Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there’s very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
One thing I never see brought up about the factory farm systems, maybe cause it is a bit of a distraction from animal rights, is that hypothetically these systems are turnkey human genocide infrastructure. It is infrastructure for a sort of perpetual animal, uh… regenocide? afterall.
Seems outlandish and unthinkable, maybe. But then again, all bets are off with the current administration in the US.
Given the amount of perpetual torture these very-likely-to-be-sentient creatures go through, it’s certainly worse than any genocide in history has ever been. Even if you only think that animals are capable of 5% of the suffering of humans.
Jesus. None of this actually matters, the cargo ships dwarf the output of a continent.
The entire worlds cargo ships emit 3% of the planets GHG emissions.
Animal agriculture is 15-20%. It’s equal to the ENTIRE transport sector (cars, trucks, boats, planes etc).
As a consumer you can’t easily change your cargo ship usage, or cars or planes, but you can absolutely change your diet, literally today.
I did! And I grew up on a dairy farm in rural NZ.
all of agriculture is only about 20%. animal agriculture is just a facet of that
Hahaha why do people just spout complete bullshit like they know anything.
A Poore and Nemeck 2008 meta-analysis covering 38,000 farms in 119 countries found that food systems contribute 26% of the planets GHG emissions, of which ~57% comes from animal ag. Meaning this study found ~15% of the entire planets GHG comes from animal ag.
Don’t forget, 70% of the food we grow is fed directly to farm animals instead of humans.
Stop spewing bullshit and look up the data?
poore-nemecek 2018 found no such thing.
I’m guessing this is your alt account huh. Because your last one got banned? Still speaking with the same monosyllabic single sentence “no-u” I see.
you are lying about the findings of a study and now making things up about other users. please seek help.
I could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.
As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.
Edit: folks still don’t get it. It’s not a matter of apathy, it’s pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone’s doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.
The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That’s on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You’d have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.
Not gonna happen. That’s just one industry.
Everyone’s not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It’s idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.
Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.
A quarter of emissions is nothing? Yeah the overwhelming majority is attributable to major oil companies, but you’re just being lazy and fatalistic. But sure, just sit there and wait for a paradigm shift to come save you from yourself I guess. Literally the first two search results I found:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148 https://www.c2es.org/content/regulating-transportation-sector-carbon-emissions/
from your article:
That said, other areas of life are a bigger source of greenhouse gases — for instance the transport and aviation sector. Driving 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) a year causes over 2 tons in CO2 equivalents, as does a round-trip flight from Europe to New York. That figure doubles when you fly from Europe to Asia or South America.
Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
It’s a manner of perspective, Coca Cola is considered one of the largest polluters on the planet but that’s not because corporate Coca Cola is out there polluting for funsies it’s because they make a product that individuals purchase and then individuals improperly dispose of. Sure no one person can stop Coca Cola from polluting but isn’t the pollution caused by your individual purchase your own responsibility?
No. Coke could make biodegradable packaging and choose not to because number go up. Next question.
And people could not purchase non biodegradable products
Veganism is good, necessary even, but more than voting we need to actually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Profit will destroy the planet unless we take control of the reigns from capital.
On a planet where 95-99% of people consume animal products, and still heavily participate in the systems of animal captivity, brutality, and exploitation; can you explain how overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism is going to make a vegan world happen?
Socialism will not automatically create vegan world, it hasn’t done so anywhere socialism exists. However, it does swap from profits as the end-all, be-all of how society is organized, to one where humanity can better plan production and meet people’s needs. If capital is in the driver’s seat, then the meat industry will continue to perpetuate said brutality and environmental destruction unimpeded. If humanity is in the driver’s seat, then we can actually work against what would be assured in a profit driven model.
The swap to veganism will never be instant, but it will be largely impossible without human supremacy over capital.
I agree with the sentiment, but a small percentage of individuals doing this will make no measurable difference. If billionaires and corporations made similar changes that would make a difference.
It really wouldn’t. If a corporation reduced their production of for example red meat, another one would simply scale up their production, because the demand of the market would remain unchanged.
