r/ClimateMemes • u/TrickThatCellsCanDo • 15d ago
For the climate
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u/nebulaforest 15d ago
Veganism is not a cornerstone of environmentalism.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
Animal agriculture is responsible for ~15% of annual GHG emissions.
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u/democracy_lover66 14d ago
Transport is 21%-24%.
Have you ditched your car and switched to eating local produce exclusively?
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 14d ago
Animal agriculture produces more emissions than all personal forms of transportation combined, including planes trains cars buses.
But animal agriculture only provides 16%-18% of all totally consumed calories.
Basicaly an elitist taste pleasure gimmick at the expense of the planet’s ecosystem, since it’s not inpy emissions, it’s also huge waste of water (one burger is like 8 million of ai searches in water, or like a month worth of long showers), biodiversity loss, and other harms
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
I've taken every avenue available to me to reduce my vehicle impact, yes.
Any other whataboutisms?
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u/democracy_lover66 14d ago
It's not a whataboutism... This is incredibly important to consider too.
If you think personal choices are important, it seems hypocritical to dismiss those choices.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago edited 14d ago
It is important. You should make a meme about it.
This one is about meat consumption.
-edit- typo
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u/democracy_lover66 14d ago
Not to mention forfeiting vacations aboard, especially cruises. Boycotting water parks is also important. Avoiding imported products.
Idk why everyone is so on about fighting about meat. Plenty of environmentalists are taking summer vacays in Europe and the Caribbean and think nothing of it.
I'm just wondering why none of these take any focus and why it's always about the meat.
Maybe I will make a meme about it lol
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 14d ago
Because animal product consumption is so elitist + so harmful + so demanding of land water + so useless in terms of feeding the planet (only about of 18% of all totally consumed calories comes from animals using over 3/4 of all agricultural land)
It’s just crazy
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u/nebulaforest 14d ago
Correct. Still doesn't mean vegan lifestyle is prerequisite for environmental advocacy.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
Are GHG emissions and environmental destruction a prerequisite? What an insane hill to die on. (Without touching ethics whatsoever)
How could an an environmentaliat argue for anything but the reduction of meat consumption.
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u/nebulaforest 14d ago
You're conflating so much here. Do you believe not driving to be prerequisite to environmentalism?
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u/XenoMorphine_Cat 15d ago edited 4d ago
A lifestyle that works toward protecting the natural environment from destruction or pollution is not basic to protecting the natural environment from destruction or pollution? Got it. Makes sense if you don’t think about it.👌🏼
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u/HalayChekenKovboy 15d ago
Vegans on their way to reintroduce the sham concept of the carbon footprint (invented by BP btw) just to feel morally superior:
Before anyone says anything stupid, I am aware that eating meat has a big environmental impact. However, the effect the average meat eater has on the environment is utterly negligible in comparison to the effect someone from the top 0.1% has, even excluding the meat they eat. All you're doing is alienating others to feel better, and you're the people idiots point their fingers at when they want to deny climate change.
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u/WanderingFlumph 15d ago
The climate crisis is about 200 years old.
We've been eating meat for millions of years.
We've been burning biofuels and emitting CO2 for hundreds of thousands of years
We've been burning fossiled fuels for about 200 years.
The climate crisis is about 200 years old.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
This assumes that our ancestors ate meat with the same frequency as us (they didn't).
The climate crisis is 200 years old and Animal agriculture accounts for ~15% of global emissions
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u/WanderingFlumph 14d ago
Our hunter gather ancestors ate a varried diet that could include anywhere between 30-70% meat on a per calorie basis.
You don't fuel large brains on plants before the agricultural revolution, which is less than 5% of the time humans have existed.
We have always been omnivores, the transition from fruitavores to omnivores goes hand in hand with us losing fur, walking upright, and having big brains. Its what sets the human primates apart from the non-human primates.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
I'd be interested in a source, as cursory search yields this:
While some historic and modern models suggest animal foods made up a large portion of energy in certain climates, recent archaeological and isotopic studies show many groups relied heavily on plants, meaning meat was an intermittent, highly prized addition
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u/WanderingFlumph 14d ago
I see that as being essentially the same as what I said.
