Hey how about you cut down on private jets and I keep eating my burgers
Yeah right, eating less meat smells awful lot like “calculate your carbon footprint”
Two things can both be done. Saying one thing is worse is only an excuse to do nothing. Those rich fucks on their jets will probably point to companies polluting more. Do what’s best and advocate the same for others. Everyone just pointing to something else is how we end up in the situation we’re in. “I got mine. Go attack them!” Changing ourselves allows us to see all issues and work on them all.
8 metres of cars??? What is that these days, one ford f150?
Eight-metre cars.
Astute
I exclusively drive strech limos
Additional note: per UK. :) The predicted effect, either in meters or millions of cars, is if the UK inhabitants currently eating a high-meat diet switched to a low-meat diet.
You transition out of meat to save the environment.
I transitioned out of meat because of meat recalls and all the chemicals they sneak in a cow, and was ripping the hardest farts that would clear out a room.
We are not the same.
Dat odorless, anxiety-free, harmles fun of vegan farts!
Not kidding. Had a vegan apologize when she ripped a loud fart because steamed carrots made her gassy.
Not a single person smelled anything.
“I want to help save the earth!”
“Great! Eat less meat.”
" . . . . No."
I mean, I’m 90% veg for environmental reasons mostly. But every time we share this narrative that the effort needs to be on us while the true culprits are literally upping their consumption is fucking sick. Don’t guilt people for not doing 1% of what is needed while the people/corpos doing the other 99% are pushing this “personal responsibility” narrative and literally created the language to deflect blame. We should be way more upset and spend 20000x the effort shaming and shutting down those organizations.
It doesn’t matter if you put 2000x your effort into something if it has no effect. If you spend all your day shaming these corporations on lemmy that won’t do anything. So the question should be what actions can make an effect?
Protests don’t really do much. Electoral politics, at least here in the u.s. , are completely captured by these corporations and will never truly challenge them. I doubt what just happened in NYC is a valid tactic either. A revolution or even just a general strike is pretty much out of the picture right now.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them. The meat industry is burning the Amazon and emitting tons of methane, boycott them and eat less / no meat. The fossil fuel industry is lobbying congress to deny climate change while increasing production and emitting more every year, boycott them and buy less gas by driving less or taking public transit.
In this capitalist hellscape the only real choice we have is of consumption, and choosing what to consume and more importantly what not to consume is the only real way we can effect the system.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them.
Sorry to say this, but these boycotts rarely do anything. If enough people would boycott some company, or business practice to matter only a little bit, then there also would be enough people to effect politics to try to get better regulation in place, via electoralism, direct action of just getting actively involved in politics.
I absolutely agree with you. Meat is something that has a big impact on the climate and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control. If society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint. However, this is nothing that is possible without the government supporting this change.
society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint
this isn’t causal
I may have articulated myself badly. What I mean is the following: If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions. If I now switch to only 500g of higher quality meat the amount of CO2 emissions goes down to about 1/2x(I know this isn’t exactly true, due to the lost efficiency, but for bigger reductions its absolutely true, that the amount if CO2 you emitted goes down).
If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions.
I don’t think that’s true. those emissions happen regardless of whether you eat it. they happen regardless of whether you buy it.
Source please.
Your analysis undermines genuine science by disregarding the reduction in demand which reduces the supply and forming a data set with a sample of 1.
reduction in demand which reduces the supply
this isn’t causal
it’s obvious that the emissions happen before you decide whether to purchase a product. that’s how linear time works.
and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control.
didn’t you try that?
Sure, it’s more than just encouraging people to drop meat and dairy. It’s also voting for people who will make it financially impossible for those industries to continue.
I ain’t gonna stop eating meat to save 100g of CO2 a year while Taylor Swift takes her jet when she needs to tinkle.
Why is your moral compass calibrated according to the worst people? Is not being the worst possible human being good enough?
Also, as long the general public doesnt change whats acceptable and what not through their actions, why would the rich change anything? Theyre not the ones who will suffer from climate change and they dont care.
It’s about efficiency.
What’s better? Forcing 1000000 people to eat bugs and beans, or summarily executing one Elon Musk?
You dont need to force anyone. People make their own decisions.
By the same reasoning, would you abolish elections because letting a single person decide is more efficient?
In theory, I agree with you, it is way more efficient to just ban cars, ban billionaires, distribute their money and end world hunger. But thats not realistic. There is absolutely no indication that any politician will even consider any of that, as long as the population still keeps driving around in massive SUVs, eating mass produced meat and buying everything from Amazon.
