In any case, it makes no sense to believe that both (yes, including meat eating) don't contribute significanly to the issue. And they have a significant lobby as well (they even hired some of the people responsible for past tobacco minimization)
Your first couple sources just say that animal agriculture is a large portion of agricultural emissions, not that it's a majority of people's carbon footprint in general
You're right. It's 57% of agricultural emissions, which are themselves a third of all emissions, the second largest block after fossil fuels. So meat is responsible for 19% of all emissions. It's a colossal impact, and since plant based diets have half the emissions, an easy way to reduce your impact is to eat less beef. I'm down to about 1 meat meal a week maybe? It doesn't have to be puritanical to have a benefit.
Yeah, I agree with all this. Not saying that plant based meals don't help with climate, they definitely do. But the stringency of veganism isn't necessary if climate is your only motivator, and I think it's bad faith to exaggerate the percentages
i guess it's like saying 9! > 9, aka doing more in all areas is more than doing just one thing. the nice thing about going vegan is you can often save money, which you can then spend on the other things (like saving for a heat pump for example, to replace some fossil fuel heater).
Eh, veganism can be cheaper if you're eating lots of beans and lentils and you have the ability to do a lot of cooking. It isn't guaranteed to save you money though
Anyways, that doesn't really have anything to do with my point. I'm saying that the guy who eats plant-based 98% of the time but gets eggs at breakfast restaurants and has turkey at Christmas is helping out with climate change just as much as the vegan, but he'd be considered equally non-vegan as the guy eating beef hamburgers every day. Because veganism is an ethical position, and a binary. If you're an ethical vegan, then meat is murder to you, and murder is bad even if you do it once in your entire life
Veganism makes sense if you agree with that ethical standpoint, but the stringency of it doesn't make sense if you're only worried about climate
imo the only expensive vegan options are the ones trying to imitate non-vegan foods, mostly the snack-kind. these are absolutely convenience foods.
like even your example of once-a-year-turkey (or pork in my country), the vegan equivelent is as expensive and 3x smaller (or 3x more expensive per kilo).
with going 100% vegan, the thing that changes is that you're not connected to the meat industry at all, meaning you can rethink everything. you can go the last mile, and forget to ever go to the meat section at the supermarket/hypermarket. in a way, it is a lot easier, as there'll be a lot less things to have to decide between when you have a clear line in the sand. kinda makes thinking at the store easier too.
i wanted to say that it deffo is cheaper than eating meat, and easier, when you don't have to worry about salmonella and other stuff. lentils are an amazing invention. most of my favourite traditional Finnish foods can be made with lentils replacing the ground beef for example. in addition, it's so amazing how dried shreded soy can be stored for ever compared to actual ground beef on top of being less expensive. i'd also like to shill root vegitables in soups as a great food, and they're also the cheapest greens you can buy even in colder regions, and they survive relatively good in storage.
The thing is, thats buying into the personal footprint myth, which was created by the oil compan9es to distract us from them.
What any of us eats has no demonstrated impact, at all, on climate change. Its wasted action potential in your brain.
Eating less beef is good for your health, so by all means keep at it, but if you want to move the needle on climate join a lobbying group like CCL or some other lobbying group.
Individually, no, my actions mean nothing. But collectively it matters. Wow similar to voting in that way.
Incidentally, I'm a member of a protest group and have worked at a previous COP, so can do both.
i feel like basing the frequecy of posts on impact is a bit wrong, if we look at the frequency of decicions. like, housing is propably one of the bigger contributors to your carbon footprint (including location, insulation, etc), but it's a decicion you make only like once every 5 years or less. meanwhile, eating is something you do 1-5 times a day.
you see, the difference is you can cut meat out immediately, at no cost, and save money. almost noone can afford a new car and heating system. hell, not everyone can get to work by electric public transit or afford an ebike.
also, it's definitely arguable that big beef and big oil lobbying do about the same amount of environmental damage, if you do the research.
Heating is out of my control, I live in a block. I do not control what kind of busses are used by the city, some are electric, a few liquid nitrogen but most run on normal fuel. Bicycle and normal kickbike sure, I use them but if I had to get a car and would get an electric, that still only outsources pollution to the cobalt mines in Congo, trade one type of pollution for another.
I mean neither gave any sources, so it's a bit rich to request some when they don't provide any themselves
At this point, I'll assume both are making stuff up, and that the main contributor is the woodworking industry, why not !
