ITT: peasants attacking each other instead of the people responsible for gestures broadly all of this
You know what would really help? More so then cutting actual food intake?
How about halfing the number of golf courses? Stop using grass and let more natural plants for lawns, stop the use of private planes and also just kill or reduce the Cruise ship industry to a miniscule amount. Plus other shit rich people use that has a disproportionate huge carbon footprint. Find it funny that I never see the news --or rich, holier than thou morons-- pushing for this. Nah, they go after our food. Rich people do not care, they can eventually make beef the price of caviar per weight? Because fuck you and all of us. Why? Well they do not care. They can always pay. Easily.
For example: Bill Gates is the largest farm land owner in the USA now, he and his buddies and his rich clients will all get all the natural milk, beef, pork, chickens, lambs, veal they can eat. You? Eat lentils and maybe crickets or give his lab grown biomilq, to your kids or eat his lab meat, like a good and compliant serf. Don’t think, just comply and consume. 'Cause I am sure he ain’t touching the stuff himself or is his family. He is not going to be the long term guinea pig. I wouldn’t either.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/biomilq-artificial-breast-milk
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-backed-lab-grown-195311408.html
Carbon footprint of food production in the USA is 9% of total. Beef is about 3% of total. So 9 for both beef and crops.
Just the cruise ship industry, for example, is about 3.3% of the world’s total carbon footprint. Let’s kill that. Also private jet use. They can fly Business class, if they are not hypocrites.
I couldn’t help but think there’s no way luxury cruise ships is 3% of global carbon emissions
Was this your source? https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/maritime-sustainability
It says “cruise ships and other maritime vessels” which isn’t cleared up anywhere in the article. You have to remember that if this includes container ships it’s fully expected, we all buy shit from across the world all the time.
This article says the shipping industry is 3%: https://sinay.ai/en/how-much-does-the-shipping-industry-contribute-to-global-co2-emissions/
So either greenmatch is intentionally rage baiting everyone or they both emit 3% each, sus.
I really hate misinformation. It’s very easy to rally and hate on the rich but it would be very funny to me if that 3% you said to “get rid of” means you would have to completey change your consumer habits and not only just affect “the rich”
But yes regardless don’t mistake my comment for defending luxury cruise ships.
I mean, we can do all of those things and reduce our meat intake. They’re not mutually exclusive. How about we encourage people to do everything they can, rather than gate-keeping solutions?
Considering every 100 pounds you add to your vehicle you reduce fuel economy by 2%, I wonder how much less CO2 we’d produce if everyone got to a healthy BMI.
We need a total shift. All those things are things we should do too. It’s no doubt that rich people produce more emissions.
But you’re just trying to avoid shouldering any responsibility yourself for something were all responsible for.
This is something you can do, right now, to decrease your carbon footprint.
Btw, if you’re living in the west with constant access to Internet, and got a free education…you almost certainly are one of those rich people.
The type of golf course matters. Where I live, a lot of golf courses are public, packed with big trees, surrounded by bushland, act as a green space and native animal refuge among the suburbs, some of them protect wetlands, and are local government owned. While they do use up a lot of water, its still probably less tgan if it was all just paved with suburban housing and their shit lawns. And all the trees would be gone.
Eating meat is not your religion. Why do you feel so offended?
Personal carbon credits would make it very easy to solve all of that.
My partner and I are flexatarians, it’s lovely. The only downside is that it’s hard to not eat carb heavy, which is also an issue with vegetarianism and veganism. I feel like a spy among vegetarians.
I really don’t eat a lot of meat. When I do it’s usually chicken, sausage, or broth. The latter two are great for using bits of the animal that wouldn’t normally be consumed alone.
I feel very grateful that I grew up in a non-veg household that still ate tofu. And now I am a tofu fiend.
However, eggs are still far less impactful than beef, so, protein options still exist, not to mention all the nuts and beans out there.
Also, what about vegetables? Though I admit these should be part of a diet no matter what your diet is, so doesn’t really count.
It’s not all carbs in non-meat land, is all I’m saying.
Power to you for whatever works for you though, no judgement.
I eat pretty much the same, except almost zero carbs because of diabetes. But I’ve been eating like this for decades because my stomach just can’t handle most beef or pork at all (except the sausage) … it sits like a rock in my gut and takes almost a full day to start feeling normal again.
