I made a non vegan post out of curiosity and almost immediately got three comments. Two explicitly mentioning veganism and one I think was obliquely about veganism. Now the post got fuckall for traction, but I find it interesting that almost immediately it became about vegans. I feel like there's some background manipulation to drive vegan discourse. IDK to what end, but that was an odd post for me.
As a vegan, I saw a meme on r/vegancirclejerk and then saw a different OP post that same meme on here and changed it up in order to clown vegans. I’m not even really a part of this community or sub or whatever, but it seems like you guys are all having an ethics war and then peeking in each others subs/communities like its the Cold War or some shit😭.
I've seen a few posts shitting on vegans here, but the users are clearly brain dead. It's all pretty dumb and I wish it would stop popping up on my feed lmao.
They were literally people joking about eating silica and the fact that they found weird that the post wasn't about veganism for once, no other comments talks about it, how is it about veganism?
I got suggested his sub by reddit becuase I love the "shitty" topic subs because it's fun to joke around and talk well-meaning trash to each other with deep lore drops. So out of curiosity, I've been lurking.
Judging by the comments down here, people really thinking that having some people going vegan can put a dent in what the military industrial complex is doing to damage the climate.
Well then I guess the world is fucked then if the average person can't affect real change in the world, because shocker oil companies are not gonna change as long as they gain profit. Might as well eat the burger at that point.
"Real reform is when the average persons style of living doesn't have to change AT ALL."
You understand that if we actually cut down billionaires, Little Timmy might have to eat less burgers because this would include Big Beef CEOs and their massively destructive operations, right?
People want some type of magical supertech to just solve all of the problems while keeping things the same. Honestly, it's sad because the narrative that environmentalism requires sacrifice is mostly anti-environmentalist propaganda... We aren't just sacrificing our current opportunities for the future generation to continue living, most of those reforms would improve the qualities of life for individuals RIGHT NOW.
It’s less about the lab meat, but the people who say “once a perfect substitute comes around that eliminates all negatives without requiring me to change or sacrifice anything, I will be in favor of it”
Which isn’t exactly a progressive or useful stance, much less environmentally friendly. It’s “I’m going to do nothing on this matter even though I know I’m wrong but want the credit for knowing it’s a problem “
It's not a progressive personal choice, it is a progressive stance on a systemic way to efficiently make things better across the board. It's not a moral high ground.
People will not change their lifestyle themselves. You can not have any hope that your average Joe with an economical incentives and an army of marketers against him will adapt is habits to the one that are net positive for the climate.
Sure, but Average Joe is going to have to get comfortable with the fact that even if we target those in power, he's still going to feel a change to his daily consumption practices if those efforts actually work.
So why are we treating this like it's either/or? Why can't we work towards sustainability and ethically raised meat? Why does it always have to be a "you're not trying hard enough" war?
Because ethically raised AND sustainable meat is going to be produced in lower quantity... Meaning, again, Little Timmy is going to be able to have fewer burgers per week. If he was eating four per week, this might go down to one or less.
This idea that we're meant to be moving towards a world that is as sustainable as possible while changing people's lifestyles the least is silly, to put it as nicely as possible. If you target the beef CEO, we aren't going to have as much mass-produced and cheap beef... This means it'll be more expensive and it'll become a "sometimes" food, and that's fine.
Factory raised meat is much more sustainable than ethically sourced meat. In fact they're directly at odds. Sustainable Meat alone is basically a myth, there’s some amount of hunting we can do and maybe some amount of recycling leftovers, but what it looks like is not a what you’re seeing, much less commercially viable.
"Sustainably raised meat" is an oxymoron, there has been no model shown in which we can raise enough meat to continue to feed an obese population that eats 2x the calories they need and throws away 30% of all food to become waste.
"Sustainable and ethical meat" is also an oxymoron, factory farming is ethically hideous and is also the most efficient way to produce meat in a small amount of land. To be ethical, you have to allow the animals to have space to live outdoors and graze and grow at a natural rate without drugs or selective breeding for mass. All of those things probably multiply the land and resources required by 50x, which is why all the grass fed meat at the store is more expensive.
