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 metric of per kg of product, while entirely fair, can be a bit misleading when it comes to making high impact decisions in your life. The switching to tea example is a good one to criticize because on this chart coffee is quite high up there, but I consume only 15g of coffee a day, compared to probably close to a kg of meat, egg, and dairy. Eliminating coffee would not be a high climate impact decision.
Rice and refried beans for me! (my cholesterol is high)
or eat the wealthy is a better start
How is dark chocolate so high? :o
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.
The prevalence of people telling everyone not to have kids in the context of our current culture is weird.
Alt-right: “Hey we’re trying to have as many kids as possible so there’s more of us, and less of you. Do us a favor and don’t have kids.”
Evidently a lot of people on the left: “Sounds good dude.”
May I propose a reasonable alternative? If you don’t want to have kids, cool, don’t have kids. If you want to have kids, have the financial and social security to do so responsibly, and a partner who wants the same thing, then have kids (but also go vegan, ride a bike, and raise them to do the same).
Aka, you do you.
We need significant subsidies invested into vat grown meat. But now Big Ag is getting it banned in every state it can. Texas and Florida have already banned it.
Not disagreeing that meat is bad for the environment, but I think not having kids is probably way above cutting out meat.
Accounting for emissions per kilogram isn’t that fair, can we account for emissions per 1000 kilocalorie? Or emissions per protein?
Can we please have a source for the YSK statement you made in the title and the graph?
I have seen data on not having kids being the biggest choice a person can make to prevent future emissions. You also didn’t mention flying less often, or not flying when a reasonable alternative exists. What is the relative impact of all of these things compared to dietary changes? Numbers on that would be helpful.
Veganism is good, necessary even, but more than voting we need to actually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Profit will destroy the planet unless we take control of the reigns from capital.
Being alive is bad for the environment.
You can’t survive around here (eastern Kentucky) without owning your own car. The nearest Walmart to me is a half hour drive at 60mph and we don’t have taxis in any of the towns around me. That’s 7 hours of walking, each way. No buses or trains either. The closest store of any kind to me is a Dollar General and is about 2 hours each way if I walk.
Not loving that the exact source of the data in this graph is not clearly linked in the description.