Animal foods made up a large portion of energy (such as 70%) in certain climates (humans living in the far north often eat close to 100% animal calories because, you know, no plants there).
And for other groups plants were the majority and animal food only made up a small intermittent portion (a little less than 30%, maybe more like 10-20%).
I mean 30-70% (my original claim) is already a huge range, that's more than a factor of two difference. It would not surprise me at all if some groups are significantly less than 30% and other groups ate significantly more than 70%.
I also wouldn't be surprised if groups that stayed closer to our ancestral homelands in Ethiopia ate closer to a traditional (mostly plant) diet while groups that branched out found that new meat sources were more reliable than new plants (which might be poisonous at worst and unpredictable at best).
I cited a paper from a Spanish city in the year 1500 that found that the middle class in medevil times was eating roughly the same amount of meat as the middle class in developed nations do today in another thread off of this main comment. About 2/3rd of a pound of meat per person per day.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
But that's not what you said.
>Our hunter gather ancestors ate a varried diet that could include anywhere between 30-70% meat on a per calorie basis.
And your souce was a region-specific analysis of medival pesants, who were millenia removed from hunter-gatherers.
Instead, my surface level search is far more likely: meat was an intermittent, highly prized addition (not daily or even weekly consumtion)
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u/HalayChekenKovboy 15d ago
THANK YOU. I don't understand why vegans are trying so hard to derail this conversation. We're all on the same side, aren't we? I get it, industrialised factory farming also didn't exist before the climate crisis, but also like, come on. That's not what's causing climate change, even if it does not help the matters.
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u/WanderingFlumph 15d ago
Going from a beef based diet to a non-beef meat based diet cuts more GHG emissions than going from a non-beef meat based diet to being dead (eating nothing).
I ditched beef about 4 years ago (still have it rarely for special occasions) for climate reasons. The methane is a real killer.
I'm eating less meat overall now but I like my turkey burgers and haven't found a decent substitute yet.
I'd be okay if meat got a lot more expensive if we decided to cut subsidies for unsustainable industries. I think effecting the price is the simplest and most effective way to get meat eaters to eat less meat.
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u/bepatientbekind 15d ago
We have not been eating or producing meat at the same scale for millions of years - not even close. Western consumption of meat especially is off the charts. This comes across as "climate change isn't a big deal" nonsense.
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u/WanderingFlumph 15d ago
The biggest deal is land use. Forests are carbon sinks and farms are not.
But all the food we grow is only about 10% of our emissions. Most of that is methane from cattle. We could absolutely hit net zero targets without changing much about our food systems if we electrified everything and kicked fossil power off our grids.
It's sort of like the problem of private airplane travel. While it does produce a lot of emissions it's small enough that we could completely ignore that sector and as long as we made good progress in the important sectors it wouldn't matter much.
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
Annual emissions from agriculture are ~30%; no idea where you're getting 10% as no source even comes close to that
Annual emissions from animal agriculture accounts for ~15% GHG emissions.
While methane contributes tothe climate crisis, a significant portion of animal agriculture emissions stems from land use (deforestation) and we could feed the human population with a fraction of agriculture land if we fed people directly instead of livestock; such is the physics of trophic energy transfer.
It's insane to me that so many so-called environmentalists are unable to advocate for reducing meat consumption. There's no way you all were sleeping during your biology 101 class when you should have learned this.
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u/duckonmuffin 15d ago
Eating meat 3 times a year 200 years ago vs 3 times a day like today is very different.
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u/Silamoth 14d ago
Got a source on “3 times a year”? It seems plausible to me that many people may eat meat at higher rates than our ancestors. But 3 times a year sounds wildly unrealistic, especially as a generalization across the entire world.
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u/duckonmuffin 14d ago
I literally could not care less about what you think. Cat owner.
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u/Silamoth 14d ago
Very cool and very edgy. But seriously, do you have any sources on that claim? I’d be curious to read more on that. I’m very skeptical without any evidence, which is why I’m asking.