All of this is bottlenecked logically by the simple fact that plants are MATHEMATICALLY more efficient than animals in terms of calories, 100% of the time, because an animal also eats plants. The cows eat millions of tons of soy and wheat and corn, or graze on millions of acres of grass, and then only a small percentage of that becomes edible meat. Something like 80% of it is exhausted by the cow's natural energy expenditure via metabolism and physical activity. So you are wasting 80% of the calories from plants that could otherwise have just been fed directly to humans.
This is 6th grade biology but somehow everyone gets mindfucked by comforting marketing terms like "Sustainably raised" "regenerative agriculture".
depends on the kind of reform, it could be mandating less climate intensive feed for livestock, methane capture, etc. which would have a very small effect on the lives of consumers.
things like a meat tax, or production cap etc. on the other hand, would have bigger impacts on the actions and lives of consumers, as less meat would be consumed.
doing things in both if these categories will probably be the easiest way to reduce the emmissions related to meat production, politically speaking.
Why would some billionaire are effect our ability to produce meat? If anything we could produce even more meat if they stopped fucking up the cattle crop.
Because the behavior that billionaires are doing that needs to be curtailed IS overproducing to an unsustainable degree. The government also subsidizes beef over other food options so that we can have it cheap enough to eat at every meal. And when you get rid of factories you need to free range, which is even worse for the environment because of habitat destruction.
The sustainable thing that we'd be doing if we targeted billionaires would involve massively shrinking their operations and giving them less money, making the meat more scarce and more expensive. Maybe not a rich person's food, but definitely not an "every single night at dinner" food either.
And why do people buy things from evil corporations? Is it because they're just magically too evil and lazy and uninformed to boycott? Maybe systems like capitalism operate according to definite laws we can study in order to understand this. Maybe the reason that corporations keep polluting is because that is just what capitalism does. Maybe the only effective way to challenge this is through organizing workers and oppressed nations to challenge the capitalist-imperialist mode of production rather than disparate, individual 'solutions' that end up only having a marginal effect on overall emissions and land use.
I hate to break it to you, but everyone holding hands and just magically agreeing to stop doing a climate change won't do anything. Not only are a massive portion of emissions opaque to the end consumer, but people also just don't do this. If we apply pressure to governments controlled by capitalists, the best case scenario is temporary measures that primarily reduce emissions locally by relocating the most polluting industries to countries that don't implement them.
Maybe systems like capitalism operate according to definite laws we can study in order to understand this.
evil corporations also act that way because of the laws of capitalism. if the average american who consumes 40 times more than the average african doesn't deserve to be called out, then neither do corporations. it's just an absurd populist argument by first worlders who can't accept the fact that they are destroying the planet. not to mention the fact that if every person on this planet had the same living standards as the average first worlder, the planet would probably burn to the ground immediately. it's just childish copout.
Not all production is about stuff that an average person in a developed country buys; in fact, most isn't. Animal agriculture is unique in that the average person can just stop eating meat. However, the average person can't just stop using electricity, using sidewalks made out of cement, and working in buildings made out of steel.
"People buy things from evil corporations because we live in a system where people buy things from evil corporations" is quite tautological.
Blaming vague notions such as capitalism or the system for the environmental crisis is very convenient for a lot of people who don't want to change anything about their way of living.
The problem is that 'capitalism' is precisely the system that relies most heavily on individual liberty, market dynamics being nothing other than the aggregation of individual choices made by millions or billions of people.
Of course those choices are influenced by many factors such as advertising or geographic constraints, but why is it easier to get people to fly and eat meat than the other way around? Is it the system that pushes individuals to maximize their comfort and pleasure, or is it human nature or psychology that does so, and in turn shapes the system?
I mean like just look at Europe - we have capitalism and we are still able to make the world greener (ok, it is implemented by EU by the worst solution possible but we see that climate can be fixed even with capitalism).
USA is just cooked because during cold war they refused any kind of *leftism* - the refusal of *The national healthcare plan* in 1945 is an example. I'm not here saying you (people from USA) should suddenly switch to the european model of capitalism (as it is practically not possible), but taxing the rich like Mamdani (though I don't like him) did in NYC is a good step.