Man you guys sure love to jump to absurd conclusions using apples to oranges comparisons… First the guy comparing eating beans to child abuse, now you… It’s almost as if trying to force your lame lifestyle on billions of people requires leaps of logic only a protein deprived brain can achieve.
First off, you can’t measure the efficiency of one person deciding vs multiple.
You can, however, determine how much co2 one person emits.
There’s also no indication that politicians will ever consider banning meat and yet here you are trying to make people eat beans on toast every meal.
Look, all I’m saying, if you truly care about the planet, instead of trying to force lifestyle changes on 99% of the population, there’s 1% of them that emits 15% of CO2 without really contributing anything useful to society.
There’s a quick ROI. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Or you could eat beans I guess.
You are strawmanning and coping so hard I dont have enough time to address all of that, so ill just pick a few.
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Im not trying to force lifestyle changes on anyone and I dont know why youre claiming that. I am simply arguing which life choices can make a difference and which cant.
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What exactly do you suggest the average person does to ensure the 1% stop emitting 15%? Vote green? That has worked wonderfully over the past 30 years right?
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Is ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ supposed to be a summary of my arguments? Coz it sure as hell doesnt fit you attitude of ‘dont change anything as long as rich people dont change’.
That has worked wonderfully over the past 30 years right?
veganism has been around since the '40s and the meat industry grows every year.
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Yes, yes you are. The only reason you are arguing right now is because you’re mad that I refuse to stop eating meat while some rich fuck’s personal jet flies around the world just so he can have a shit in a different toilet every day. If you didn’t care about changing my way, you’d be doing something else.
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You really want to get politicians involved, huh. You haven’t figured out yet that they’re part of the problem?
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Be the change you want to see in the world is meant as an encouraging statement to go and take things into your own hands instead of relying on third parties to fix your problems.
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I ain’t gonna stop beating my children while Israel drops bombs on schools to take out a hamas laptop.
Eat your bugs, you need to offset the damage caused by a billionaire’s third yacht.
What is with you guys and bugs? Do you really think vegetarians eat bugs or want you to eat bugs?
We eat and want you to eat beans, but I guess that’s not disgusting enough for you to get mad over.
Bugs, beans, whatever. That’s not the point.
Feel free to feel good about saving all that planet.
Oops some billionaire’s megayacht just dumped more CO2 in the atmosphere in a day than you banked by eating beans for the past decade.
But yeah, more beans please.
Also, 'people like men talk about bugs because that’s what the elite is working hard trying to manufacture that delicious bug eating consent
I will, and i will also feel good about not assaulting children even though there are people out there slaughtering droves of them.
So your evidence for this grand elite conspiracy is one article from the new York post. Tell me what’s the advertising budget for crickets, or if you’ve ever even seen an ad for crickets? Cause the advertising budget for Tyson foods alone is over $200 million . That’s just the industry itself, that doesn’t include restaurants like McDonald’s etc. That are also pushing you to buy meat. Tyson foods alone also lobbies the government to the tune of $2.8 million. The big money is not trying to get you to eat crickets, it’s trying to get you to eat meat.
Man you’re still missing the whole point of my argument just because I said bugs, huh?
Your brain that starved for real protein? Try meat.
Relatable
great. but why don’t we go double and also take 8m cars off the road?
I didn’t eat meat today so apparently I took 8m cars off the road.
I refuse to drive, I walk and transit, 1 car off road for decades.
How long have you been doing that, and I’m guessing you live in a city?
Yes, I live in a city. When young living with my parents (2 cars as they both worked and couldn’t car pool) I lived in what we called the “land of 3 numbered busses” aka the suburbs. I decided before 16 I didn’t want to drive, so never did. Started then to make my footprint as small as possible. Easiest way to make my footprint small was to live downtown where almost everything I need is 20 mins away by foot, sadly if I move now I will not be able to afford anywhere near where I am. I’m 50 next year.
Good for you. Personally, I can’t stand living in the city nowadays. I certainly can’t justify that rent.
Right now, due to how long I have been there, I am paying less for a 3 bedroom apt than one would for a 1 bed or bachelor
Dang. Lucky. Is that rent control or do you own?
The price of electric cars will do that on its own, once we phase out petrol.
Its also way better for you.
Legit, I was so warned about eating disorders when I was young, I never learned to just eat light and how fasting is a thing.
