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 could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.
As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.
Edit: folks still don’t get it. It’s not a matter of apathy, it’s pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone’s doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.
The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That’s on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You’d have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.
Not gonna happen. That’s just one industry.
Everyone’s not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It’s idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.
Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.
Airlines, cruise lined oil companies are not immutable forces of nature. They have grown to their current size to meet the demand of individuals like you and me who want to buy shit and go places.
If everyone stopped flying, passenger airlines would be out of business and no longer flying planes within a year or two. Same with cruise companies. Oil is used in more things but if everyone switched to EVs or stopped driving oil production would go way down- even more if we cut our plastic usage as well.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking consumers are powerless. In a free market economy they are very powerful- that’s why boycotts can be so effective.
Seriously. Some people here are so happy they’ve found the “perfect” justification for their apathy and inaction.
Could you name a few successful boycotts? I did a quick search and recent examples don’t seem that successful to me. Amazon is still doing amazingly well and Nestlé is still killing people.
Sure, let me google that for you.
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/boycotts/history-successful-boycotts
In general boycotts are less about driving a company to bankruptcy and more about getting them to change their behavior. Some companies are surprisingly immune to boycotts but many others have walked back their problematic behavior. Notably in recent memory in the US I can think of Barilla, Chick-fil-a and (by conservatives) Budweiser. The Montgomery bus line boycott is the stuff of history.
A quarter of emissions is nothing? Yeah the overwhelming majority is attributable to major oil companies, but you’re just being lazy and fatalistic. But sure, just sit there and wait for a paradigm shift to come save you from yourself I guess. Literally the first two search results I found:
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148 https://www.c2es.org/content/regulating-transportation-sector-carbon-emissions/
Yeah, cruise lines opening back up and returning to business as usual after COVID, basically made me stop paying attention to a lot of this individual-targeted climate change stuff. That was a perfect and fairly natural way to end that high pollution luxury oriented industry, but everyone basically said “boomers still like cruising, so fuck the planet”.
If boomers and rich people can continue to pollute at incredible rates, just give me my stupid plastic straw back. At least that way I can drink a full mlikshake before my straw turns into paper mache, while I watch the world burn.
I don’t think we should give up on reasonable direct action but going after what people eat when there is the elephant in the room like flying and toursim generally along with crusies… It is kinda insulting to the poors IMHO
You do you. For my part, honestly, even going over board on recycling is off the table. I’ll separate bottles and stuff, but spending excessive time doing stuff like collecting grease to put in compost bins feels pointless and meaningless – why would I put myself out, spend a buncha time doing that kinda stuff, while rich people are buying up Venice to have a Private Jet orgy, and a ton of media hypes it up as though it’s awesome / they have no fall out from it? I have more respect for my own mental health than to internalise the guilt of it all, when every rich person out there is happily burning everything to the ground, and the majority of the poors are cheering them on for doing it.
Like I said in another post, even “Climate leaders” like David Suzuki owns like 4-5 houses, and jets between them for shits and giggles. It’s all a joke, you may as well not punish yourself over it if you can’t be fucked to do some of the small shit.
Plenty of not poor people eat too much meat
They also fly and vacation a lot more too lol
I honestly don’t know what your message is. Rich people shouldn’t fly but they can eat meat? Neither? Poor people should eat meat but not fly? Both? Neither? Middle class people?
Flying is bigger issue than eating red meat long with tourism generally.
While reducing red meat is good… Targeting beef as solution is disingenuous at best. Likely a shill op
Generally people who shill it are also the worst offenders about flying and tourism.
You can eat all vegan all your life but once you fly or go on the cruise… It doesn’t matter.
I didn’t realize flying was destroying ocean ecosystems by overfishing and deforesting the Amazon.
All of this can be bad. All of it can be called out. You don’t have to cancel one with the other. You don’t have to call people who point at the meat problem “shills.”
Unless there’s an oil exec that lives nearby.
Right but you have to begin somewhere, and being a good example for others certainly helps as well.
I try to change my life such that it doesn’t impact me much while having fairly large effect. For instance I’m basically vegan (still eat meat occasionally, e.g. when it’s otherwise thrown away), I even don’t want to eat meat anymore, the taste just got worse for me over time.
It also has effects on the market, e.g. Meat replacement products are quite affordable and popular.
Stop flying for vacation… That alone will do more than all of deit adjustments
I didn’t fly for years either (nor I do possess a car), so yeah agree, or at least reduce this as much as possible.
But nutrition also has quite an impact, especially when we must consider that highly carbon rich forests still get destructed for (inefficient) food. The high amount of meat consumption in rich countries is unhealthy as well.
people need to get over the idea of not earting farmed bugs, its more efficient and eco-friendly.
It wouldn’t be nothing and you know that. If you simplify the meat problem to just emissions, sure, it might look small in comparison to cruises, etc. But if you look at it as the multifaceted problem it really is, then reducing consumption will have several effects. Especially, as you exaggerated, if you forced everyone you know to do the same.
The last thing we need is people advocating for these “fuck it” attitudes. Should we really excuse better choices and better directions of behavior and culture just because there’s a “small” effect? I feel like this line of logic can be used to excuse some pretty dark shit.