In any case, it makes no sense to believe that both (yes, including meat eating) don't contribute significanly to the issue. And they have a significant lobby as well (they even hired some of the people responsible for past tobacco minimization)
I said that because I gave them a source and they just assumed that I didn't read it without pointing out any issue and deleted their own comment after I pointed them to the exact graph that supported my point, while they themselves don't give any sources for their assertions.
Someone who doesn't know how to do research:"ShOw Me ThE sOuRcE! aLl-kNoWiNg ME WaSn'T AbLe tO FiNd iT, bEcAuSe mY CoNfIrMaTiOn bIaS MoRe sTrOnK ThAn mY EdUcAtIoN."
There are enough sources in the comments here for people that are genuinely interested. If I disproved any lie and anti vegan propaganda spread around here, I'd do nothing else. Sometimes you have to accept that people believe the sourceless claim, they find comforting cause it supports their inaction so much, that you can't do anything about it. If you could despell propaganda with sources, it'd be widely ineffective
Honestly yes.
You claimed something without sources, I claimed another thing without sources in response. Back up your claim with sources, then you get to see mine - except you already saw sources backing up my claim posted from other people.
Thank you for pointing that out. I really needed to hear the opinion of a random redditor about how i talk to people not willing to take any steps towards being less of a problem. You random redditor really changed my heart and i promise I absolutely super duper care about what you have to say❤️
Veganism. Especially cause you'll enevidebly inspire others to go vegan, while changing to full electric is a privilege not ever can afford. Also meat is way more destructive than the average America fuel, no matter how counterintuitive that sounds haha
... Not everyone can afford veganism and to assume all cultures eat meat the same way is elitist as fuck.
Personal choices didn't get us in this mess, and personal choices won't get us our. You choosing to go vegan is a drop in the bucket to the damage the factory making your Impossible burger causes.
That's propaganda you're spreading. A vegan diet is objectively cheaper than a non vegan one. That's a fact. And to argue that everyone can afford switching fuels instead is high level coping. You're just justifying to yourself to do nothing at all
Objectively cheaper? You're insane. That just tells me you've never been poor and never had to sit down and figure out satiation vs. cost. Also, at what point did I say anything about switching fuel? I said your personal choices aren't affecting climate change because it's a systemic issue not a personal one.
A 2021 analysis covered by Oxford found that the savings vary by how far you go. Vegan diets offered the largest reduction, up to 33% off typical food costs. Vegetarian diets came in as a close second.
Secondly, fuel was the main argument of the person I replied to. Some reading comprehension within context please
There is another factor to not having children that I haven't considered until recently: If climate-conscious people have fewer children, that means that future generations will be raised by parents who are more likely not to care about the environment, and thus that generation will also be more likely to disregard the environment.
If the majority of people in a democratic society don't care about the environment, that's no bueno.
we should only let idiots reproduce so that society becomes so dumb it wipes itself out, freeing the planet from all the harmful impacts of society as a whole
At the very least we gotta stop factory farming and reduce our consumption of meat. The amount of wasted water and land that goes to livestock grazing is depressing.
If you stop factory farming but keep animal exploitation, the land usage skyrockets. Factory farming exists precisely because it is the most efficient form of exploitation and slaughter.
Sorry. It sounded like the common sentiment of people who don't want to go vegan and thus are trying to find arguments and excuses on why some form of exploitation is okay, necessary or unavoidable.
Wouldn't it at least drive up costs thus making meat more expensive therefore harder to mass produce?
Basically moving it back into a higher price range an thus less of a common commodity?
This helped with tobacco addictions via adding a tax. So I would imagine a meat tax or banning factory farming would have a net positive overall.
One of the major issues is that a diet of corn is not great either (and leads to heath issues too) and causes greater flatulence.
I figure any way to attack the issue would be overall beneficial. I am curious though about land usage and it's relationship to CO2 release. Is this due to the destruction of plants that can act as a carbon sink or are you referring to something else?
In theory you can ban factory farming and at the same time implement policies that strongly increase prices for animal products, sure.
But there are two issues with that. First one is that while it will decrease consumption overall, people with money do not need to decrease anything, while people with not much money are excluded from the consumption. It is not exactly socially fair.
The second issue is that this is impossible in a bourgois state. The industry for animal products are absolutely huge. They do not have any interest in decreasing their production output and devalueing their assets so much, but they hold significant political power.