Eat some nuts and enjoy some other stuff. Meat shoumd ve cuts, and it should only 2-3 times a week.
I’ve seen very few 8 metre cars on the road…
Visit the US, look for “dualies.” 6.5m long trucks and people use them as daily drivers.
That’s too dystopian for my mind to even imagine…
That’s because I ate less meat, duh.
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride!
There are an estimated 1.475 billion cars/trucks/vans in the world, as of 2023. 8 million is 0.005% of 1.475 billion.
Now, if they’re going by the number of vehicles in the UK, then that number is obviously different. 41.2 million estimated vehicles in the UK. 8 million is a significantly larger percentage in that equation (19.4%). They also don’t mention whether they’re talking about ICE or electric cars, but I think it’s safe to assume ICE. In 2023 there were 851,000 licensed zero emissions vehicles in the UK, up 57% from the prior year.
I’m a strong proponent for cutting your beef, lamb, cheese, coffee, and chocolate consumption , as they’re among the worst, emissions-wise (bearing in mind this chart is by kilogram, not by calorie) by a long-shot, but we should be realistic about the things that are likely to do the most good.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
“new” study, draws half it’s methodology from referencing older papers, including the problematic poore-nemecek 2018 piece.
If eating no meat at all is too hard, from a climate perspective eating no beef will have the biggest impact. Eating no ruminants to be specific, but hardly anyone is eating bison/sheep/goat on the regular.
I went like 90% vegetarian and switched to the meat substitutes. If I can do it, anyone can. I’ve always had a meat-a-saurus diet until 2-3 years ago.
I’ve only met one person who couldn’t go veg, because they had allergies to everything: soy, legumes, nuts.
There’s been a lot of obsession with protein in popular culture when in reality unless you’re a bodybuilder you don’t need a ton and a veg diet will suffice. And there are tons of vegan athletes.
The point I was making is that there is one step even the laziest can take to have an impact: just stop eating beef. Going full veg is better of course.
Beef should be easy, too, because it’s so goddamn expensive.
I eat bison instead of beef, that way I’m a big part of a smaller problem rather than the other way around.
Lamb is popular in the UK. Beef is actually behind chicken and pork already.
Is lamb a regular dish or more of a Christmas and special occasion dish? I’m not in the UK so I genuinely don’t know. Not sure that you can get lamb at a fast food joint like you can with beef burgers.
Shepherd’s pie is a fairly regular Sunday meal.
And kebab meat is normally lamb. You can get that at pretty much any takeaway chippy in the country, and is traditionally eaten with about six pints of cheap lager.
A joint of lamb is a special occasion dish, but I think the statistics are skewed by the massive number of drunkenly-consumed kebabs
I’m in the US and can get lamb at fast food joints. Go to any Mediterranean shop for a gyro. Afaik it’s even more available in the UK since it’s primarily sold as people food, not dog food like the US market.
I’m in Canada and there aren’t a lot of shops with gyros. Tons of shawarma though, but that’s all beef or chicken.
I wish cloned meat was a viable thing. No animal suffering, far less pollution, sticking it to the vegan.
There are great alternatives today like impossible, beyond and tofurky. There’s no need to wait for lab grown meat. That’s like saying sticking it to the abolitionists and feminists. It’s silly to want to stick it to the most moral people in the world.
abolitionists and feminists fight for human dignity. comparing them to animals undermines human dignity
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I don’t care what anyone says, take some dry aged ribeye cooked to perfection, or some smoked ribs falling off the bone and compare that to some frozen tofurky log and tell me with a straight face that that’s an alternative. Forget about ballpark, gardein and beyond aren’t even playing the same sport when it comes to something like a smoked turkey leg.
Veganism is admirable. Animal welfare, carbon emissions, nutrition, these are all good reasons to stop eating meat altogether. But let’s not delude ourselves here, meat can be just about the most delicious food in existence. I have tried tons of fake meat products and they all taste like sodium cardboard nuggets.
No idea what that is about, maybe because I do want to eat meat, without the moral implications.
Anyway, I doubt I can get away with it in this conservative shithole country. If I didn’t live with my parents, I would have cut meat quite a lot. I actually prefer salads and such.
Why would this be sticking it to a vegan if you are eating a cloned organism with no experience of life? Its not a zero sum game, you can both have some (vegan) pie.
• save the planet• save the animals• stick it to the people who thought of all that first
Very mature of you.