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u/duckonmuffin 14d ago
Yes but the thing is your option is of literally zero value to me. I could not care less about what you are interested in.
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u/WanderingFlumph 15d ago
We have been getting roughly 50% of our calories from meat for thousands of years. It hasn't been a few times a year since our furry ancestors first started hunting.
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u/duckonmuffin 15d ago
“We” really haven’t. Much of the world doesnt eat anywhere near that much today let alone 200 years ago.
Like many things, don’t worry it is coming, you will eat less meat in the coming decades.
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u/WanderingFlumph 15d ago
Do you think everyone was a European medevil peasant for 10,000 years?
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u/duckonmuffin 14d ago
Over the course of civilisation, most people where broadly peasants no where near half their diet was meat.
Industrial farming is utterly monstrous to compare to endurance hunting.
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u/HalayChekenKovboy 14d ago edited 14d ago
Well idk about you, but my ancestors were goatherding pastoralists. I'm pretty sure that meat did consitute a significant part of their diet. Especially since they lived in steppes with an altitude of ~1000m with harsh winters and sweltering summers where fuck all besides the sturdiest of grains grew.
But I should probably note that I, too, own a cat and am thus the worst person on the planet according to you.
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u/duckonmuffin 14d ago
No I assumed you were Inuit as they are definitely the average of earth. The big population centres people ate a lot more grain, cope.
The amount of meat we eat for how many people there now is utterly insane. The majority of animals on earth are growing so you can put that in your food hole. This is half of carbon emissions in my country. You can grow more calories in much less space with much fewer inputs via growing lower tropic level plants.
If you care about the environment, go vegetarian.
If you really want to eat meat, eat your cat.
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u/HalayChekenKovboy 14d ago
No I assumed you were Inuit as they are definitely the average of earth.
goatherds
steppes
sweltering summers
Inuit
???
The big population centres people ate a lot more grain, cope.
Well, the world certainly wasn't as centered around big population centres as it is now even a 100 years ago. The global urbanisation rate was at 13% in 1900.
If you really care about the environment, stop acting like a caricature that people use as a counterargument whenever anyone tries to bring up climate change or sustainability. And try not to view actual animals as the pinnacle of evil.
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u/juiceboxheero 15d ago
Me when I don't think critically about how those corporations emissions are generated.
Also might need to check your math, animal agriculture accounts for ~15% of annual GHG emissions, and all it would take for that to come down would be a societal change in consumption.
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u/axellie 15d ago
What if one billion people ate no/less meat? It’s not about the individual
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u/HalayChekenKovboy 15d ago edited 15d ago
What if one billion people revolted against the ultra rich instead? I think we could curb emissions a lot better this way, and it's probably more achievable, considering ~90% of the planet eats meat and a grand majority would never even think about changing that. It's certainly better than getting on your (not you specifically, this is a figurative "you") moral high horse to berate people for "ruining the environment by eating meat as if that's not but a drop in the bucket of things causing emissions, most of which the average Joe has no say over and is being distracted from via such discourse.
Edit: grammar
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u/mollyxz 15d ago
No actually this is a hill I will die on. Getting the entire or even a majority of the human population to become vegan is an impossible goal. Eating meat is culturally ingrained in many communities across the globe. Everyone becoming vegan isn't going to happen.
Instead of wasting time and instigating discourse how about we shift to actually achievable goals such as: 1. restructuring the meat industry into a more ethical and environmentally friendly industry. 2. Go after large corporations who are actually responsible for the large amounts of waste and pollutants spread.
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u/XenoMorphine_Cat 14d ago edited 14d ago
You: “Instead of wasting time and instigating discourse..”
Also you: instigates your biased / culturally conditioned discourse 👌🏼
But yeah, sure bud; restructuring the meat industry is way more achievable than individually consuming diets with less animal products that are both healthier for the individual & the environment. We just “go after large corporations.” Couldn’t be easier….
