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.
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The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.
Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Not scaling could be a feature and not a bug. It would raise the price of beef and thus lower demand.
To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)
For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production
The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.
[…]
The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.
Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it
Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint
[…]
Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass
the first time in probably a year i’ve seen someone explain supply and demand correctly. thank you.
What?!?
It doesn’t mean that you must supply me with everything I demand?!?!
A huge aspect of this is ranchers not cycling their land and allowing it to regrow native grasses properly, which does end up running into the land use problem again. But right now we’re very unoptimized with land regrowth and there’s a huge difference that can be made with just properly handling the land and to stop ranching in literal deserts.
Nope it because politicians need votes from farmers so they continue to give farmers corn subsidies cos they lose votes if they take away the subsidies they where given decades ago.
In Australia most of our beef is grass fed. Not only is it cheaper (when u don’t account for the reduced price of subsidised corn) but because much of Australia is so desert like it can only support grass and cattle are the only way to convert that grass to food and profit.
we need to feed them corn and soybeans because people want lots and lots of meat, and that’s the best way to get lots and lots of meat.
that’s… kinda why people advocate for eating less meat, so that there won’t be such a powerful incentive to turbomaximize meat yields to meet the huge demand…
Well, it’s not “growing” per se, but we produce fertilizers which are “plant food”, so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.
why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
we don’t. but we do grain finish most cattle, because it’s faster.
My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don’t think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I’m keen for lab grown though.
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How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It’s obviously someone else’s responsibility to change!
i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an even more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.
i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…
it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.
Lol this is ridiculous.
- Small changes across many people add up. IE meatless Monday has a positive effect even though it’s not full abstinence.
- If someone truly can’t economically afford to change their eating habits I’m not talking about them. You’re extrapolating to them in order to make a bad faith argument against anyone making any positive change. (Though beans and rice is cheaper than beef lol)
- Corporate America, while it can’t be controlled exclusively by people’s habits, actually is able to be influenced by enough people’s spending habits. It has to make money after all.
Have fun completely abdicating your agency and making absurd rants though, I guess
P.S. no one argues that people should make personal changes in lieu of government/business changes. This is another bad faith assertion people make to attempt to abdicate personal responsibility.
My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.
Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
We should push for large institutional change, but don’t ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren’t also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change
Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There’s been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns
I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.
Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.
I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.
Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.
If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.
it wouldn’t be very scientific but it’d be nice to have a graph like this with co2equivalent per serving
Same here. I only eat beef a few times a year as a treat both for health and environmental reasons. But coffee and chocolate so high up the list is more of a killer for me. I definitely enjoy a couple cups per day as well as at least one bite of dark chocolate. Probably should cut back now that I can’t claim ignorance.
I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.
Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.
I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.
They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.
When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).
I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.
Fuck your gatekeeping and special pleading
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
But they fly for a vacation?
because companies pollute much more
This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.
See, OP is not saying we should “just drop red meat”, and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.
people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more
What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that’ll help a lot.deleted by creator
I’m one of those people, and I’ve brought the critical thinking required to prove it.
U see the issue with those studies is that they are calculating methane output from the animals themselves and that’s it. It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics and chemistry. Methane is CH4 and is a product of fermentation (which takes place in the gut of said animals). We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed so this carbon and hydrogen must come from somewhere in the animals diet (in this case grass). Now the grass must get those elements from somewhere and if u did heigh school chemistry u would know that the answer is photosynthesis (6CO2 + 6H2O + Light Energy -> C6H12O6 + 6O2).
So what’s happening is grass gets eaten by an animal. Most of that grass passes through unprocessed and is excreted as shit (a carbon sink contributing to the biomatter of the soil). A small fraction of that grass undergoes fermentation and a small fraction of that fermented carbon is byproduct methane. All that carbon originally came form the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. A majority of that atmospheric CO2 is sequestered in the cow shit by contributing to the soil biomatter. That’s not even accounting for the additional plants that the cow shit helps to grow which are also carbon sinks.