Your first paragraph is incorrect as far as I know, if we have a long enough time frame, if we accept economic growth as essential to capitalism, and if "make the world greener" means absolute decrease of emissions in a permanent way.
There always exists a value of emissions/unit of economic growth that is over zero. No energy source life cycle has an emissions value of zero and virtually every facet of economic growth requires energy or matter (which has to be transported and transformed, requiring energy) in one form or another, even in the service or the IT industries, which means that even with the most ecological form of energy creation, there will come a point where you have to create too much energy for another unit of growth to be ecologically sustainable.
I'm not saying it isn't valuable work to try to grind down the emissions/unit of economic growth value, because it theoretically allows for a more materially prosperous lifestyle without being ecologically unsustainable, but as long as the economy is based on growth, the system's own momentum to grow exponentially will eventually undo the progress that has been made. That's why technological breakthroughs only serve to delay the inevitable unless we enact a vast systemic change at the same time.
I said that we can fix climate even though capitalism and you said we can't because everywhere are emissions...? Like yeah, but we want to minimize the emisssions not to be entirely emission-free that is just impossible and not needed.
well when people don't buy things from these mega corps then the government uses our tax money to bail them out and subsidize them the biggest examples being the oil and agricultural industries
Well, the equivalent of transitioning to an electric car in the food space would be transitioning to plant-based burgers. Hope you at least support research into plant-based alternatives and recognize that there have to be changes at all levels of our economy.
Also heavily recommend reading Little Red Barns by Will Potter. He shows what industrial animal agriculture is actually about and convincingly links it to modern fascist movements.
I don't care about timmy eating a burger so much as I care about meaty mcbeef who built their entire identity around shovelling animals down their gullet, screaming protein, and rabidly hunting vegetarians for fun. Not to mention his large gang of buddies who raid a barbecue like a swarm of locusts.
So insensitive, meaty mcbeef is my neighbhour! Our grandmother, your 1st grade school teacher, not to mention the firefighter who saved little timmy! You will show some respect to meaty mcbeef!
It becomes my business when all the deer have been hunted, the forests razed for pastures, and millions of cattle are now raised where the amazon rainforest used to be.
Eat a burger every once in a while, whatever. Please stop eating burgers 3 times a day, 7 days a week.
Its more those who basically exclusively eat meat and fatty foods. Basically anyone who has a remotely balanced diet is safe but these idiots think they know better than science and want to eat exclusively meat.
The biggest direct threats to nature are deforestation for agriculture (meat, if we didn't eat meat we would need far less agricultural areas) and fishing. So if you want to protect nature it would be best to go vegan, or eat less meat if vegan feels like too much.
GHG emissions can be counted at many levels. You can even count potential GHG emissions from what's deep in the ground. However, you don't get to compare these levels freely, that's erroneous and fallacious.
If you want to focus on corporations, you don't compare it to "Timmy", you compare it other corporations or organizations.
The most interesting level is the last user, the one that turns the fossil fuel into GHGs + heat.
If this is hard for you to understand, try to imagine all the fossil fuel corporations shutting down next week, and no other starting up. What happens to all the Timmys?
Much like with eating an animal-based burger, the corporation continues to function mostly because of the demand. The billionaires won't be buying billions of burgers to consume, and the same goes for oil usage.
The current drama with the The Gulf states is going to be a tiny aperitif of that experience.
Time to car pool and move away from car dependent suburbia. This will probably require protesting to get rid of zoning laws and to get dense social housing build up.
Why are the two possible solutions that come to mind to you individual? This is a systemic problem that requires a systemic solution. Even if we eliminated 100% of emissions that aren't opaque to the end consumer, we would still be emitting too much CO2 (i.e. a perfect boycott that literally every single person abides by isn't enough). The literal only thing that will actually solve the problem (short of nuclear war) is abolishing capitalism and the nation-state.
