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.
A surefire way to zap a bunch of ideologically-motivated activists into a puddle of fatalistic nihilists.
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.
The bulk of your post is probably the reason why consumption goals aren’t given - it’s not going to be the same for everyone.
Anyone who only eats 1 steak per year is unlikely to see a general statement like “reduce your red meat consumption” and think “oh no, I’m eating too much red meat”, because they are likely well aware of how much the average person eats compared to them.
“A sustainable diet leaves room for 2 chicken breasts a week”
(Really, 2 servings of fish / poultry per week. No red meat.)
The average person outside of developing nations vastly outpaces this consumption rate.
The small, single-digit percent of the population that’s vegetarian/vegan, as well as people who are experiencing food insecurity and do not have consistent access to meat are ahead of the curve from a sustainability perspective.
When 95+% of people who have the means to dictate their meal choices do not achieve the target reduction it’s generally safe to say everyone who eats meat needs to cut back.
I don’t think it’s necessary to compare yourself to others here. The consumption goal should just be to consume less and every effort makes a difference. If you eat red meat every day, then try every other day. If you already do that, try once a week. If you feel you can consume even less then have it as a rare treat or just cut it out entirely.
Perspective matters. There’s a couple things you can do to majorly reduce your carbon footprint. Beyond those it gets increasingly difficult to have smaller and smaller effects. At some point the next most effective things to do with your time and effort become
- do activism
- earn more money
- to buy offsets
- to donate to activist charities
The time and effort you spend living like a weirdo has an opportunity cost that you could be doing those things. Furthermore it looks bad. There was a study that found that when you tell people that tackling climate change requires major sacrifice, they became more likely to deny climate change is even real.
I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)
If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.
But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair
Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.
One or two meals with any meat at all per week, never any red meat at all.
[…] never any red meat at all.
Why not?
To give you a consumption goal 🤷
I’m just curious if said consumption goal is based on any scientific rationale, and, if so, what that rationale is.
Eating less red meat, it’s better for the environment.
Look if you dont want to, that’s fine, but dont overcomplicate it. (You’re at a higher risk of a heart attack bc of all that red meat)
You forgot number one: By far, the best thing you can do for the climate is not have children.
Increasing the bag limit on “billionaire” to something greater than “0” would have a much more appreciable effect on the climate than a thousand families forgoing children.
Remove the bag limit, put a bounty on them. Anyone that murks a billionaire wins a 2000 ft^2 home (or condo, whatever) in the location of their choice, with all taxes, fees, and utilities paid for as long as they live there.
I am so confused by this comment.
What’s a bag limit? Why would you apply it to the word “billionaire”, and why would increasing the limit help the climate?
Are you saying billionaires should use less bags? Because I doubt that would help more than having 1000+ less humans on this planet.
Thanks. Never heard that term before so I thought you were talking about plastic bags and worded it weird as fuck lol.
Kill all the billionaires -> another crop step in to fill the power vacuum - likely more likely to hire excellent security teams.
Revolution, overthrow capitalism -> the power hungry psychopaths who wanted to be billionaires pivot and seek positions in seats of government power. They continue living lives of opulant luxury on the public largess, and propagate fossil fuel and factory farming industries since this is one of the ways they skim their wealth from the public coffers.
Reform, throw out all the opulant bureaucrats. Maybe murder them. Introduce a new level of transparency in government. Install leaders who follow the public will, even to their own detriment. But the public will likes things mostly the way they are, and doesn’t want to give up their cars because they are used to them and see them as a symbol of their success in achieving whatever socioeconomic status, and doesn’t want to give up meat because meat is delicious. Because everyone likes getting things for free and the elected representatives do exactly what the public demands, entitlement programs grow rapidly while taxes stay the same or get lower. No one does work, because perfect communist utopia provides people with all their needs, so people just spend all their time driving cars and eating meat. A few do-gooders talk about how we are destroying the environment and going bankrupt. Everyone tells them to shut up and stop being nerds.
Economy collapses due to no incentive to work. Everyone admits that capitalism was pretty flawed, but was still pretty good at getting people to build houses and shit even when they would rather be driving cars and eating meat. Start capitalism again, but with better rules about lobbying and regulatory capture and all that jazz. Also, better education and support for children so the next generation grows up less fucking stupid. Elect good politicians who are good at spinning necessary hardships to their constituents. Apply a carbon tax to meat and gas and give people the tax money directly, because most people feel like they come out ahead when they get free money.
