products."

"Meanwhile, Denmark is considering a recommendation from its ethics council that all red meats should be taxed," Premack continues. "The council argued in May that Danes were "ethically obliged" to reduce their consumption to curb greenhouse gas emissions."

RED MEAT = RED FLAG

Red meat is a red flag to Progressives. It always has been. Hard-core Progressives have been vegetarians for over a century. This was true of the Fabians in England, who always had an oversupply of vegetarians in their ranks, most notably the playwright George Bernard Shaw.

The problem for the Fabians' ideological heirs is this: they also want to eradicate poverty by having the state steal from the rich and give to the poor (minus 50% for handling). This political program is promoted in the name of middle-class values. Their problem is this: middle-class values, most notably the desire to get rich, led to increased wealth whenever they are adopted in a private property-based society. Problem: increased wealth leads to an increase in the consumption of meat -- all over the world. This creates consternation among Progressives.

Consider this Progressive report:

People in developing countries currently consume on average one-third the meat and one-quarter of the milk products per capita compared to the richer North, but this is changing rapidly. The amount of meat consumed in developing countries over the past has grown three times as much as it did in the developed countries. The Livestock Revolution is primarily driven by demand. Poor people everywhere are eating more animal products as their incomes rise above poverty level and as they become urbanized. By 2020, the share of developing countries in total world meat consumption will expand from 52% currently to 63%. By 2020, developing countries will consume 107 million metric tons (mmt) more meat and 177 mmt more milk than they did in 1996/1998, dwarfing developed-country increases of 19 mmt for meat and 32 mmt for milk. The projected increase in livestock production will require annual feed consumption of cereals to rise by nearly 300 mmt by 2020. Nonetheless, the inflation-adjusted prices of livestock and feed commodities are expected to fall marginally by 2020, compared to precipitous declines in the past 20 y. Structural change in the diets of billions of people is a primal force not easily reversed by governments. The incomes and nutrition of millions of rural poor in developing countries are improving. Yet in many cases these dietary changes also create serious environmental and health problems that require active policy involvement to prevent irreversible consequences.

Oh, woe! Oh, conflicting goals! When the poor finally get richer, they eat more meat. What's a Progressive to do?

JUST STARTING OUT ON HER OWN

Ms. Premack is about 22 years old. She is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan. She can't seem to get a regular job. So, she works as an intern for the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos's red-ink producing hobby. This is her second post-graduation internship. If she works really hard, she believes, someone will start paying her a decent wage. In the meantime, she is probably being paid minimum wage. She lives close to the nation's capitol, where a modest starter home costs $625,000. But you can buy a condo for $430,000.

Ms. Premack writes a blog for the Post. Newspapers run blogs by unpaid authors and low-paid interns in order to raise their search rankings. Blogs are raw copy. Copy increases search results. This need not be edited copy -- just text.

Ms. Premack provides text. You can read some of her recent text here.

Why you might want to be skeptical of McDonald's latest food changes.

South Korea came up with a plan to cut down smoking. The opposite happened.

Whole Foods just got called out for a pretty big exaggeration.

Why rich neighbors are bad for you.

As you can see, she is deeply concerned about many issues. They are of no interest to the general public, but they are of interest to Progressives.

She is a Progressive young woman at a Progressive news site that is progressively going bankrupt.

She has her very own website, RachelPremack.com. If you have an obscure name, you can still get your name for a URL. Back in 1996, I had no trouble getting GaryNorth.com. Today, it's tough.

On her website, we read this:

Hi, I'm Rachel.

I am a business reporting intern at The Washington Post.

I previously wrote for Crain's Detroit Business and interned as a investigative reporter at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, where I also reported for the Post's Investigative and Metro sections.

I graduated from the University of Michigan in April 2016. There, I served as a senior news editor on my college's daily student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, leading business and government reporting. As a reporter, I used data and video to tell stories about race, gender, socioeconomics and other identities that affect students at U-M.

I like to read fiction, go on Wikipedia and study Korean. My favorite beverage is water.

This is what passes for a website when you are 22, an intern, and a Progressive.

I would not call her website's sales copy employer-motivating. The benefits to the employer are not clear. The web page announces this message: "Recent college graduate needs a real job writing stories about race, gender, and socioeconomics." The market, let me assure you, is crowded. The demand for articles on race, gender, and socioeconomics is weakening. It was not high to begin with.

But she has strong opinions about meat, the depletion of water, cattle, and global warming.

Global warming? What have cattle got to do with global warming? Ms. Premack did not offer evidence. There is evidence, but if she had presented it, this might have reduced her career positioning as a Concerned Progressive.

This was reported on The Daily Caller.

As part of its plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama administration is targeting the dairy industry to reduce methane emissions in their operations.

This comes despite falling methane emission levels across the economy since 1990.

The White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25 percent by 2020. Although U.S. agriculture only accounts for about 9 percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes up a sizeable portion of methane emissions -- which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Some of these methane emissions come from cow flatulence, exhaling and belching -- other livestock animals release methane as well.

It did not help her case when Time began a story on this problem this way. It even cited the same Danish study that she has relied on to make the case against meat.

Flatulent cows are not a laughing matter. (Pause.) OK, they are a laughing matter. And flatulent sheep and goats are almost as funny -- though not to the chickens and pigs in the pen next door. But pull-my-hoof livestock are a problem too.

The emissions produced by nature's woodwind section contain a nasty mix of many gasses, among them methane. Though carbon dioxide is the first gas that comes to mind when we think of greenhouse emissions, pound for pound, methane is more than 20 times more powerful in terms of its global warming potential. Methane doesn't linger in the atmosphere quite as long as CO2, and it's not produced industrially in anywhere near the same quantity, but it does its damage all the same -- and livestock toots out a surprisingly large share of it.

According to one Danish study, the average cow produces enough methane per year to do the same greenhouse damage as four tons of CO2. The average car, by contrast, produces just 2.7 tons. Multiply that by the planet's 1.5 billion cattle and buffalo and 1.8 billion smaller ruminants and you have the methane equivalent of two billion tons of CO2 per year. According to the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), livestock account for about 4.5% of all of the country's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Globally the figure is thought to be higher -- about six percent.

Since nobody is going to re-engineer the ruminant digestive tract anytime soon, the solutions are limited: stop eating meat or at least eat other kinds.

Well, there it is. Cows fart. They just will not stop. They drink water and fart. And with every bovine retort, the world gets closer to the Armageddon of global warming, aka climate change. Ms. Premack is Deeply Concerned. Therefore, she concludes, governments must raise taxes on meat. We must bring in a tofu nirvana.

As I said, it is not easy to be a Progressive. The general public just does not take seriously their deeply felt causes. For the next half century, she will be frustrated. Also underpaid.

So, if you know a Progressive publisher, send him a link to my article. There is a young woman out there who is ready to make the switch to a real job.

And remember: her favorite drink is water. It helps wash down the tofu.