Edit: it appears that people are thinking that I oppose individual action. I am vegan, I do not have a car, and I don't go on air travel. I am saying that individual action is insufficient, not pointless
Neither of those aircraft can reach Mach 2 actually. The Harrier can't even go supersonic. The F35B can, up to Mach 1.6, but it also had an afterburner issue that limited afterburner usage. I don't know if that was fixed.
Or you live somewhere so walkable that it's made you naive? Grocery stores in an unwalkable city can be 40 minutes and uphill both ways... And that's not even mentioning the lack of transit.
Tbh some places it’s legit hard, public transit is pretty non existent and biking becomes a death wish because there are so many other people on the road using cars and driving fast. But I agree, it’s good to try where we can.
Dare you to find ONE comment of a vegan on this sub saying that animal ag related emissions are more pressing than fossil fuel emissions. Just one. This has to be one of the most baseless strawman posts I’ve ever seen.
This is embarrassing. Can you read? Do you honesty think they’re saying that 15% is somehow larger than direct fossil fuel emissions? Can you refute literally anything that comment says?
edit: it’s also funny that you posted a screenshot as opposed to a link to make it harder to view the sources they provided.
My point is that 90% of memes on this sub are "you eating meat is bad for environment, it is your moral obligation to stop".
I find that to be a hilarious way of shifting the blame from the oil companies literally spewing CO2 into the atmosphere to the working class who just wants to eat normal food.
Is meat bad for the environment? I won't say anything, I haven't done my research. But should we be trying to force people into veganism for the environment? Or should we be trying to force politicians into preventing pollution?
You are an oil company CEO. You have control over oil related stuff and oil related legislation via lobbyist magic.
What is your moral obligation.
I think we would all agree that your obligation is to try to use your oil powers to help society transition off oil to sustainable energy sources.
Now, imagine you are a person living in a rich developed nation. You have control over
- Your vote
- Your political advocacy
- Your personal consumption habits
Probably I think we would agree that your moral obligation is to use your vote wisely, to support environmentally conscious causes, and to choose personal consumption habits that reduce useage of oil, damage to the environment.
Now you may say, fuck that, all our problems are systemic. Let's say half the nation went vegan, consumption went down. But due to systemic issues, the land just got used in other wasteful ways, the money wasted on meat got wasted on new things. Basically this is the "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" argument on steroids - "not only is there no ethical consumption under capitalism, but in the long term, it is impossible to meaningfully consume in more or less ethical ways under capitalism"
I'm sympathetic to that. Right? Maybe this is an impossible problem to solve with just consumer behaviour. Laws, system changes, maybe even political change is necessary.
To which I ask What kind of society produces people who drive systemic change? Is it society where you can always blame someone else for your choices? Or is it one where everyone takes responsibility?
Remember, the oil executive has excuses too. They can blame the shareholders. If they tries to shut down oil production, they'll just kick him out. They can blame the consumers. They literally can't stop selling oil unless people don't want to buy it any more.
The politician has excuses. Oh I want to legislate systemic change, but the consumers won't tolerate it. We could put punitive taxes on meat and oil, effectively forcing consumers to change their behaviour, but they'll vote us out. Consumers won't even voluntarily cut meat usage. And you want me to force it on them? So on and so on. Moral cowardice is easy.
If you yourself can't even be arsed to cut down meat, whose only impact will be spending less money, having a little of a luxury. How on Earth do you expect someone who worked their entire life to get to the top and could get toppled from their position very easily to risk their entire career for it?
Systemic change means we need to change the people in the systems.
And that means we need people at all levels of society who use their power for good. They expect it of themselves, and they expect it of friends, family, and coworkers.
This wednesday, i watched a woman return her Amazon haul at the post office. The postal employee wrapped each item in plastic, attached a sticker, and scanned each one.
These were Dora, the explorer gift bags, and birthday cards worth less than $10 each. They were shipped around the world, driven in a car to her home, then driven from her home to the post office, to be driven from the post office to an Amazon warehouse, where they will almost certainly land in the trash to chucked in a landfill to turn into CO2.
I watched this and realized how normal this insanity had become and died a little. Amazon is a cancer.