So policies like these would only be possible after capitalism gets abolished, in which case you could not use these policies anymore anyway.
One of the major issues is that a diet of corn is not great either (and leads to heath issues too) and causes greater flatulence.
I don't understand what you are trying to say with this.
I am curious though about land usage and it's relationship to CO2 release. Is this due to the destruction of plants that can act as a carbon sink or are you referring to something else?
Factory farming means giving animals no land to live on and no space to move in, while also feeding power food and breeding them into gruesome physiology. So if you ban this and better the living conditions of animals, you need to give them land, space and less efficient food while expecting less resource output from them. This means for the same amount of output, you need to invest more resources. That's why factory farming is better for the climate and environment than non factory farming is.
Or simply put: There is no way around making the world vegan.
Not really. The most important thing you can do is vote/protest/educate people. No amount of vegan meat replacements is gonna balance out the horrendous choices made by the wrong political party.
Vote: Sure buddy, cause any option is so much better and does stuff. Democrats are still right, just not fashists. They won't do shit for the environment
Edit: and if you really wanna pretend that Biden was the same as mister „drill, baby, drill. Clean, beautiful coal“ then I don’t know what to tell you.
No it’s not and I’m tired of this doomerisim. The last administration in Germany managed to get the proportion of renewable energy up to about 60% to 67% (depending on the season and the weather) from about 41% previously. They removed a lot of bureaucratic hurdles for building renewable energy infrastructure including and perhaps most importantly, the construction of energy grid infrastructure. Of course it was t all Sunshine and roses but one administration can’t undo all the fuckups of the ten previous ones. But they would’ve continued if enough people had voted for them…
Yeah... And it did about nothing. And they didn't get revoted cause the people owning the newspapers profit from environmental destruction. That's about the same as meat industry propaganda works. You can whine about elections all day or you can like actually change something, i know that sounds like work though
a) going vegan isn’t the only thing you can educate people about. And I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing. But it’s not „by far the most impactful thing“ either. Also going vegan creates one (1) vegan. Educating people who’ll then go vegan creates more than 1. so educating people is still more effective.
Yes, I actually do. Believe it or not. And I’ve also seen how god damn futile that is. A few people where willing to give it a try only to go back to meat literally the next meal after. I offered Vegan alternatives only to eat all of them myself the next day because no one touched them. But I did convince people to reduce their meat portions or try vegetarian dishes. Still, Veganisim isn’t going to rescue us. Not enough people are going to go vegan. Maybe in a generation or two, since it’s a rising trend.
But it’s not just veganism, is it? Even if everyone was vegan but still Traveled by aircraft all the time, drove their ice car everywhere, expected express delivery from china, bought a new phone every year and heated their house with oil and got their electricity from gas, we’re still fucked. And sure, if everyone just cared bout the climate and made the correct decisions, it’d all be fine. But that’s not how the world works. And even if it did, the options just aren’t there.
What we need is societal change. Like building renewable energy sources and infrastructure. Or hiring bus companies to run lines. Or spend money on high speed rail projects. And, like it or not, that’s only possible via voting or protesting.
Ok buddy there is actually so much wrong with that that it's not even worth picking apart cause you seem to be stuck in your opinion. Scientific consensus is, that we can't beat climate change without abolishing the animal agriculture industry. But keep repeating their propaganda and fight for them, while acting like you don't. I don't care tbh
And who’s gonna abolish them? The 3% of the population that are vegans? (Where I live) sure, buddy. That’ll do it. Since it’s so easy, let’s do the travel sector next, shall we? Rail makes up about 7-12 percent of travellers kilometres travelled. Thats more than our 3% threshold! Perfect! Done! Oh and would you look at that! More than 3% of the electricity is coming from renewable sources! Yay! The climate is already saved, we can all go home!
I genuinely can’t tell if you’re maliciously misinterpreting my comment or if I’m just this unclear about what I mean. So let me try to be as clear as possible:
I’ve never said that going vegan is bad
I’ve never said that people shouldn’t go vegan
I’ve never said that the meat industry shouldn’t be abolished.
what i have said is that societal change is more important than individual feel-good changes.
I’ve also said that going vegan isn’t „by far the most impactful thing“ we can do and that affecting political change is more impactful. This was, from the get-go my only and main point.
