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. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
i don’t think that’s true, if meat production continues to grow.
If people are eating fewer beef meals, where is the beef production growth coming from in your theoretical?
it’s not theoretical. plenty of people (claim to) have cut back on beef, but production continues to rise.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/meat-production-tonnes?tab=chart&country=~OWID_WRL
Then people haven’t cut back. The production has to go somewhere, they aren’t making money shoveling it off a cliff.
Probably historically poor parts of the population gaining the means to buy more beef, for example in China
Then you skipped the entire first half of my statement where I said “If people are eating fewer beef meals,” So sure, if you ignore half of what I said then you can say I am wrong. At that point what are we even talking about?
some people are eating fewer beef meals
And for those people that eat fewer beef meals that does help. That is unambiguous. We’re talking about choices individuals can make for themselves to affect positive change. Those that eat fewer beef meals remove themselves as demand drivers of beef for those beef skipped meals. Were those individuals that would have eaten beef chose to eat beef for those future meals, then demand would be even higher with even higher climate impacts.
Do you disagree?
first, you can’t prove a counterfactual. second there’s no reason to believe that meat production could grow any faster.
there’s no reason to believe that. production grows every year, year-over-year.
If you’re not willing to concede that a future state of people skipping beef meals does lower demand compared to those same people choosing to eat beef instead, then I don’t think we have any basis for continuing to have a discussion.
I couldn’t figure out what pedantry you’re trying to play at, nor any value for it. The best I could guess is you like dancing around on word play for some reason. That is not an interest of mine. Then I looked at your post history and see this behavior is entirely on-brand for you with your conversations with most folks. Feel free to reply to the void. I’m not interested in your games and won’t be interacting with you anymore.