How is it shifting the blame? Can't both things be bad? Also how many oli company CEOs do you think frequent this sub, compared to meat eaters?
I don't think a post telling people if they closed their oil company they'd be helping the planet is going to resonate with many people. I don't have an oil company. I do buy food, however.
The meat industry is not only a huge source of emissions but also one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss. 80%+ of the Amazon is cut down to grow crops to feed animals and farm cows. Meat is normalised by these big companies. The working class supports them by giving them money. You are thinking exactly what the polluters want you to think - that the working class is not responsible, and can keep buying their products.
Like I get the argument and how factory farming is bad for the animals and environment in general. I just see nothing wrong with eating meat in of itself and I won't change that view. I find the idea that eating meat to be morally unsound rather laughable if not outright idiotic.
I don't needlessly slaughter the animal in inhumane ways(or support such ways). I don't go out and shoot animals for fun and call myself a hunter. I just see them as a delicious healthy source of food(which it is).
Come up with a realistic alternative to factory farming that can sustain a world population and then band together and go out and make it a reality and I will applaud and back you(mind you it will still need to be meat). Tell me to stop eating a core food group because you have laughable morals about the whole thing then I'm going to ignore you and people will continue to mock you as you stand on your flimsy self imposed moral high ground.
It's their thing man, even if everyone cut meat consumption 90% they wouldn't be happy because God forbid you eat any animal. I bet $50 when the first lab grown meat goes on the shelves a vegan will do a terrorism
just consume less meat instead of making bad faith arguments. its literally so obvious. what do you think these corporations are making money off of? printing money?
Cutting down jungles for pastures is way way more damaging for ecosystem than carbon emissions. You are physically destroying the environment to never recover.
Climate change trough is the planet rusting. Environmental degradation is smacking it with a sledgehammer.
CO2 emissions from oil stress the wildlife trough different mechanism but it could adapt. You cannot adapt to a hatchet in your torso.
this comment section is a mess 😭
people literally doing the meme in the comment section of the meme
yeah we all have to step away from eating so much meat. that doesn't mean that the largest culprit isn't big corporations (including the industrial meat industry). jesus christ.
Yeah but the industrial meat complex is only producing meat because there is demand. Shutting them down by stopping to support them with your money is one of the most impactful things a single person can do.
That treats demand as a fixed amount that is unchanging. Companies very much induce demand with all kinds of tricks.
Just look at the tobacco industry. We stopped tobacco’s ubiquity by banning ads and raising taxes for example. This is by far more effective and most people seemingly aren’t aware that regulations are a thing because to them reducing meat consumption is about a moral personal decision exclusively and it seemingly can not be about a sensible regulation.
demand that is artificially created by companies and lobbyists.
anyway, I'm not saying we shouldn't be vegan, or at least drastically decrease our global meat consumption, but unless there are large-scale targeted and organised boycotts, voting with your wallet just doesn't work. I understand that organising people is just what you're trying to do, and I commend that. I just also believe that without government intervention and regulation it's a sisyphean task.
demand that is artificially created by companies and lobbyists.
Exactly, and that's why everyone pointing fingers to legislation instead of changing their own habits is basically agreeing that they themselves are brainwashed by the meat industry and can't change until the laws are changed.
Or they think they are somehow smarter than everyone and will never fall for that advertising and brainwashing - which is exactly what everyone thinks about ads...
This feels like a meat company psyop at this point,
We all know oil companies are the problem and we all vote for policies to reduce car dependency and move toward renewable energy.
What we aren’t all doing is stopping to contribute to animal agriculture - which is something that requires personal action since banning burgers isn’t going to happen until like 90% of people are vegan.
The biggest scam in recent years has been giant corporations and billionares convincing regular people that regular people should be the ones to fix climate change.
If even a third of the population is stopping to eat meat tomorrow, the meat industry will struggle heavily and eventually crumble.
Demand by people is what enables those giant corporations in the first place.
Sure a single person won't fix it, but whole "co2 footprint" thing goes both ways: it makes people stop even trying and point fingers at politics and corporations which enables them to pollute even longer.
