Eating the rich is by far the most eco-friendly approach as it can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jeff bezos probably tastes like drywall and hooker spit.
Hooker spit. Lol. Imagine Jeff Bezos paying you hundreds of thousands to spit on him while trying to hide the fact that, you would gladly do it for free.
What about soy derivates being used as estrogens by the body suppressing testosterone. Plus to keep soy fields you have to spray more pesticides than everything else.
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Who cares how much meat I eat when there’s a billion cars, 2 billion factories and 1000 greedy billionaires burning the world to the ground?
This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:
“Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment.”
…which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.
Takeaway from the article shouldn’t be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it’s also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.
That’s both absolutely true and a massive distraction from the point. An environmentally friendly diet that includes meat is going to involve sustainable hunting not factory farming. In comparison an environmentally friendly vegan diet is staples of meat replacements and not trying to get fancy with it. It’s shit like beans instead of meat, tofu and tempeh when you feel fancy. It means rejecting substitutes that are too environmentally costly such as agave nectar as a sweetener (you should probably use beet or cane based sweetener instead).
So in short eat vegan like a poor vegan not like a rich person who thinks veganism is trendy
Yes, I think it’s vital to avoid thinking in absolutes over carbon footprints if we are to make real progress. We can argue endlessly over the “necessity” of consuming meat, but that becomes a distraction. Many things are not “necessary”, but most people are not realistically going to live in caves wearing carbon neutral hair shirts.
We need to continue increasing transparency on the impact of different animal products, so consumers can make informed choices. While also accepting they may not always be perfect.
Tax meat, subsidize healthy meat alternatives.
Could start by removing subsidies.
“Healthy meat alternatives” you can keep your phytoestrogens, soy and antinutrients. Thanks
What’s wrong with phytoestrogens?
It sounds scary
/s
Having fewer children is the number one thing you can do. And it’s not even close.
I mean, do the other things anyway if you like. They can’t hurt. They may even save you money. But they won’t save an overpopulated planet.
It’s not “one thing” option, you can do most of those, even all of them.
So what should I do with this extra kid?
Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, study finds.
OK, but what if instead of going vegan, I just don’t have kids. Because adding more people to the world also creates more greenhouse gasses.
How bout both? :)
Instead of going vegan or not having kids, I died when I was 5. Because living also creates more greenhouse gasses.
In fact, having a small footprint is just a matter of choosing how miserable you’re willing to make your life.
Unfortunately the Earth cannot sustainably support so many people living COMFORTABLY, and eating WHATEVER WE LIKE. The more people, the more miserable is the globally sustainable way of life.
Curbing population growth - not Thanos-like, but through education and availability of contraceptive methods - is the only way we can all have the cake (and the meat) and eat it.
Many wealthy countries have their population declining. Maybe if we get to the same level of wealthiness everywhere, less people would engage in procreation.
In any case, if we just do nothing and the doomsday evangelists are even nearly right, extreme weather, plage and famine caused by climate change will indeed curb the population. Eventually it reaches equilibrium.
In this case, the faster we get to the edge of the abyss, the quicker the situation will solve itself.
What if you don’t have kids and just make an effort to reduce intake of animal products knowing it contributes to global collapse and also represents a modern holocaust.
Animal products don’t have to be as all or nothing as having kids.
That moment when your veganism goes so hard you commit a hate crime on the internet implicitly comparing Jews to cattle
Edit: I’m from Poland, the country where most of the Holocaust happened - this is where the Jewish population was the highest and where Germans build their death camps. We read about it extensively at school, including eyewitness accounts describing the atrocities involved in this horrific campaign of human extermination, from the home of the Jew, to the ghetto, to the transport train, to the camp, to the gas chamber and to the furnace. Many of us heard those stories from our grandparents, of their neighbors being humiliated and taken away, ghettos liquidated, and public executions. I don’t know what kind of deplorable scumbag one has to be to equate factory farming with the Holocaust.
*implicitly comparing the treatment of Jews during the holocaust to the treatment of cattle today
also, you can compare two things without equating them
I think if you actually cared about the words you wrote, you wouldn’t have used them as the basis of a lazy strawman to win an argument on the internet against veganism
I don’t care about arguing about veganism. Just stop bringing up stuff like this. Also, do you think calling something a “modern holocaust” is not a comparison in terms of scale of harm? As opposed to every other time those words are used?
Edit: If you want to argue for veganism, stop bringing up Shoah. It’s disgusting, downplaying the severity of the genocide, and earns you no favors with the general population. It has negative convincing power.
It’s 90 billion every year. If their suffering is 15000 less significant, that’s one holocaust a year, every year, since many years. Why are you using Shoah, if holocaust is so obviously only one thing? And why are the voices of holocaust victims/survivors/relatives totally fine to silence? Many have made that comparison, shouldn’t they know best whether it’s comparable???
You are correct however that this argument is utterly stupid and useless to make, esp. online, where there is zero context.
100 corporations contribute 71% of all emissions, and I’m supposed to stop eating the pork I bought from a local farmer? Fuck that noise!