Ever since pandemic, meat has been doing the same to me. Muscle meat in particular, ground meats I’m more ok with.
How do you manage to avoid carbs? It seems like almost everything nonmeat is some form of carb, except for mushrooms, milk, and eggs
I try to keep my carbs under 30 grams per day. Above that I gain weight and feel like crap.
Very VERY limited wheat products like bread, pasta, etc (once per week if that). I used to use konjac noodles as an alternative but they’ve become very expensive.
Zero sugar (I use stevia instead, but it’s an acquired taste).
I make protein shakes with 0% milk, real chocolate powder, collagen protein and stevia. I’ll have 2-3 @ 16oz per day.
I also make my own soda/pop with club soda, lemon and lime juice, and stevia.
Drink about a gallon/4 litres of water per day.
And because of cost I eat a lot of frozen veggies vs fresh … mixed with pasta sauce, melted cheese on top, or made into an omlet of sorts.
Homemade soups are also great, but I currently live in a rooming house so don’t have access to a freezer anymore.
You may not have discovered TVP yet. You should do so.
I’m not looking to add protein, I’m looking to reduce carbs. They’re in fucking everything from oat milk to fruit. At least, that’s what my Endo told me.
unsweetened almond milk has minimal carbs, and not much you can do about fruit since its all pretty much all sweet but the fiber is good to make you feel fuller.
I’ve been on this diet for 5 years, I call it the “only meat on sale” diet
Aldi on Thursday morning for me.
Why thursday morning? What country?
I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere, but at least in the US, Aldi offers some meat at a reduced price on wednesdays and I assume on thursday morning they discount even more to clear out unsold stock.
I’m watching the new climate town video as I see this.
Glad the media is still telling us it is our fault as consumers while industry and governments actively work against us.
Yes eating plants is better for the environment and your body. Yes I try to eat mostly plants and I encourage you all to try it, but Capitalism is what is killing us and eating a salad isnt going to fix it.
The article literally says producers, consumers, and government are all part of it.
We’ve gotten to the point that any mention of what an individual can do to reduce their carbon impact is met with “stop blaming us!”
The reality is that we are all responsible and we all have to change, including individuals. You just don’t want to change, you want everyone else to. You are just like the rich person that says they care about global warming, as they turn around and jump on their private jet.
I agree it is all connected.
I guess my complaint is the degree at which we as individuals make an impact vs Corporations and the Government. I could go completely carbon neutral tomorrow. Sustainably farm in the woods and never leave, but that wouldn’t touch the 6 million tons of Methane leaked from Natural Gas infrastructure this year.Pretty much everyone and everything can point to a bigger polluter. The reality is that we all have to change. If every time we are given ways to change, we instead whine that there are worse than us…well, then, we’re just fucked.
Actually, quite the opposite. As long as you buy beef, cattle will continue to be a major driver of climate change. Under capitalism, it only gets produced because you buy it
isn’t it heavily subsidized? I appreciate that you’re using a textbook definition of capitalism but that’s not how anything actually works.
Worldwide? Not necessarily, no. Most of the growth in beef demand in particular is in developing nations. Subsidies increase access, but they don’t create demand in and of themself
In my country meat is heavily subsided and if was put to market at true price less people would buy it.
They don’t remove them because It would piss off a lot of business to remove the subsidies overnight and many would lose jobs. But I say fuck them, it’ll work out in the long run
Subsidies increase access, but they don’t create demand in and of themself
If something is significantly lowered in price, wouldn’t that affect demand? If not, why would it suddenly work differently?
You should also see how much of the EU budget directly goes to farming. That’s just direct subsidies, there’s also loads of indirect ones.
Yes you are right, but we don’t live in a truly free market. There are all kinds of shenanigans that happen to make our decisions have less impact. Also advertising has to be accounted for. Corporations use neuroscience to convince us to do things against our best interest. How can we account for that?
Is this actually news? Seems old to me, thanks OP though for bringing it up again.
it’s pretty crazy that no one in this thread has mentioned that going vegan would have a larger impact.
I am vegan and I would say that but it would result in a big circle jerk as always of “hurr durr bacon”.
Of course.
But don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.