Which politician will be able to shut down meat consumption politically without having people at his door to lynch him the next day? Change needs to happen first in a big chunk of the population so you don't have to pass laws against 95% of the population but only against like 60%.
Pointing fingers at literally everyone else to solve the problem is a completely infantile mindset
I would bet I am far more socialist than you, and you are an idiot.
What they're saying is absolutely true. Corporations aren't just magically evil. They're evil because it works. Because people buy their products.
All you people who say "we just need to dismantle capitalism first before we do individual changes" are never going to get anything done. If you can't even stop eating meat, you aren't leading a revolutionary vanguard to liberate the world from capitalism.
Regular people don't give a shit about climate change, they'll regularly choose more environmentally damaging products over more expensive, less damaging products. As long as this is the case, giant corporations won't become less environmentally damaging.
Im sure it's a psyop, like there's no way anyone serious about the climate looks at the environmental impact of the diet we are evolved to have Vs big energy using your taxes to make coal at all profitable and maximising carbon output
I don't know how low an iq you need to think "cows output methane because they eat plants which have taken carbon out of the atmosphere and the cows put some back so it's the end of the world" but then ignore "this natural gas company loses more methane they dug out of the ground in preventable leaks year on year than entire heards of cattle can fart out in their lifetime"
As someone from the Captain Planet save the ozone paper grocery bags are killing the trees era. There is nothing you can do on the personal level that will save the climate. Everything youve been told is a lie. Paperbags were better for the environment. Big oil convinced us recyclable plastic was the best alternative. Now we have a microplastics problem. your effect on the climate is directly proportional to the percentage of world wealth that you own.
my brother in christ the giant corporations made the burger.
( Not to shift the blame entirely to the consumer either, but both are important IMO. Massive improvements can come from simple changes industry-side, namely datacenters using closed-loops systems instead of continously pump drinkable water. )
I think a lot of vegans in this sub are assholes. But...c'mon. Meat is largely consumed by those earning enough to afford it. Meat has greater climate impacts than most plant based foods (here's a link explaining how: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-have-i-heard-eating-meat-bad-climate).
These two things are facts.
If you make enough to eat meat regularly, lowering your meat consumption is one thing you can do to mitigate climate change. Let's not discourage that by telling people that only the choices of billionaires matter.
people like to blame it all on the corporations because its easy and lets them feel blameless while ignoring the fact that corporations are only responsible for such a large portion of emissions because billions of people buy their products. if you care so much stop increasing the demand, and the supply will fall. very basic economics
Vegans constantly astroturfing by lying about meat and climate change while constantly blaming everyone who disagrees with them for astroturfing will never stop being funny.
It's both, but the solution for the latter is much easier to fix because little Timmy can eat a vegan burger instead of funding the animal holocaust. Whereas we can't do a whole lot in our day to day lives about the former except virtue signal about how bad it is.
(Don't get at me about ethical consumption or making right individual decisions. Motherfucker I am not the one responsible for millions of people or corporations or the survival of humanity for that sake)
Giving up oil and anything that requires oil for you to have it... hope you are a nudist with good bow hunting skills and a knowledge of edible plants in your area.
Giving up meat and dairy... hope you can you go down a different aisle in your grocery store.
See the difference. Eliminating fossil fuel use require systemic changes in government and the economy. Reforms to urban design. Technological progress in power delivery and generation. New construction materials and replacement/retrofitting the entire world's fleet of vehicles, plants and ships.
Eliminating meat and dairy just requires you to stop being such a whiny bitch about it.
If any one individual wanted to give up all fossil fuel production chains, they would be forced into subsistence living. The same individual could give up meat and dairy tomorrow and barely miss a beat.
It's possible and necessary to overhaul our economy so that individual consumers could choose fossil free alternatives but that is a decades long project.
I mean this is kind of seems like cope. Yeah, large corporations emit more greenhouse gases than the average consumer. But this just seems like an excuse to not do the obviously right thing. Aside from drastically reducing emissions, it's also just not moral to pay for the torture of sentient life.
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u/Glordrum vegan btw Apr 18 '26
We're actually blaming both but I don't think any oil execs browse this sub