Exactly. Not having kids covers my any excess from meat and driving easily.
We’ve been eating meat for millennia, while climate change has only been an issue for a century, yet somehow meat eating is the problem, not the billions of people we have added.
Fossil fuels are the problem, but not eating meat is a juicy, very low hanging fruit.
There is no other way to prevent that much emissions for basically not changing anything. You will still eat 3 meals a day for a similar price.
It’s not nothing to me. Eating isn’t a mere chore, I eat because it is enjoyable. Vegan entrees just are not consistently palatable to me. Take away meat and I’m sorry, but my list of reasons to live will dwindle.
And besides, I’d argue not having kids is an even lower hanging fruit by your reasoning. That even saves money. A lot of money.
Take away meat and I’m sorry, but my list of reasons to live will dwindle.
Seems you haven’t had a good veggie dish yet. I totally get how enjoyable food is central for a happy life, but you don’t enjoy it because it was killed instead of harvested. I’m pretty sure you have a few veggie foods you enjoy, maybe without realizing they don’t contain meat.
And besides, I’d argue not having kids is an even lower hanging fruit by your reasoning. That even saves money. A lot of money.
As said in a nearby comment: Only if you didn’t want to have kids anyways. In which case it should not be counted as a saving.
If you want to have kids but don’t because of climate, that’s probably tougher to stomach than a slight composition change on your plate.
Seems you haven’t had a good veggie dish yet. I totally get how enjoyable food is central for a happy life, but you don’t enjoy it because it was killed instead of harvested. I’m pretty sure you have a few veggie foods you enjoy, maybe without realizing they don’t contain meat.
Or maybe I have different tastes than you.
I really hate that attitude that because it isn’t much of a sacrifice for you, it isn’t for anyone else. People are different.
Heck, even if I found your one magical dish, I’m not going to eat it for the rest of my life. Even with meat, I choose variety.
As said in a nearby comment: Only if you didn’t want to have kids anyways. In which case it should not be counted as a saving.
If you want to have kids but don’t because of climate, that’s probably tougher to stomach than a slight composition change on your plate.
Oh, so personal preference suddenly matters? Seems you haven’t found the right hobby yet. I totally get how kids are central for a happy life, but you don’t enjoy them because they are your kids instead of pets. I’m pretty sure you have a few activities you enjoy, maybe without realizing they don’t contain kids.
See how you sound?
How about this, you don’t eat meat, I’ll not have kids? We’ll see in 100 years who had a more meaningful impact on climate change.
The problem is not the amount of people but how much each individual consumes. Getting meat out of your diet is a simple and a small sacrifice. Besides the health benefits there is also the fact that you don’t contribute to the culling of 70 billion animals per year (of which 40% is probably not eaten and thrown in the trash). Not only that but you don’t contribute to the greatest cause of deforestation, antibiotics resistance, decline of biodiversity, water waste, …
Besides the global population is steadily stagnating (Africa is still booming) as a lot of countries see population decline (less than 2 children per woman).
You don’t even need to cut it out entirely. Just not eat such a ridiculous amount of meat.
Stuff like this isn’t helping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH9VLihKm2g
Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op’s article.
The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
A cow also produces a lot of methane, a much worse greenhouse gas.
Besides, the problem isn’t the grass from cows grazing, it’s the rainforests that go down all around the world to convert to farmland to produce animal feed.
It’s much more efficient to use that farmland to feed humans than to feed cows and then feed humans (1kg of meat needs 25kg of feed)
Disclaimer - I’m not vegan but I try to reduce my meat consumption overall, especially red meats.
Oh look, another article pointing the finger at the meager consumption habits of citizens and completely ignoring the massive ocean of CO2 production by large companies.
Don’t people get tired of seeing this same argument being made? The amount of carbon produced by barges carrying cargo over the Atlantic so far greatly exceeds the consumption of many millions of people every single day but I’m supposed to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak today instead of some semi-edible “impossible meat” bug protein?
ETA: Nice, my first blowup since leaving reddit. Very refreshing to see some people arguing passionately. I appreciate the vigor and the quality of argumentation, everybody. The quality of discourse here is so much better than on reddit.
I’m willing to admit the “semi edible impossible meat bug protein” gamut was a bit tongue in cheek, but I recognize how it can sound genuine. I do think Impossible Meat is disgusting, but that’s neither here nor there.
I eat plenty of plant matter and I regularly forage in the local forests to learn about edible plants. But I’m not going to stop enjoying steak just because it might put a bit more CO2 (why do people keep writing it as C02 online?) into the atmosphere. If removing subsidies and putting more pressure on the meat industry to be less wasteful, less environmentally impactful and more ethical towards animals causes steak to rise to $40/lb as some here have stated I’ll gladly pay.
FWIW, I get my steak from local farms that are free range and grass fed. Grass feeding is healthier for the cow than the typical grain, it produces less CO2 and the steak is better quality. Plus the cows are better taken care of. Again, thanks for the great messages (generally).