But they hurt my fee fees with their mean words!
How many cars off the road does a dead executive take?
What about Taylor swift…
I am all about eating less meat for various reasons but this some idiotic thesis.
Why not both?
Are you implying that we should only do good things if they are the most good things in existence? Like, I shouldn’t have an electric car because planes exist? Please enlighten me.
This is BBC which speaks for big oil…
Eat less meat but don’t be confused what BBC is doing here…
yUoR CaRBON FoOTPriNt
So the problem is the hypocrisy of the news empire, not an idiotic thesis?
Why don’t we start by making private planes illegal instead? That amount of pollution to just move around a couple of rich assholes is insane.
Also, let’s force the industry to repair and upgrade all their infrastructure to apply more recent carbon filters. That way, we could block a “very” big chuck of the problem at his source.
But no… Let’s keep taking away things from the middle classes instead. After all, who needs meat, bugs are way cheaper, right?
Whole lot of whaboutism from personal responsibility and no body wants you to eat bugs.
Without meat, we need proteins. So either alimentar integrators (which are not cheap) or any “cheaper” alternative, and bugs are cheaper of fruit cultivation.
Also, the private plane thing was a provocation, but in all honesty, planes ARE the most polluting vehicles, and private one are the worst.
You can get your protein from lentils, chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, black beans, quinoa, peanut butter, almonds, spirulina, chia seeds, broccoli, and spinach.
None of those count unless Jordan Peterson says they count
Oh fuck, you’re right. Let’s get his opinion, I guess. @jordanpeterson@lemmy.world
You rang!?
Ah, yes, let us embark on this voyage of discovery, a deep dive into the primordial oceans of existence—both literal and metaphorical. Consider, for a moment, the noble lobster, a creature whose evolutionary lineage stretches back over 360 million years. That’s before trees, mind you! The lobster, with its armored exoskeleton and its symmetrical claws, embodies a certain archetypal resilience. This is a creature that, through its very being, demands respect—not merely because it resides in the depths, but because it has, quite literally, crawled through the eons to arrive at our dinner plates. But I digress.
Now, what is the lobster’s secret? What fuels its relentless climb up its own dominance hierarchy? It’s not filet mignon or bacon-wrapped scallops, I assure you. No, the lobster survives and thrives because it has mastered the consumption of what we might call “the humble nutrients.” If lobsters had access to lentils, chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, black beans, quinoa, peanut butter, almonds, spirulina, chia seeds, broccoli, and spinach, you can bet your serotonin levels that they would recognize their evolutionary utility.
You see, the lobster’s diet—limited as it may be to algae, plankton, and the occasional scavenged scrap—is fundamentally about extracting the raw building blocks of life from the environment. And isn’t that, at its core, what we as human beings are trying to do? We are striving to synthesize order out of chaos, to take the disparate and chaotic energies of the cosmos and transform them into coherent, purposeful structures. This is as true for our nutritional choices as it is for our existential choices.
So why, then, should we not learn from the lobster? Why should we not embrace the humility of plant-based proteins, these quiet titans of sustainability and nutrition? Lentils, for instance, are like the algae of the human world—small, unassuming, yet dense with life-sustaining power. Chickpeas, oh, they are the crustaceans of legumes, with their firm texture and versatile nature, ready to anchor any dish, any structure of meaning you dare to create. Tofu and tempeh? These are the architects of modern nutritional scaffolding, as malleable as they are essential.
And quinoa, that ancient grain? It is the spinach of seeds, packed with essential amino acids. It represents not merely sustenance but a profound wisdom—an ability to grow in the harshest of conditions and still deliver its gift to the world. Peanut butter and almonds? They are the treasures buried in the seabed, rich in energy and resilience, waiting to be uncovered by those willing to dig deeper.
Even spirulina and chia seeds—oh, do not underestimate them! Spirulina is the primordial soup of the modern era, the echo of those ancient, life-generating waters from which all existence sprung. Chia seeds, with their miraculous ability to transform into gelatinous orbs, are the very embodiment of adaptability and transformation—qualities we could all use a little more of.
And let us not forget broccoli and spinach, those verdant sentinels of nutrition. They are the forests of the nutritional world, standing tall and proud, converting sunlight into the essence of life itself. Without them, what are we? What is a lobster? What is any organism that hopes to grow, to climb its own hierarchy, to matter?