Now as an Aussie where 99% of our red meat is grass fed that’s actually a net carbon negative activity. As for the dumbass yanks feeding livestock corn (due to politicians buying votes with corn subsidies) then u have a problem. But nobody is gonna acknowledge any of this they just gonna spend all day shouting at each other.
The problem is not just the farts, the problem is the absolutely humongous amount of feed and space cattle needs. Most crops grown around the world are used to feed cattle, just like most farmland is used to grow cattle. That’s what’s polluting, producing so much green house gases, deforesting, etc.
No matter how you turn it, red meat is an environmental catastrophe.
We are talking about carbon here not other environmental impacts. If u wanna talk about other environmental impacts I’m happy to discuss how bad monocrop agriculture is especially the ridiculous amount of pesticides getting into the water and fucking everything up.
Producing feed doesn’t make GHG producing feed is the systematised mass application of photosynthesis (turning atmospheric CO2 into sugar). Using more land isn’t an environmental problem unless ur doing mass deforestation which is happening in 3rd world nations not the west. So what ur actually saying is that 3rd world nations shouldn’t eat red meat cos its causing deforestation but ours is ok because it’s not.
Their is the feed and livestock transportation emissions cost and that’s about the only good argument u got. Except that problem is an electric vehicle problem not a red meat problem. And if ur gonna use the argument of its an additional carbon cost that u don’t pay for just eating plants then why don’t u go live in a grass hut cos the additional carbon cost of concrete is unnecessary.
Not to mention that grass fed cattle don’t have this problem. So eating grass fed or going hunting also solves the problem.
Where do you think most of the world’s red meat is coming from? Brazil is one of the top producers and exporters of red meat, deforestation is ravaging the Amazon.
3rd world countries are not eating red meat, we are. The link between rich countries and meat consumption has been established for a long time now.Most cattle eat soy, not grass, that’s also a myth. Simply because soy is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot more abundant and easier to grow than grass. Also, grass is only slightly better than feed, but it generates more GEG overall because of digestion.
We need soy, so we need monocultures of soy, and that’s catastrophic, just like you said.
Transport is actually not that big of a problem with red meat. Land usage and the actual cattle are. They’re the top source of GEG emissions from agriculture.
You were talking about thermodynamics earlier. Red meat is incredibly inefficient converting resources to usable calories. 1kg of beef requires 25kg of feed.
You’re also using a lot of straw men in your arguments, living in a grass hut instead of a concrete building, or electric vehicles for cattle transportation?
You can enjoy red meat but you can’t argue in good faith that it’s not completely awful for the environment at pretty much every level.
A few sources to support my claims:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/23/americas/brazil-beef-amazon-rainforest-fire-intl/
Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.
Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.
But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don’t have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.
And let’s also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It’s not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They’re more or less green deserts.
if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.
most people don’t want to eat grass or soy cake. letting cows graze, and feeding soycake (the byproduct of soybean oil production) to pigs and poultry is a conservation of resources.
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not all land is suitable for crops. letting cattle graze it is fine.
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this is a strawman
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You can’t counter “raising enough cows to supply our current meat demand takes a lot of resources we could be eating instead” with “its okay for them to eat grass :D”
this conversation didn’t happen.
Good news is that overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat. Don’t need to use all the same land, you have flexibility to move around production
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat.
I don’t think that has ever happened.
It’s worth noting that soybean meal is not a byproduct. When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal is still the driver of demand
However, soybean meal is the main driving force for soybean oil production due to its significant amount of productivity and revenues
[…]
soybean meal and hulls contribute to over 60% of total revenues, with meal taking the largest portion of over 59% of total revenue
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010
This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used
Moreover, soybean meal is the driving force for the whole process [expelling oil from soy] because it provides over 70% of the total revenue for soy processing by expelling
hexane solvents are not the most common method of oil extraction. you have been misinformed.
some studies show soybean oils being as much as half the value of the crop, despite being just 20% of the weight.