Also, there’s already more than just a “small percentage” of people who have dropped red meat from their diet. All vegetarians, vegans, pescetarians, and people who eat meat but stopped eating red meat due to the environmental impact add up to several percentage points, which is absolutely measureable and impactful.
If a corporation reduced their production of for example red meat, another one would simply scale up their production
how can you prove this claim?
The prevalence of people telling everyone not to have kids in the context of our current culture is weird.
Alt-right: “Hey we’re trying to have as many kids as possible so there’s more of us, and less of you. Do us a favor and don’t have kids.”
Evidently a lot of people on the left: “Sounds good dude.”
May I propose a reasonable alternative? If you don’t want to have kids, cool, don’t have kids. If you want to have kids, have the financial and social security to do so responsibly, and a partner who wants the same thing, then have kids (but also go vegan, ride a bike, and raise them to do the same).
Aka, you do you.
I’m certainly not going to bring kids into this shitty world when I have no confidence whatsoever that they will have a good life. Things are going downhill FAST and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that situation is going to change. It’s going to be bad enough with just me having to live with this shit for another 20-30 years (assuming nothing kills me before that).
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
That’s entire lives of (likely) red meat consumption! I also am never having kids, so I can have my occasional steak without feeling guilt.
Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories
Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).
Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.
Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”
when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.
But that’s just it. The plane doesn’t burn less fuel because you didn’t buy a ticket. Hell, I’ve been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).
They’re polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There’s no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone’s life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.
You’re gonna need to come up with a better example, when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air. Companies usually want to be as cost effective as possible, meaning they will do the least amount of work needed to still get their customers money.
One big problem that regulation can tackle is that corporations seek to externalize as much of their costs as they can, which means the corporation won’t have to pay for the externalized cost, so they can sell their good/service cheaper, so consumption of the product increases, leading to an outsized environmental/societal cost compared to the cost of the product.
when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air
Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them
In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.
That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line. If there was a true societal shift and people flew less, airlines wouldn’t keep flying empty planes around for the fun of it. Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding. The narrative of “we are powerless to stop climate change because corporations are evil” is lazy. Corporations aren’t evil they are just amoral-they answer to market demand, whatever that is.
That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.
It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.
If there was a true societal shift and people flew less
The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.
I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.
If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.
Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.
There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.
These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.
Corporations aren’t evil
At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.
The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.
Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.
I mean, screw their economic calculus, if people stop flying they will go out of business. If people fly less, there will be fewer (and smaller) planes in the air. It’s not that complicated. I get that in practice most people can’t stop flying entirely but I’m exasperated by the leftist view that consumers are powerless because the global elites are using mind control to force us to fly to the Bahamas on holiday.
There is no “floor” to air travel, the same way there was no “floor” to passenger rail travel. Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry, but market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry. Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.
Nah, I think their biggest con is making people believe this exact discourse right here, don’t change their habits and keeping giving them money.
They are psychos that can care less about being blamed for this or that when they can simply keep bribing governments and never facing any consequences.
But they have real fear that people start being more conscious about their own consuming and stop giving them money.
Both things are important. And most importantly, vote with your wallet when thinking about what corporations do.
Sure. Vote with your wallet.
But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.
This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn’t actually reducing your carbon footprint because you’re not actually the one emitting the carbon.
This isn’t like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by driving less” it’s like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus”.
They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it, despite so much going to waste. Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it long term.
Exactly. This right here. Blame the politicians that deregulate the industry and let these corporations destroy the environment so they can post an extra .5% profit.
They’re using the money they got from their customers to lobby politicians to keep doing business as usual. They have so much power because people vote with their dollar, for them, and not for sustainable alternatives.
Blaming politicians while continuing to fund these industries won’t lead to anything.
It’s just corruption. The politicians could fix it … but money.
That gets difficult when billion dollar industries are involved, especially multiple. Some politicians will oppose the corruption, but the corporations will just fund the campaign of other politicians that are willing to act in their interest.
Transparency and a vigilant civil society with consequences for scandals can mitigate that somewhat, to varying degrees. But ultimately there’s corruption in every government at every level of governance. Capital interests always find a way, unfortunately.