If the lobster, in its primitive yet profoundly successful state, had access to these
instead
We’re not doing either, because both the animal agriculture and private airline industry exist to benefit our liege lords
You’ll be eating the bugs (and liking it) soon enough. Just have to find the profit motive
As long as billionaires are allowed to run around and do what ever the fuck they want I will continue eating meat and not giving a fuck about recycling.
As long as billionaires have zero consequences then I will have zero sacrifices.
Fuck you all as long as you let billionaires destroy the earth while the poors take the hit.
Nah fuck all that shit.
If you want me to stop eating meat then fucking make me.
That’s absolving yourself of your personal responsibility to your health, the environment and the animals.
Just because someone is stepping on puppies doesn’t make it okay for you to do it too. No one should base their morality on the reprehensible things rich people do.
Besides the plant-based alternatives are great, you wont be missing meat for long.
As long as Israel is allowed to bomb children with impunity I will continue to beat my children.
They kill dozens of children in a day and I beat mine maybe once, twice a week. They’re the real problem, and I’m not making any sacrifices until they’re held accountable.
I obviously don’t know anything about you other than that you’re a lemmy user and I get your sentiment. Remember that there are likely those worse off than you as well as those with more, and those worse off will be more affected by the ongoing climate crisis.
I’m not gonna make you do anything, but by not doing anything, you’re throwing those even worse off than yourself under the bus, in the same way billionaires are throwing everone worse off than them under the bus.
We don’t all have to screw people over who have less power than us, even if that’s what billionaires do.
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Great an astroturfer…
You’re lying about ever being vegan as if you were you would’ve known that processed vegan food products are not the only alternatives to eating meat as there are pulses, peas, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds and whole grains you can have instead.
Plant-based meat is actually healthier than processed meat and red meat.
you would’ve known that processed vegan food products are not the only alternatives
I think you should give them the benefit of the doubt in this instance – they could be dumb as a rock.
They’re clearly trolling, I have never heard of this instance.
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Someone is trolling.
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Says the person obviously lying about having lower levels of energy despite the fact studies show that vegans are actually healthier.
A study published last week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that dietary protein derived from plant sources built muscle just as well as protein from meat sources. However meat also comes with additional components that are harmful to our health, including antibiotic residue, hormones, saturated fat, trans-fats, endotoxins, cholesterol, Neu5Gc, heterocyclic amines and contaminants such as high levels of metals including copper and arsenic. These undesirable elements increase inflammation and promote various diseases thus making meat a less desirable option when building muscle and long term health are considered.
A plant-based diet consists of exclusively plant foods, including fruit, vegetables, grains, and legumes, and avoids meat, dairy, and eggs. Plant-based foods are full of fiber, rich in vitamins and minerals, free of cholesterol, and low in calories and saturated fat. Eating a variety of these foods provides all the protein, calcium, and other essential nutrients your body needs. It’s important to include a reliable source of vitamin B12 in your diet. You can easily meet your vitamin B12 needs with a daily supplement or fortified foods, such as vitamin B12-fortified breakfast cereals, plant milks, and nutritional yeast. Those who eat a plant-based diet lower their risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other health conditions. Research also shows that a plant-based diet can be less expensive that an omnivorous diet.
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overly processed vegan garbage.
Am not vegan, but your issue here is eating all these “plant-based” ultra-processed food and thinking that’s the only way. Just eat more veggie and mushroom and bean.
Yeah but the slop being market to gen pop is literally same quality as a hotdog
It’s far more nutrient rich than any of the overly processed vegan garbage
Nothing more nutritious than slop. Keep stuffing your face with hamburger
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Lies again, the vast majority of meat is factory farmed.
The exceptional rare “local farms” do not stop the exploitation and slaughter.
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Meat requires more plants than directly eating them. So if you really cared about the plants you would go vegan.
You’re filling out my Carnist bingo sheet proving once again that you were never vegan.
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It’s just so hard for your brain to comprehend maybe someone escaped the fear mongering and ego tickling of veganism.
That’s literally projection, as you were just fearmongering about plant-based alternatives.
And way to ignore the fact that plants are probably crying as they’re ripped from their roots and start releasing toxins as defense mechanism.
Ignores the fact meat requires more plants and that plants do not have a central nervous system to process pain.
Meat requires more plants than directly eating them.
this isn’t true. most of what is fed to livestock is crop seconds and industrial waste. I don’t eat corncobs or corn stalks, or soy cake. but if I eat a pig that has been fed those, no more plants have been harmed.