Government performs services, and acceptd payment for those services in the form of taxation. The thing that is missing is the recognition that the powers exercised by government are possessed by We The People. We own those powers. We “invest” those powers in the government, who uses those powers to provide paid services to its customers.
We are each owed a return on our “investment” of political authority. Our political authority should not be given to the government freely. We should be individually compensated for it.
We are shareholders.
Universal Basic Income is one possible method of compensating the citizenry for the use of our political authority.
Government doesn’t exist to serve the people. It exists to serve those who have the power to influence the government. Sometimes this is the people. Sometimes it isn’t.
Literally the opposite, more people -> faster growth -> new technology that saves people (as it happened past many times in the past already)
this is about protecting the climate, not protecting people
Yeah votes just show how dumb people are, we are already screwed.“about protecting the climate” man, nature and climate will exist regardless of people, and if we want to live it is OUR problem to fix the cimate, not anyone else. You people are so arrogant that you don’t even want to look into history how many times new technolofy saved our civilization.
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.
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
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
Are bilionairs white meat?
The single best thing you can do for the climate is not existing. The next best thing is not having kids. The lifetime of consumption of a person is out of the equation without that person. Until we figure out how to live sustainably on this earth, overpopulation is a real problem.
Edit: To be clear, I want you to still exist with us in this world. Especially since I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife. I’m just stating a tough truth with no clear action statement, besides maybe figuring put how to live truly carbon-neutral. Some things are just a catch-22.
I’ve got a special trick where I can make pretty much the entire internet rage at me. Check it out:
I’m vegetarian.
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”.
We could really use a movement to get more people to try adding beans, peas, and tofu to their grocery list. I wasn’t able to stick to not eating meat, but sticking to eating less meat by adding alternatives to my grocery list turned out to be quite easy.
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
Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).
Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.
when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.
But that’s just it. The plane doesn’t burn less fuel because you didn’t buy a ticket. Hell, I’ve been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).
They’re polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There’s no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone’s life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.
You’re gonna need to come up with a better example, when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air. Companies usually want to be as cost effective as possible, meaning they will do the least amount of work needed to still get their customers money.
One big problem that regulation can tackle is that corporations seek to externalize as much of their costs as they can, which means the corporation won’t have to pay for the externalized cost, so they can sell their good/service cheaper, so consumption of the product increases, leading to an outsized environmental/societal cost compared to the cost of the product.
when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air
Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them
In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.
That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line. If there was a true societal shift and people flew less, airlines wouldn’t keep flying empty planes around for the fun of it. Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding. The narrative of “we are powerless to stop climate change because corporations are evil” is lazy. Corporations aren’t evil they are just amoral-they answer to market demand, whatever that is.
That’s a bit of a gimmick related to airlines betting (correctly) that flight demand would rebound after covid ended and wanting to keep their spot in line.
It’s an illustration of a market incentive that doesn’t reflect consumer demand. It was also a prelude to a bunch of federal and state bailouts for the industry (much like after the crashes in '08 and '01), intended to keep businesses that can’t stay profitable in the black.
If there was a true societal shift and people flew less
The societal shift would need to be a reduced demand for travel not a reduced desire to fly on a plane. That’s what COVID created (temporarily) but it still didn’t drop plane flights to the point of consumer demand, because of these private contractual arrangements intended to keep airports profitable.
I fucking hate flying. I know lots of other people who hate flying. It’s stressful, it’s expensive, it’s obnoxiously bureaucratic (especially as we switch to Real ID / tighten security at borders / etc). But it is also the only practical way to get between big states in less than a day.
If you want a True Societal Shift, you need to present alternatives to air transport. HSR was supposed to be that alternative, but it never got delivered. For some mysterious reason, passenger railroad companies that had crisscrossed the country a century ago just evaporated. Cities grew increasingly hostile towards municipal bus depots and rail terminals. Highway expansion and airline construction dominated the priority of municipal and state governments.
Also, there WERE a lot fewer flights during covid, ghost planes notwithstanding.
There was a floor below which the number of flights could not drop due to - what are functionally - political reasons. Similarly, there were restrictions on travel that were lifted far too soon, and reignited the rapid spread of the virus, for political reasons. And there was further M&A of smaller airlines intended to monopolize the supply of travel, because finance capital demanded air travel receive priority over other civilian alternatives.
