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.
perfect is the enemy of good.
I wish vegans and vegetarians would be a bit more willing to promote this viewpoint. It’s insane how many otherwise normal people will refuse a single meat-free meal for no reason other than identity politics.
I’m not vegetarian but it baffles my mind how many people are against not eating meat. Some people seem to have made eating meat their whole personality and it’s insane to me. I don’t always eat meat and actively try to reduce it. Personally I’ve only met vegetarians who encourage this, even if I’m not willing to fully commit. I’m trying to make meat more of a luxury for myself and I think it’d be nice if most people did so. Better for the climate and better for the animals.
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
No offspring club let’s goo
Where
Probably the antinatalist sub
Edit: apparently we don’t have one
Nah, antinatalism is different.
That’s not a place i want to be a part of—it gets fairly toxic.
You know what would help even more? Eating other people’s kids.
And kicking people in the nuts 🤪
Nah you got to start at the source, more efficient, eat the (future-) parents.
I know a few guys and gals that drink straight from the spigot, so to speak.
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.
I hit a kid with my car once so now I can litter and stuff without guilt
Wow! You’re a true climate hero!
Here’s the perspective that helped me the most with this:
You don’t have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.
Even cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact. Start by ordering a vegetarian option instead of meat every once in a while. Experiment and find veggie alternatives you actually like, there are tons of options now. I heard someone refer to this as “microdosing veganism”, and it can really help make the change less exhausting.
Over time, you might even notice your tastes start to shift and vegan options become actually enjoyable instead of a “sacrifice”.
That’s meee! ✋
I still eat meat, but quite little, and quite rarely. There’s the odd salami at home, or every few months some ham for carbonara when I get guests over, or something like that. But it’s such a small percentage of what I consume now, I feel like I’m effectively vegetarian, anyways.
And yeah for most things I use alternatives because it turns out they’re often easier to handle. The Barista This Isn’t Milk is nice because it foams more reliably than actual milk and lasts much longer which is important as a single household.
Oh yeah, our house basically gave up on real milk once the alternatives got good. The shelf life alone was a huge driver.
lasts much longer which is important as a single household
This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.
cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact.
i doubt it. many people have done that, and meat production grows year-over-year every year.
All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won’t just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it’s only 6% of our global annual emissions that we’d save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won’t happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we’re having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.
It’s enough to make it difficult to keep to 2C climate targets on its own. Its not something we should ignore - especially since much of it comes in methane emissions which means reduction in it can be felt quicker and reduce chance of hitting feedback loops. We must tackle all sources
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
That’s also on top of other environmental issues that it contributes to besides just climate change. Land usage, water usage, waste runoff
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
And pesticide and fertilizer usage is lower
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products
Emissions are just a piece of it. There’s land use, consequences of this land use, etc, which involve changes in rain patterns, soil acidification, and so forth.
Anything to pass the blame away from you, eh? Are you not responsible for your own actions?
I agree that systemic change is important, too, but 6% of global emissions attributable to a single factor is HUGE. Plus, it’s not one or the other. Changes by individuals supports change at a systemic level.
You have anger problems as well as responsibility problems.
Exactly.
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.
What bother’s me about these sorts of posts is they don’t give people a consumption goal. Blindly telling everyone to consume less isn’t exactly fair. Say, for example, there’s person A who consumes 1 unit of red meat per month, and person B who consumes 100 units of red meat per month. If you say to everyone “consume 1 unit of red meat less per month”, well, now person A consumes 0 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 99 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Say, you tell everyone “halve your consumption of red meat per month”, well, now person A consumes 0.5 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 50 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Now, say, you tell everyone “you should try to eat at most 2 units of meat per month”, well now person A may happily stay at 1 unit knowing that they’re already below the target maximum, they may choose to decrease of their own accord, or they may feel validated to increase to 2 units of red meat per month, and person B will feel pressured to dramatically, and (importantly, imo) proportionally, reduce their consumption. Blindly saying that everyone should reduce their consumption in such an even manner disproportionately imparts blame, as there are likely those who are much more in need of reduction than others. It may even be that a very small minority of very large consumers are responsible for the majority of the overall consumption, so the “average” person may not even need to change their diet much, if at all, in order to meet a target maximum.
YSK you should stop guilting us peasants.
Everyone knows who’s to blame.
Tired of this shit.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.
Get out of here with your logic and reason!
There wouldn’t be a market for bottled water if water was clean and readily available for free.
The bottled water industry is way worse in Norway than in Spain for example.
Even if you justification added up, you could just go get barrels of water, you don’t need to get individual bottles.
You people actually make me sick with your BS
Most scandinavians don’t buy individual bottles because of the drinking water quality. water is usually available most places. And it’s always free in regular cafes and restaurants in Norway if you ask for it.
It’s solvable if the state does what’s it’s supposed to.
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?
:)
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.
YSK that doing nothing because a corporation is worse isn’t going to fix this mess and your own lifestyle is still unsustainable if you live a typical western lifestyle.
Also if you just wanted to do a little better using this chart you could replace beef with bacon. Surely even the most meat obsessed individual can manage that?
🙄
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 guiltI 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.
Also 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.
What about not having children?
Yup. Having kids is an order of magnitude worse for the environment than anything else you could do to lower your carbon footprint.
Unethical pro tip: mass shootings are good for the environment
Just came from another discussion about Cara killing the same number of people as guns do in Chicago, so by that logic: cars are good for the environment too.
Ohhh that is an interesting one, how low do traffic safety regulations need to be before cars become a net positive?
If people who care about climate don’t have children, there will be less people who try to put laws in place the help the situation.
I’m not sure not wanting to die in a food root is a gene.
Isn’t it egotistical to expect that your child will hold the same beliefs as you?
Also it’s morally the right thing to do if you have the choice.
Ok, sure. Tangentally related, have you seen the ending to the show The Good Place?
That show pissed me off so much. They actually straight up concluded that there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism, and then… just rewrote the universe’s metaphysics so that you get a pass for that, and American consumerism becomes standard religious doctrine
Genuinely, thank you for sharing. That’s an interesting takeaway and a little different than mine. What do you think matters more the ethics of destroying/replacing the system vs the ethics of negatively affecting/interfereing with those in the system? Example: Would it be ethical to kill/euthanize all the cows in a cramped feedlot along with whoever is in charge so it wouldn’t happen again?
Clearly murdering a farmer is also wrong, if there were easy answers then we wouldn’t be where we are now.
But, I think the Judge had it right when she said “find another tomato”, and the scriptwriters allowed the main characters to handwave it away as “no that’s too hard” without being challenged any further on it.
It goes back to OP’s original point; we don’t have to go to total war, we just need enough people to draw a few more lines that they stick to most of the time.
That’s almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.
But for overall impact, there’s one winner and it’s bigger than everything else put together.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Capitalism hates this one weird trick.
i’ve replaced beef in my diet with kangaroo for exactly this reason… it’s not the same, but it’s great in its own right and contains a load of iron. makes cutting beef out much easier
bonus: roo populations have to be managed otherwise in modern australia they tend to multiply uncontrolled and it’s a problem, so it’s either eat the meat or waste it… roo meat isn’t farmed
Do billionaires count as red meat? I am asking for a friend.
People will look at an image like this, read that 80% of deforestation in the Amazon happens for cattle, and go “I’m powerless, Exxon is bad” and continue to not only eat meat 5x a day but also actively try to convince other people that reducing their meat consumption is silly and they might as well keep eating it as much as they want because grocery stores will stock it anyway and Elon Musk rides a jet.
Taking planes, another big CO2 contributor. The sky is full of planes burning fuel.
