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.
Ok, are actively working on this? Is your work on it so horrendously demanding of all your attention of every single day, that you couldn’t ALSO go vegan, or vegetarian, or just eat less meat? Eat the rich is just a fun day dream and a lazy excuse to not do what you can (like going vegan).
Eating the rich would also vastly reduce racism, sexism, classism, and worker exploitation. Can I therefore ignore my negligible personal impact, and keep being racist, sexist, classist, and buy only the cheapest clothes crafted by the most exploited third world toddlers?
I vehemently disagree with this statement.
We need to compost the rich and use that as a soil amendment to grow heirloom vegetables.
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.
Right there with ya
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.
having a small footprint is just a matter of choosing how miserable you’re willing to make your life.
In many areas yes, but not when it comes to food. A plant based diet is in no way miserable. There are still too many places with bad kitchens making it seem that way, but that’s just a lack of skill on their part.
I’d say my food experience rather became less miserable when I stopped eating meat, and my footprint decreased by a lot.
Eventually it reaches equilibrium.
In this case, the faster we get to the edge of the abyss, the quicker the situation will solve itself.
If you open the window to ventilate for 20 minutes that’s different from replacing the air in your room in 2 nanoseconds. The violent shockwave of the latter will probably damage your stuff and harm your health.
Similarly, the speed of climate change matters a lot. It is required for plants and animals to migrate and adapt, for people to migrate and adapt, for infrastructure to be built. It makes all the difference between a devastating blow and adaptation, while the reached equilibrium is the same in both cases.
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
*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!
How bout both? :)
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
Couldn’t we just stop food waste? Most food is discarded before even making it to the store. Seems to me being more efficient with how we distribute food is more realistic that trying to convince everyone to go vegan.
Because I’m not going to stop eating meat and the amount of ppl like me is larger than you think
Many people will also not reduce food waste, for exactly same reasons you won’t stop eating meat. Convenience, habit, cost, time investment.
Except those two things are not the same. We already have regulatory organizations that determine how food is handled and distributed. We can’t regulate veganism, we can regulate food waste
We could absolutely regulate veganism. Hell, it’s the other way around at the moment. For pretty much every animal rights law, there’s an exception specifically for farm animals. Just removing those exceptions would make factory farming (and therefore like 90% of meat production) illegal.
And in a more general sense, we absolutely can regulate carnism (aka the opposite of veganism), exactly how we regulate a million other moral questions.
I upvoted because this message still didn’t reach everyone, but I guess it’s just that people are in denial… like, isn’t this obvious? And weren’t there already dozens of studies proving it?
I’ll go completely meat free when the super rich go private jet free.
Other people doing bad things doesn’t justify you doing bad things.
people ate meat for MILLIONS OF YEARS with negligible global warming effect from the animals
vegans going start blaming the Assyrianz for inventing husbandry before blaming Exxon Mobile BP
like dude pick your battles
That’s just it. It is about picking battles.
We are at (actually well past but…) the tipping point. Climate change is happening and we are going to see sea levels rise in our lifetimes (within the next decade or so, as per some studies).
Changing to clean energy is something that will take massive infrastructure changes and we needed to be doing that literally decades ago.
Eating a few less hamburgers and working on a more climate friendly diet can have impacts in as little as a quarter. If enough people even slightly shift their diets, that will lead to massive supply chain changes and shifts in demand. Which will actually make a difference. Nowhere near as big of one but one that can actually be done.
If your worldview is “nothing I do as an individual matters so I won’t do anything” then… okay. But this is literally something we can do and see change in the short term.
dude people will never change because you tell them too if yall actually cared you would talk about the end of factory farms (which also incudes Veggies) the corruption Comes from the system itself. you are absolutely naive if you thing a a capitalist run Vegan Diet Enforced by Law would Help the environment
mate the cut down the rainforest to grow all kinds of food. growing Veggies with Monsanto juice literally gave millions of people cancer 🙄
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I am a vegan bro I hate meet Because I don’t like the taste. I hate vegans trying to turn a food PREFERENCE into a snobbery high horse thing. dude eating Factory Farm Veggies is just as bad if not worse (see Monsanto)
Maybe Boop A Pipeline if you are truly morally superior
Well that’s no surprise. Raising animals for meat is horribly inefficient compared to plants.
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
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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.
yes. when you look at charts and such. Someone who exclusively ate meat for some reason who moved to chicken would have a greater impact than someone who exclusively ate chicken and went vegan. Sheep did not show up so well either so im guessing ruminants in general are not going to be so hot. Anyway I would encourage folk to keep it in mind and do what they can. I realize go vegan results in many. Well eff it all then but man just avoiding beef is big impact.
Yeah I barely eat beef anymore, mostly chicken. I don’t want to give up on eating animals, especially since I’m trying to get into shape right now and it would be hard to eat healthy and get enough protein to build up muscle mass.
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
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There sure is a lot of effort being made to obscure the fact that most greenhouse gasses come from industrial sources.
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Can anyone explain to me why being vegan is the new cool, while being vegetarian is equal to eating meat without eating meat? Like, when I’m looking for vegetarian recipes, I only see vegan recipes, no vegetarian ones anywhere.
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I can stomach a meal or two without meat, but you’re going to have to shoot me before I’ll eat that disgusting fake cheese.
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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
That is a lie.
Thank God for trees. Amirite?
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?
I think being vegan creates more than four times the noise pollution tho.
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.
Articles like this are dumb… This just puts the burdon on everyday people who are doomed to fail if they try. If the entire world turned vegan would it make a difference? Rather, how about some tough legislation against the top polluting companies responsible for climate change… That would mean some politicians would have to refuse a few bribes, tough I know, but any level of effort here will create more results than a world giving up meat
https://peri.umass.edu/greenhouse-100-polluters-index-current
If the entire world turned vegan would it make a difference?
…yes. Plainly and obviously. Most land use would be gone overnight. Deforestation would stop immediately as would the second largest source of methane, one of the largest sources of NO2, and billions of tonnes of CO2 per year (about a quarter of all emissions). No other single initiative other than maybe ending urban driving would come close.
If you’re in the global top 50% there is absolutely nothing stopping you from switching to a primarily plant based diet, and if you’re in the bottom 50% you probably don’t eat enough meat to be a major impact.