YSK you should stop guilting us peasants.
Everyone knows who’s to blame.
Tired of this shit.I might be able get behind this argument when you talk about the rules on plastic straws. But red meat is terrible for the environment. As is driving cars. Especially ICE and especially when it’s just one person, i.e. most work commutes. Another thing is heating/ cooling homes btw.
I personally think there are a lot of small things we should do as individuals but I understand not everyone might want to do them. I also agree that it’s up to governments to do a lot of heavy lifting. That can be things like establishing district heating or improving public transport. But maybe it can also be adding higher taxes on red meat.
" higher taxes on red meat"
And there we go.
They’ll probably do that and those taxes will not be used to do anything climate related.
Or maybe buy some more carbon credits to legally pollute more.
I’m tired of this blameshifting and not touching the core problem, capitalism and endless growth of consumerism.
They can all go to hell.The income from a tax is generally not tied to a specific cause in most countries. If all it does is reducing meat consumption that would be a net benefit for the climate. And in this case also be beneficial for the economy as res meat isn’t healthy and contributes to a lot of disease among the population.
I saidit is NOT reducing meat consumption. fucking hell you people are dense
Calm down. It’s pretty well-known in economic circles that increasing taxes on a good will reduce consumption of said good, unless it’s absolutely lime maybe baby formula. Even then some poor people are likely to be priced out of the market or at least forced to reduce consumption.
🙄
This is such a colossal cop out. Without question corporations and individual billionaires produce more pollution by several magintuedes of individual people. But even that is a drop in the bucket between the deforestation, the years of transporting food for livestock and the final transportation of end product meat to the world population that can be fed on plant based protein.
Save this line for plastic straws and other frivolous demonization from those in private jets. But don’t use it as a thought terminating cliche aginst the single biggest source of historical human made climate change.
Oh please.
Every food needs to be transported.
Well not if it’s produced and consumed locally but you forget you’re in capitalism where it’s cheaper to get your quinoa from 4000km away, etc.
Also I don’t want to be fed on plant based protein.
The world population can be fed anyway but capitalism says we need to destroy a lot of food to keep the prices down.
And some regions don’t have food bcs it can’t get there or their crops are destroyed by war, again caused by capitalism.
There’s a reason you don’t hear about little Greta anymore, she got wise.
Everyone can parrot the BP carbon footprint garbage all they want, IDC. I have zero guiltAlso I don’t want to be fed on plant based protein.
At the core of literally every anti-vegan argument is, "but I don’t wanna!"
yep imagine not doing what you want
Do beliefs and principles even matter if, whenever they’re inconvenient, you ignore them and do whatever you were going to do anyway?
you have zero knowledge of my beliefs, let alone if I find them inconvenient or ignore them.
No need for your pedantic ramblings.
Going to have a cocktail in the sun with a little umbrella. ByeThis conversation is about whether eating meat is unethical, if you’re saying “I don’t wanna” then what you’re saying is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s ethical or not, because even if it were shown to be unethical and against your principles, you wouldn’t care, because “I don’t wanna.” Because your treats are more important to you than beliefs or principles.
I generally agree with your point (although I think we can hold corporations accountable and make whatever changes to our lifestyle that will help at the same time) but
There’s a reason you don’t hear about little Greta anymore, she got wise.
She was in the news just last month for trying to get humanitarian aid to Palestine. She was on a ship that tried to bypass Israel’s naval blockade and the Israelis seized the ship and it’s cargo and eventually deported the activists.
She’s still very active in her environmental activism as well.
You many not hear about her as much now that she’s a young woman and not a teenager, but your implication that she ‘got wise’ is incorrect. The mainstream media doesn’t like to report on her unless they can somehow make her look bad, because they don’t want to remind people that climate change is happening or encourage young people to follow her lead.
I know about all what you said.
And you’re completely wrong. It has nothing to do with being a teenager but with her anti-capitalist stance which she now understands is the core of the problem.