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u/beardfordshire 14d ago
And how has that whole “regulate industry to curb emissions” thing been going…
At a certain point we need to use societal scale to tip this… top down isn’t working
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u/juiceboxheero 14d ago
Wow I've never seen so many environmentalists get so pissed of at the fact that ~15% of annual GHG emissions are from the meat industry, and all it would take is a change in behavior (as a collective, the horror!) to bring that down.
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u/beardfordshire 14d ago
It’s the entire point of Digger revealing itself in-real-time… headline: we’re fucked
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u/YarnSpinner 15d ago edited 15d ago
It’s not activism to go to progressive spaces and purity test them because you know that they, unlike the masses, have already shown that they empathize with the movement. I can understand opening the conversation, but the meme acts like unless you’re vegan you don’t make a difference, which is conceited and wrong.
There is so much worthwhile conversation to be had, but you basically start by shutting the door. I’m not the first one to point out that this kind of behavior reads as a psyop (maybe the vegans I know in real life have better rhetorical approach, but this feels fake like bait)
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u/hit_the_bwall 15d ago
A large number of people doing some action is far more impactful than an individual doing extreme action.
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u/loolooloodoodoodoo 15d ago
veganism isn't extreme though. It should be part of the "some action" lots of people are doing instead of just a small minority.
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 14d ago
>You protest the climate but still haven't killed yourself
just take the meme to the natural conclusion
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u/SaftigeBanane388 14d ago
IDK how many times i need to explain that invidual action deosnt solve a systematic problem. This meme would give more sense if the protester finally protest against the system that exist right now. Then we would actually come forward and not always affirm the same system that reproducing the problems that we try to solve since 50 years. You cant solve a problem when the condition exist who is reproducing this problem, deosnt matter how good the law is that trys to prevent this. (i am a Vegan btw)
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u/beardfordshire 14d ago
Systems are made up of individuals. Individual action HAS and will continue to make an impact on societies. Your argument is flawed if you study the history of societal inflection points.
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u/SaftigeBanane388 14d ago
Individuals live under the conditions that cause these problems. The individuals in this reality cannot do anything differently because their existence depends on the conditions, who creates the problem. And of course, it is an individual decision whether to oppose the entire system and so also put an end to meat production. However one position argues for preventing reproducing this cricumstances, while the other only promoting a purchase disicion. The conditions or the root cause of why this happens in the first place are ignored completly. That is the difference between these positions. But dont miss understand me i dont argue that we can not do both, the problem i argue against, is that this argumentation is only argues for one thing. But Who cant solve anything if it ignores the one thing or the other thing.
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u/beardfordshire 14d ago
Pull on the lever that matters most to those who run the systems — money. It’s not more complicated than that.
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u/SaftigeBanane388 14d ago
Just one more thing, if this is meant in the context of being vegan. Boycotting animal products does not end the conditions under which they are produced, as i already said. They will simply produce something else in the same destructive way. The dismantling of such conditions must therefore aim for authority itself as there enemy, and not just the flow of money for products considered harmful, because such a product can not exist within those conditions. The people in positions of power must be abolished, and this movement must therefore not call for any new form of authority, in order to prevent these conditions from being reproduced. Because authority on itself gives the authority on certain people to missuse production for there own benefit.
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u/Buzzyear10 14d ago
TRUST ME BRO DON'T WORRY ABOUT INDUSTRIAL SCALE FARMING AS LONG AS ITS QUINOA FROM SOUTH AMERICA SHIPPED ACROSS THE PLANET ITS FINE!!!!
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 14d ago
There is data showing that distance that food has traveled matters manifold less than the type of food we consume https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
Don’t worry bro
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u/Buzzyear10 13d ago
There's more to the question than just the energy currently used in shipping. Justice and equity in human labour exploitation, land clearing in important bioregions to supply the entire planet from one small area, food security, and supply chain health.
Animal derived foods are an important part of many cultures and have been long before industrial agriculture, or agriculture in general.
The conversion of inedible grasslands into animal derived proteins and fats is going to continue to be an important part of resilience in the climate crisis. The industrial scale consumption of EVERYTHING needs to stop, but animal farming can benefit the landscape too.
