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.
The consumption data is quite interesting. Takes into account the fact that we put most of our emissions in China, and shows what we actually consume per person. And indeed the UK and US have gone down, and India and especially China, have gone up. But that World figure seems pretty flat overall. And we all live on the same ball of slowly heating rock, and none of us are anywhere close to being net zero.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?tab=chart&country=OWID_WRL~GBR~IND~CHN~USA&mapSelect=~USA
That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.
Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:
This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.
I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.
The developing world is going to use more and fossil fuels unless we basically pay them to use something else. And foreign aid seems to be a thing of the past too. I can’t really blame the rest of the world. The west has grown fat and rich off the last 150 years of using it, and now we’ve got the gall to turn to them and tell them not to.