If we assume that’s the case, half of revenue is still not a byproduct, it’s a coproduct. The other half is still pretty relevant to its value and usage. If 50% of your revenue disappears from something, you’re going to be making a lot less of it
i think at this point we’ve devolved into arguing semantics. you’re not going to convince me soybean is a viable crop unless you can press it for oil, and i don’t think i can convince you it’s a viable product unless the meal is fed to livestock. but i hope you have a good night!
What are you talking about? Soy is great. Soy beans, soy curls, tofu, soy milk, soy sauce, miso. All kinds of great soy products.
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
No offspring club let’s goo
Where
Probably the antinatalist sub
Edit: apparently we don’t have one
Nah, antinatalism is different.
That’s not a place i want to be a part of—it gets fairly toxic.If anyone wants civil discussions about antinatalism stuff, the best bet is probably trying to find places that have strict bans on efilist ideologies (those are the “everything should die” people)
Yeah it is a bit “nobody deserves to live” typa mood on that subreddit.
You know what would help even more? Eating other people’s kids.
And kicking people in the nuts 🤪
Nah you got to start at the source, more efficient, eat the (future-) parents.
I know a few guys and gals that drink straight from the spigot, so to speak.
That’s entire lives of (likely) red meat consumption! I also am never having kids, so I can have my occasional steak without feeling guilt.
I hit a kid with my car once so now I can litter and stuff without guilt
Wow! You’re a true climate hero!
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”.
That’s meee! ✋
I still eat meat, but quite little, and quite rarely. There’s the odd salami at home, or every few months some ham for carbonara when I get guests over, or something like that. But it’s such a small percentage of what I consume now, I feel like I’m effectively vegetarian, anyways.
And yeah for most things I use alternatives because it turns out they’re often easier to handle. The Barista This Isn’t Milk is nice because it foams more reliably than actual milk and lasts much longer which is important as a single household.
Oh yeah, our house basically gave up on real milk once the alternatives got good. The shelf life alone was a huge driver.
lasts much longer which is important as a single household
This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.
If you only understood the damage you were doing.
Rather, I feel you fully understand the damage you are doing and are probably doing it deliberately
what has helped me is just pivoting heavily to chicken, i used to basically just eat beef and pork, so simply eating a different kind of meat helped ease into eating non-meat meals as well.
meat alternatives are of course great, but i also think soybeans (or similar) are very underrated, just raw green soybeans are astoundingly meat-like for being a straight up unprocessed vegetable. Great in salads.
cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact.
i doubt it. many people have done that, and meat production grows year-over-year every year.
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
Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
It’s a manner of perspective, Coca Cola is considered one of the largest polluters on the planet but that’s not because corporate Coca Cola is out there polluting for funsies it’s because they make a product that individuals purchase and then individuals improperly dispose of. Sure no one person can stop Coca Cola from polluting but isn’t the pollution caused by your individual purchase your own responsibility?
No. Coke could make biodegradable packaging and choose not to because number go up. Next question.
And people could not purchase non biodegradable products
If everyone got together and did the individual action, it would become significant.
But getting a big percentage of the population to come together and do something is the challenge.
Economics will force something eventually… That’d how we ended up using plastics to wrap all of the food we eat 🤡
if everyone got together
And this is where it falls apart.
it’s more than a challenge, it’s a fucking fantasy dude lmfao. people don’t wake up everyday and choose to do these things, they do these things out of necessity. even if individual action was effective in stemming climate change (it’s not), you have to acknowledge that people aren’t choosing where and how they get their food. you can’t blame someone for not being willing to sacrifice their own comfort or economic posture for a *checks notes* infinitesimally small, improbable, and uncertain chance that their actions might help the environment, maybe, just a little bit. that’s fucking patently absurd to expect any rational agent to make that choice the way you are advocating.
even in this weird victim-blaming mindset people advocating on this basis have, the corps are still at fault! it’s fucking doublespeak and brainwashing, i swear.