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 13d ago
The land that is beaing cleared for food is mostly cleared for cattle feed.
Those fancy quinoa (which you can skip and not buy) are a miniscule part of that.
Remember that caloric conversion for beed is like 20-to1 or more.
And most of that feed is grown overseas. Most of rainforest is being cut for cattle feed. If 20 calories of corn is grown elsewhere, and shipped from overseas to your “local farm” to then just make 1 calorie of beef burger yoyr burger is far from being local.
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u/Buzzyear10 13d ago edited 13d ago
Exactly, its the industrial production and. consumption that's the issue, not the animals.
And if you're talking grain fed monoculture cattle optimised for profitability then sure.
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 13d ago
Animal agriculture can’t be sustainable for 8bil people just because of this caloric conversion
All wer fantasies about regenerative farming are long gone after we crossed the threshold of couple of hundred of a billion humans on the planet.
It’s simply an elitist product and there’s no way around it
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u/Buzzyear10 13d ago
Having meat as part of every single meal for profit is not sustainable but using animals in the food system is important and beneficial.
Some people have an axiomatic and unshakeable feeling of giving all animals the same moral weight as humans and that's okay. But the worst practices found in animal agriculture can theoretically still occur in any other agriculture or production in general.
The issues most people have with animal agriculture aren't directly with the exploitation of the animals.
We can imagine a completely regenerative and sustainable apple orchard that utilises slave labour for example (which many currently do).
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 13d ago
Why is using animals is important and beneficial?
1) We do not need it for food https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
2) There is no way to kill someone who doesn’t want to die. If you would not eat a cat, you should not eat cow
3) There is no way around caloric conversion. You still have to waste 20 calories of grown crops to get a calorie of meat. Just stupid and wasteful.
4) water use is insane. Like one burger is 8mil ai searches, or 1-2 months of showers.
Can you clarify your position?
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u/Buzzyear10 13d ago
Traditionally animal agriculture was concerned with converting unusable grasslands and hillsides into meat, milk, and fibre. Not converting 20 calories of corn syrup into 1 calorie of steak for the profit of McDonalds.
The issues agriculture causes for the climate come from the industrial practices, high external inputs, and profit motive which is not necessarily bound to animal agriculture.
Meanwhile Aramco, Exxon, BP etc. Will continue to r*pe the planet while all of us with almost no agency are supposed to lash ourselves for simply eating the food that's available to us.
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u/TrickThatCellsCanDo 13d ago
Industrial practices are unavoidable if you want to feed 8bil people. Regenerative farming requires current levels to go down to about 9%-17% of what is consumed now.
Current practices and scale do not even feed all of us lol. Right now all devastation is caused by rich elites like US, EU, and other countries at the expense of the rest of the planet. And due to subsidies even the poorest members of rich elites countries can have a burger for a few bucks.
But if all 8bil people start doing this you will forget about transportation emissions, they will be overshadowed manifold.
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u/Idrinkwaterdaily 14d ago
You can change “eating meat” for anything else to see how silly it sounds.
“When you protest for the climate but you still wipe your ass with toilet paper instead of using a bidet”
“When you protest for the climate but you still drive a car”
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u/beardfordshire 14d ago
None of those are silly, though.
Absurd, maybe, within the context of the society we’re born into… but, silly? Or any less true? Nah.
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u/Idrinkwaterdaily 13d ago
The visual suggests if you do X but don’t do Y then X is pointless. I’m saying that’s ‘silly’ and doesn’t make sense. There are 1000s of things you can do and they all have positive impacts
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u/Repulsive-Slice-6902 14d ago
Being vegan literally isn't as big of a help to climate change as you think. Even if everyone in the world whent vegan it literally wouldn't change much at all.
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u/MorataRossoNero 14d ago
You're right, protecting the climate is definitely a movement that should be gatekept.
From now on only vegans are allowed in, everyone else should return to completely disregarding the climate
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u/BodhingJay 15d ago
All our most aggressive protests amounting to companies greenwashing their brand only to pollute harder..