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.
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”.
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.
If you only understood the damage you were doing.
Rather, I feel you fully understand the damage you are doing and are probably doing it deliberately
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.
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.
Do billionaires count as red meat? I am asking for a friend.
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Yeah let us do the microscopic differences while some industry totally ignores it…
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What about not having children?
How much less red meat to offset all the private jet that flew to Venice for bezos’ wedding?
Don’t go pointing at the obvious now. It’s not them, it’s you! Do your recycling, stop yapping about jets… /s
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.
No. The SINGLE best think you can do for the planet is not reproduce. Then something about not eating red meat and international travel. But the planet HATES your 5 kid family.
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
No offspring club let’s goo
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.
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.
So I wanted to have 9 kids but ended up finishing out at 3. So technically a savings of 6 kids! I’m helping the environment!
Being pedantic a nebulous “having one fewer kid” means nothing unless there’s a benchmark. I think they mean “having one fewer kid as a country average” so if the average Canadian has 1.26 children per women we want to see it .26 per women.
On an individual level I can’t unalive a child.
On an individual level I can’t unalive a child.
Well, with latest in Israeli technology…
Counterpoint
My kids aren’t brown lol
capitalism hates this one weird trick
Not for the carbon reduction, but for the reduced
slave laborwork forceStarve the beast.
The methodology here is kinda bs IMO.
They’re adding up the emissions of the descendants and dividing that by a parents life expectancy.
However, if a society achieves net 0, then surely the emissions of every person there in are 0, so it’s disingenuous to count them at today’s rates.
Its an attempt to illustrate the environmental cost of over-population, but it needs to be considered within the context of that methodology.
OK, if society achieves net zero, you can have as many children as you like.
But given that it’s been going up since the industrial revolution, and it’s still going up, it seems rather fanciful to suggest that it’s within our grasp.
A number of countries have reduced emissions massively, but realistically that mostly means “we’ve moved all our emissions to China”. I could buy green energy from my supplier, but for me that was still coming from a big coal power station a few miles up the road until last year when they finally closed it.
And frankly, if corporations can count the carbon a tree will capture over 30 years and somehow “offset” that against a dirty great factory when they hurl a few pennies at a third world farmer, then we can count the carbon our descendents will emit over that time as well.
Crap. I’m going to have to eat twice as much steak now to try and make up for you all. Steak every meal.