These are not personal consumer choices. These are corporate and state policies.
Corporations aren’t evil
At least from the perspective of “evil” as an all-consuming selfishness that comes at the detriment of your neighbors, Corporations are explicitly designed to be evil.
The airline industry as it exists today - a poisonous, clumsy, alarmingly fragile, wasteful, gluttonous dinosaur of a mass transit system - is the consequence of a few cartelized industrial leaders bribing and strong arming key public sector bureaucrats into subsidizing itself, as the senior executives and investors plunder the cash flow on the back end.
Announcing that you will be bicycling from LA to NY in protest does not change any of their economic calculus.
I mean, screw their economic calculus, if people stop flying they will go out of business. If people fly less, there will be fewer (and smaller) planes in the air. It’s not that complicated. I get that in practice most people can’t stop flying entirely but I’m exasperated by the leftist view that consumers are powerless because the global elites are using mind control to force us to fly to the Bahamas on holiday.
There is no “floor” to air travel, the same way there was no “floor” to passenger rail travel. Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry, but market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry. Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.
Yeah, saying “it’s the companies (that I buy things from) that pollute and not me” is like saying “I don’t contribute to climate change because I don’t cook red meat, I go to the restaurant and order a steak and they cook the meat. It’s the restaurant that’s destroying the environment!”
They could also, I didn’t know … clean up their production processes and use alternative materials that aren’t as harmful. Exxon isn’t a good example of this, but there’s plenty of mega corps which can do this. But they won’t because our laws are structured in such a way that they are not Incentivized to do so.
And those CEOs flying their private jets for an hour are more harmful than me driving my car all year.
Vote with your pocketbook. Buy products that are produced sustainably- or if that isn’t an option, buy less.
Corporations aren’t stupid - they are very good at making money. If company X could produce a product that 10% more expensive than their competitors but sold twice as well because it was more environmentally friendly, they would absolutely do so.
Exactly. This right here. Blame the politicians that deregulate the industry and let these corporations destroy the environment so they can post an extra .5% profit.
They’re using the money they got from their customers to lobby politicians to keep doing business as usual. They have so much power because people vote with their dollar, for them, and not for sustainable alternatives.
Blaming politicians while continuing to fund these industries won’t lead to anything.
It’s just corruption. The politicians could fix it … but money.
That gets difficult when billion dollar industries are involved, especially multiple. Some politicians will oppose the corruption, but the corporations will just fund the campaign of other politicians that are willing to act in their interest.
Transparency and a vigilant civil society with consequences for scandals can mitigate that somewhat, to varying degrees. But ultimately there’s corruption in every government at every level of governance. Capital interests always find a way, unfortunately.
Nah, I think their biggest con is making people believe this exact discourse right here, don’t change their habits and keeping giving them money.
They are psychos that can care less about being blamed for this or that when they can simply keep bribing governments and never facing any consequences.
But they have real fear that people start being more conscious about their own consuming and stop giving them money.
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.
That’s one way to not comprehend what I said, I guess.
I think it’s pretty clear you said individuals shouldn’t feel responsible for any of this
You’ve made it extra clear you’re still failing to comprehend all the words I said together. It’s unclear if that’s on purpose or you’re just slow.
God what an insufferable person and shit communicator
I bet you think that about everyone who doesn’t let you twist their words 😘
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
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.”
No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.
Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn’t dominated by animal farming.
When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.
Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.
Whatever helps you sleep at night lol
if it won’t work, why would anyone do it?
Because eating meat 5x a day at artificially low prices is the wrong thing to do and is a reflection of a poor culture
You can never make animal production green. The amount of clear-cutting needed for beef as an example would blow your mind. Then you factor in the ground, air, and water pollution from these factory farms, and you’ve just fucked up into entire regions, just to sustain a food source that isn’t even needed.
There are places already without trees where meat can be grown…
You’d be permanently destroying that land, and any waterways in the area, so is that really a solution?
And if the land isn’t already fertile, you need to set up alternative land to grow the food for those cows… then import the water…
This is not sustainable, and should be discouraged.
Save the planet! Eat Deez Nutz!
Finally, me being gay can actually be useful
This needs to be normalized by calories. Soymilk and soybean oil shouldn’t be that far apart.
Beef is overrated. Pork, poultry, and wild caught shrimp are where it’s at.
