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.
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.
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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.
Accounting for emissions per kilogram isn’t that fair, can we account for emissions per 1000 kilocalorie? Or emissions per protein?
A Poorer & Nemecek meta-analysis (2008) found that beef uses 20x more land and produces 10-20x more GHG than alternative meat (like impossible meat or classic fake meat at the supermarket). Lean beef is 26g of protein, plant meat is 25g (plant meat does have half the kilokalories)
I did the research for you! All I ask is that you forever go vegan forever thank you (or maybe just try impossible mince in your spag bol next time, either or)
that paper isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
Until Exxon and BP are no longer in business and global shipping transitions to zero emissions, there is nothing an individual human can do that will have an impact in any way on global climate. They problem is systemic, not individual
If everyone decided to stop eating meat today, 10-15% of the entire planets GHG gasses drop, an area the size of all of the Americas can be rewilded (animal ag uses 50-100x the land per kilo of food over plant based), we stop wasting 70% of our antibiotics on animals, the plastic left in the ocean drops by half.
Most things in life you have little control over: you can’t easily stop driving to work, you can’t easily remove all your plastic usage, you can’t easily cut back on your electricity usage.
But you CAN easily cut out animal ag. Like, today. You can just look up plant based recipes for dinner instead of the meat ones. This is entirely consumer choice driven, entirely.
this assumes the industry stops.
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
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.
They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it
They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.
Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.
Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it
Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.
But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.
No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.
Plus it’s not just a supermarket. It’s all the little mediocre burger shops that prop up around it and other restaurants like it.
Take some responsibility. Do what’s right even if it won’t work globally.
If you think something is wrong and is fucking up the planet don’t just throw your hands up and go “meh it’s gonna be at the grocery store anyway might as well eat meat 5x a day hehe yum, guilt free.”
if it won’t work, why would anyone do it?
Yep, it’s definitely nobody’s fault people eat so much meat that the Amazon is deforested primarily for cattle and for soy (which is for cattle). Nobody feel bad or take responsibility because Exxon is greedy. Lmao gottem.
cattle only eat some 7% of the global soy crop.
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use-768x554.png
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.
Eating meat also means lots of animals have to suffer just for yout pleasure. I know people get triggert real fast if you mention how bad eating meat really is. It’s like a drug for some people.
Meat is a key food group on which majority of the world relies on live off.
Flying on the other hand is 100% discretionary but it seems people who whine about eating meat have zero problem going on vacations.
When hypocrisy is called out, they will have a melt down.