Direct action has value… But people whine about beef when the best one is not not fly.
300m cows slaughtered a year at 500lb of beef per cow and 22lb of co2 per lb of beef is 1.65B tons of co2e a year from cows. Global aviation makes up 920m tons of co2 from flying
Thank you
Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
I do agree that real change takes political power. You need things like tax breaks for people who use public transit, congestion pricing, taxing airports more, banning ads for SUVs, requiring electronic devices to be repairable, etc… These actions would be far more efficient than any individual action. Sure.
But political power isn’t enough. Look at what just happened in Canada.
Justin Trudeau banned oil tankers off the coast of British Columbia and he tried to ban single use plastics. He faced outraged reactions.
Some angry politicians were publically taunting him on social media and sued his government :
A guy literally campaigned on defending plastics and slashing the (tiny) tax on carbon.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-scrap-plastics-ban-1.7514037
See what happened? The guy was the Prime Minister. He tried some small changes. He faced brutal political backlash. Why? His people weren’t ready.
Change starts with individuals. Only when you reach a critical mass of individuals can you start trying to push for policy changes.
Policy wise this is about it but daddy don’t like it
Not having a kid eclipses all of these by orders of magnitude.
I haven’t had hundreds of kids. I’m a climate savior.
As a middle aged dude who is unlikely to have kids at this point, I’m curious about the numbers if you have some some suggested sources to peruse
i regard all antinatalism as ecofascism. i’m not asking you to change my mind, i’m letting you know you might be participating in a eugenics campaign.
- Only a small subset of people who don’t have kids are antinatalists.
- Antinatalism is not eugenics.
- Environmentalism is the opposite of fascism, actually. When you stick up for the environment, you’re with the good guys.
How is it eugenics if it has nothing to do with a parent’s genetic make up? Like if they said “meat eaters shouldn’t have kids” you could try and make an argument for eugenics but for nobody to have a kid or for everyone equally to have less children how is that eugenics?
you are saying this in english, to a (self-)selected demographic subset of english speakers. you are encouraging a particular set of people not to have children. that’s eugenics. unless you can find a way to convey this message to everyone, at once, in an identical message given cultural and other contexts, you will be biasing the message to be more effective among some segment of the populous.
We’ve done it. We’ve finally found the Olympic Gold Medalist for Mental Gymnastics.
Congratulations.
this is a thought-terminating cliche. what i said is true.
So are you interpreting the comment as only people who speak English should not have kids?
Sorry buddy, that isn’t how this works. Great try tho. Go back to the whiteboard and come back when you have valuable input to share.
That’s one pair of philosophies that creep me out both ways. Both the anti natalists and pro natalists.
Deciding for yourself is one thing, imposing your choice on others is maddening.
I don’t know if the comment quite raises to the level of anti natalist though. Maybe it’s grading on a curve of reading some more hard core anti natalists, but that comment felt tame and felt like they wouldn’t necessarily object to a couple having one child or even two, being somewhat below the replacement level…
What a fantastically apt username
in, as much as possible, a non-confrontational way, i’d love to hear why you think that.
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.
perfect is the enemy of good.
I wish vegans and vegetarians would be a bit more willing to promote this viewpoint. It’s insane how many otherwise normal people will refuse a single meat-free meal for no reason other than identity politics.
You forgot number one: By far, the best thing you can do for the climate is not have children.
That’s almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.
But for overall impact, there’s one winner and it’s bigger than everything else put together.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Capitalism hates this one weird trick.
Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there’s very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won’t just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it’s only 6% of our global annual emissions that we’d save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won’t happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we’re having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.
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.
Do billionaires count as red meat? I am asking for a friend.