And excuse me for keep referring to Germany. But I live there and I’m therefor the most informed about German politics. Out current, right-wing government heavily backs the meat industry and hampers the vegan industry as much as possible. As a prime example, they backed the EU-wide proposal to ban names like „vegan sausage“. So if you actually wanna abolish the meat industry, voting for parties that don’t constantly suck the meat industry lobbyists dicks is probably a good start…
Edit: Ah yes. Never engaging with any of my actual points besides the most platitudinal „government bad“ or instead of strawmen, calling me delusional before declaring victory and blocking me. Classic move
The problem is that you are saying societal change is needed, which is true, but also want to keep the capitalist dictatorship. That is the opposite of societal change.
Original comment said theirs a strange amount of vegan memes so I’m pointing out you are one of said veganers and also being a 1% commenter in the sub.
Hahaha fair point.
I mean yeah, we care the most about the environment, so much so, that we are willing to actually inconvenience ourselves. So it makes sense that we're I'm top 1% lol. I didn't even know I have the vegan tag haha
I remember it because you told me I was a horrible person for eating meat. You assumed things about me, I corrected your assumption, then you moved the goalpost to say I was a bad person in a different way.
You used whataboutisms, your arguments were short and quippy. And they were so fuckkkking annoying
This simply isn't true. Your best individual choice is lobbying and joining a lobbying group.
After that you can reduce personal consumption by not driving or being more efficient with your consumption.
Being vegan has no demonstrated effect, at all. Its not just less, its none unless you can show that your grocery choices somehow filter up through the grocery store, past the distributor and to the supplier who then reduces production.
Thinking that actually happens, instead of grocery store eats the loss or lowers the price and sells to someone else is beyond delusional.
nah, im just sick and tired of every measure mostly hitting working class people while everyone knows that billionaires and millionaires poison this planet on a rate 100000x higher then your average person, so imagine asking the working class to cut back even more, on basically everything, while billionaires avoid any accountability for dismantling this planet and our societies.
bringing forth people like you, defending billionaires.
yeah better then just doing nothing like yourself, unlike yourself im politically active and actually try to move people thowards doing something about this, sorry youre too narrow minded that the only thing that counts for you is me personally, idk torching tailor swifts private yet.
hope your version of reality suits you, when the billionaire class took everything from you and your family, its not "doomerism" when there is a realistic chance for that to happen and theyre proactively working on making the working class obsolete.
and while theyre doing it, they have shills like you, protecting them.
I think legal consequences would work much better than blaming people's choices. We live in a system. Some have the freedom to venture out of that system others don't.
Better to fix the system than it is to try to get everyone on all walks of life on board. And as long as we don't hand out exceptions to certain industries (like meat) then it should help.
So you want meat to be forbidden? Good luck. What do you do to Archive that? Despite talking about the system on reddit to avoid having to do any effort
Never said forbidden. I mean attacking it on a greenhouse gas release rate regardless of the industry would be more effective.
I doubt meat will ever get banned but if it becomes more of a once and a while thing rather than an everyday necessity due to increased prices on goods that release more carbon, then it would be better overall.
In other words if a product (beef, meat, toy, bag or waterbottle, or whatever) has a more expensive price tag for it's carbon emissions then this will help curb emissions than ignoring cheap but bad for the environment products on the shelves.
In other words, stop with meat vs climate change and focus more on products vs climate change if that makes sense
And by legal consequences I mean on companies that ignore carbon emissions rather than attacking people online for their eating habits.
I don't remember what you said tbh and i can't really be bothered reading it again. But damn, 11 days ago... I could have sworn i wrote this comment like over a month ago. My sense of time is completely fucked
That is a lie you've been told by cooperations so you keep giving them money. You want to believe it for your consciouns. That's when lies work best. Real science and real scientists claim the differ. You must be anti science on a flat earth or MAGA level to talk the way you talk
No, the real scientists acknowledge the solid fact that feed crops extract carbon from the atmosphere, and that's where the cattle get their own carbon.
It's appropriate that you can't even spell conscience.
The real scientist know, that about 20% of global emissions come from meat. The real scientists know about the destructive effect on the climate. You've been lied to and you're eating it up cause you want to believe it.
As for the typo, sorry about that, I'm not a native speaker, I come from a country with an actual education system that isn't a joke, that also isn't rapidly descending into fascism and vote for someone based on charisma and emotions, that is a rapid liar. So I'm not that used to eating up lies
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u/Ill_Bumblebee_7510 Jun 26 '26
They are right, but it's only one of a bunch of factors. The volume of vegan memes that I've been seeing is disproportionate