They never tried to make her look bad (except right wing news) on the contrary they hyped her up big time.
Now she’s noticably shunned by the media. There have been articles about that too.If you knew about her still being in the news, your statement about how you never hear about her anymore makes little sense.
She’s not a teenager any longer, that was my point. It was fairly unusual for a 15 year old to be so outspoken and articulate about the problem, which is why she used to get a lot of coverage.
Now she is just one young lady among millions who are outspoken about the issue, and the only thing that really distinguishes her from her peers is that she got famous for it at a young age.
Almost all mainstream news in the US is right wing, and I was clearly speaking about why they don’t report on her as much now as they originally did.
I’m sure that her anti capitalist stance has a lot to do with her not being in the news as much, nothing I said contradicts that.
From the way you worded your original statement it seemed like you were saying that the reason you don’t hear from her now was because she wised up and stopped doing it, not that she realized capitalism was the problem and that caused the media to stop reporting on her.
Now that I know what you meant it’s clear we are on the same side of the issue, so I’m not sure why you are insisting that I’m ‘completely wrong’ about it.
“f you knew about her still being in the news, your statement about how you never hear about her anymore makes little sense.”
I ment alternative news, not mainstream, that should be obvious. Where you also get real news about Palestine BTW.“Almost all mainstream news in the US is right wing”
I don’t live in the banana republic, even there the right wing Dem party and lib media fully supported her." it seemed like you were saying that the reason you don’t hear from her now was because she wised up and stopped doing it, not that she realized capitalism was the problem and that caused the media to stop reporting on her."
This is literally my statement: " It has nothing to do with being a teenager but with her anti-capitalist stance "And it does contradict your “it’s bcs she’s a teenager now”.
That is a totally different reason, which is not the cause of the media blackout.
And again you repeat that claim, so I definitely must insist you are wrong, again.
If not, we’re not on the same page.I ment alternative news, not mainstream, that should be obvious.
How would that be obvious when it was all over mainstream news?
I don’t live in the banana republic, even there the right wing Dem party and lib media fully supported her.
I don’t live in a “Banana Republic” either and I’m not sure that has anything to do with my claim about US News.
This is literally my statement: " It has nothing to do with being a teenager but with her anti-capitalist stance "
Yeah, I get that now that you have clarified. Did you expect me to divine the future to learn what you meant before I replied initially?
And it does contradict your “it’s bcs she’s a teenager now”.
Jesus fucking Christ. For the THIRD (3rd) time now, she is NOT a teenager any longer. She aged, just like everyone else did. Time continued to pass for her. She ‘grew up’. She is now 22 years old, which is NOT a teenager. Now that she is 22 years old, she is no longer considered a Teen. She was born in 2003. 2025-2003 = 22 years old. I’m not sure how much more plainly I can say the same thing.
Do you normally have this hard of a time comprehending the English language?
Let me tell you something, the consumer is to blame.
Nobody needs to orient their life around anything that they don’t choose. For example I willingly gave up my car and picked a job near me so I didn’t have to drive.
There wouldn’t be a market for bottled water if people wouldn’t drink the fucking shit.
This whole cognitive dissonance crap where you get to live a completely hedonistic trash-filled lifestyle, while justifying that you have the right because you’re sad about your earning… I am sick to death of this attitude in people.
Oh and the shitty product that exists? I must consume it, it’s not me for purchasing it and creating a market, it’s them for serving my need & this market.
It’s pretty lame to use the (imperically correct concept) of, no ethical consumption under capitalism to blanket absolve you of willful, informed choices. Humans all eat approx the same amount of calories, but the production of said calories are far from equal. Like you can be mad at the statistics but that doesn’t really change the reality of an unnecessary cultural pratice which massively contributes to climate.
I mean just for your own sake, stop this line of thinking at “I don’t care” instead of looking for a scapegoat to justify you indifference as praxis.
LOL
Tell me what is your job?
Don’t they sell crap?
Do you live in a hut?
Clean your ass with grass?
Piss off with your selfrightious BS.How about you go fuck yourself?
:)
Get out of here with your logic and reason!
