Emissions from 15 of the biggest meat and dairy companies
mas.to
mas.to
Only 8500 plants need to be replaced and we can reduce 20% of emissions.
Hey I’ve got a stupid idea. Let’s tell everyone to stop eating meat, replace a billion gas powered cars, drive less and stop flying
Let’s rinse and repeat and have this discussion every day for the next decade, just like we have done for the past 2 decades
1. Identify what measurable effect you want to achieve (e.g. reduce emissions by X% within Y years).
2. Look for multiple ways to do it.
3. Pick the combination with the best cost/effect ratio.
Until this is taught in schools on par with math or basic history, we are extremely prone to manipulation. Whoever owns the media will cover one solution that benefits them, declare it as a religious virtue and fill their pockets off pushing the crowd to adopt it. If may never solve the actual problem, but the public lacking those skills will never notice and will never question the narrative.
So you do the things you can do. Fly less, eat less/no meat, use your bike more often, point at the coal plants and vote for political parties that want to get rid of them. May later generations (should they exist) say: "He was one of the good ones". Or you know, you could hide behind your priorities, fly, eat meat, drive a SUV and point at the coal plants.
I get it, we should not let them blame individuals for corporate and political failure, but what you do yourself also matters, because it makes you more aware, it makes you have higher standards, it makes you less tolerant to weak excuses.
All you can do by your personal martyrship is delay this point by historically negligible time. But this is not fair to yourself.
It's like you have a drunkard neighbor. You know once he runs out of money, he'll sober up, take it seriously, find a job and start rebuilding his life But instead of letting him do it, you sell your own house and keep buy him more booze! Sure, he will be thankful, but it won't solve the problem. You are just fooling yourself by doing the simplest thing that appears to give your life a meaning, but on the grand scale you are just wasting your own life away.
SUVs are nice, you can fit multiple kids and hiking gear into them, tow your own speedboat and go to multi-day roadtrips along the coast. So what, I am supposed to give that lifestyle up, reduce my life to eating bad-tasting food in front of a TV so the politicians, who are agreeably bad at their job could take more flights with their private jets? I don't think it's fair. I mean, the politicians would love you do do that, but that's just not fair to yourself.
Except that personal choices are what affects the market which drives change despite stagnant government decision making.
Every single example of a positive societal change benefited the person behind it. Martyrship, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of religious cults and third-world countries. A stable system where everyone suffers in the name of abstract greater good, while the handful of elites reaps the profits. Don't go that way, it sucks.
That's a problem with your education in history, not the reality of past progress or markets. Not to mention that your response has barely any relevance to the point I made.
However, influencing your meat and dairy consumption is trivial compared to the above.
Maybe you could pay a few extra dollars in taxes to help bring it down.
Seriously, do the math.
Doing things that make zero difference doesn’t help.
It’s like the drunk looking for his keys under the street light
I know individual action on it's own is not terribly effective. The game plan I see here is that we keep public focus on how bad meat eating is for the environment, and hopefully reach a critical mass in public opinion so that one day it is politically acceptable to reduce the dairy industry subsidies. It takes time, but it is a feasible idea.
It would be wise to have a healthy skepticism if a beef and dairy association said there was no impact, so it seems it would be equally wise to apply skepticism to ethically minded vegans saying it is not fine.
Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/07/plant-ba...
People won't give up on meat.It's just too tasty.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/15/methane-...
I'm sure we can do better if we invest more.
Meat was one market that fake food companies couldn't touch until now when they're trying to feed us those nutritional laboratory grown monstrosities.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/15/methane-...
(Or, maybe it'd be better to focus on metrics which aren't so easily gamed?)
perhaps....this article could learn a thing.
Probably because food is non-negotiable and most people are not willing to switch to a plant-based diet.
At least with energy production, there are comparable alternatives to fossil fuels: solar, wind, and nuclear.
With food, there is simply not a comparable alternative to meat. The solution is a compelling meat substitute.
For the fillet mignon of top gastronomy maybe not (although I can recommend everyone to try Juicy Marbles: https://www.cnet.com/home/juicy-marbles-review/).
For the burger, which are eaten quickly in between? Definitely. And that is definitely the very largest part of meat consumption worldwide. I don't think most people would even notice if the burger patty, bursting with sauce, was replaced by Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat.
Look at it from the standpoint of the carbon cycle. For example, where does the carbon in the methane originate? It is carbon that originated in plant matter consumed by cattle. It originates in the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere. We do not feed petroleum or coal to cows. So net-carbon increase from cattle production is very minimal.
Going after foot production is insane.
Yeah, we do. Cow feed is grown with petrolium-based fertilizer. Eating a cow that ate plants will always consume more fertilizer and therefore petrolium than just eating the plants directly, because the cow is less than 100% efficient.
The CO2 footprint of a plant-based diet is lower. However, that is not the only aspect of this discussion. All the studies on the subject that I read seem to indicate that eliminating animal protein always leads to deficiencies and lack of growth in children. All the studies on the health benefits of veganism only seem to apply to obese people eating junk food.
But one does not need to go full vegan. Reducing meat consumption to the bare minimum and maybe selectively eating animal products that are less harmful to the climate, it arguable a better strategy.
People who only eat plants do just fine. People who don't put thought into what they eat, do badly, no matter the diet. Your average American probably has a significant glut of protein and carbs and days and everything else and they probably significantly overestimate the amount of protein they need (discuss it with athletes who have professionals planning their intake). We glamorize protein for some reason but look around you. People are fat. Arguably it would be better if most people probably went vegetarian.