Ya know what would also limit it: Actually stopping like the top 5 companies causing like 60% of all pollution.
Just stop doing carbon credits because it’s a literal scam and just shut down any factory that pollutes more than an allowed amount until they get it under control.
These companies are producing products you consume. What would really limit the emissions is reducing the human population to under 1B worldwide.
This has already been debunked elsewhere in the comments
That seems to put the carbon produced on the buyer of a product, not the company that produced the item. It mentions electricity as one and its not like you choose how your electricity is generated. Others being land use and food production which again you can’t control because large corporations do that, not individuals.
If there were no buyers, there would be no producers. It is always on buyers.
And yet it’s easy to stop the production while it’s nearly impossible to stop the consumption.
Lol what?
It’s nearly impossible to remove people buying something while it’s very easy to stop a company from producing something.
Lol what? Do you even understand that a company only produces something because people are buying that thing?
You heard him, @FluffyPotato@lemm.ee, it’s been debunked somewhere 🤣
That article doesn’t back up your claim at all. It talks about an industry.
Also, GHG metrics by volume distort the picture when CO2, by volume, is like 25x less potent than methane
You know what could also limit global heating? If the fucking wealthy stopped flying in their private jets and stopped cruising in their yachts and stopped buying their 3rd house. Focus on the solutions. Subsidize green energy, tax the oil companies, ban private jets, etc. You know, things that would have an actual impact.
Yep, sick of being told I’m the problem and should change my way of living when a single private flight dumps more CO2 into the air than my car puts out in half a year, not to mention the fuel usage.
The only thing that will really fix the issue is if we stop breeding like rabbits. It doesn’t matter if we reduce the ecological footprint of individuals if we keep growing the population.
I think we should do the extreme opposite of breeding like rabbits to the wealthy instead. Like the polar opposite of creating life.
Except there is a decline in population growth as numbers stop seeing family life as an option because of demographic transition. You do not remain able to reproduce your whole life and as new generations come up to the reproductive age they face a very different life to what it once was such as what the baby boomers were going through (hence the name). This is not meaning to pick at the boomers but to point out that the name was coined for a reason.
Except there is a decline in population growth
You’re talking second derivative here. It’s still growing, it’s just growing a tiny bit slower than it used to.
That is how decline works, yes.
Here’s an idea, maybe the affluent and ultra rich can stop their decadent luxuries before us peasants give up the few pleasures in life left to us.
Does “flexitarian” mean “eat less meat”, basically?
I refuse to click the link because I hate the guardian.
Yes.
The best thing you can do to limit global warming without political power is to not reproduce. The next best thing is to quit eating meat. The less meat you eat the better. And as a bonus it’s highly unlikely to be as much of a sacrifice as not having a wanted child.
The best thing you can do to limit global warming without political power is to not reproduce
This relies on some assumptions that I question. Each person doesn’t contribute a fixed amount to emissions, and it’s not even a bell curve distribution. The rich contribute orders of magnitude more to the problem than the poor. The top 1% contributes almost twice as much as the bottom 50%..
And with birth rates where they’re at, at different levels of income/wealth, I’m thinking that plenty of childless people can contribute more to the problem than an entire bloodline of people who have huge families.
That’s complete bullshit as the article is based on complete bullshit.
Iirc, there’s a population of livestock that can be sustained without feed crop (instead living off of by-product and untillable pasture), and reducing it past that is less sustainable overall. So while it’s true that we eat way too much meat, it’s not a great idea to get rid of it entirely in the context of sustainability. There are other arguments regarding the ethics of the meat industry, but that goes beyond the scope of the discussion.
Yeah my attitude is to carbon tax it and stop subsidizing it. If meat is a luxury it’s not something people bitch about accidentally not having in their dinner.
I think that’s a splendid idea.
Global warming isn’t from cow farts ffs. Container ships etc though
The methane production from bovine rumination absolutely has an impact. As does the massive supply chains and absurd amount of agriculture necessary to feed those cows.
Look up the number of buffalo circa 1800
Look up the main cause of the deforestation of the Amazon. Look up the number of cattle alive today compared to any other point in history.
North american cattle population is roughly equal to buffalo population of 1800. Maybe i had looked this up long before you suggested it. Whining about cattle is an entirely different issue than just stopping deforestation, which is more for palm oil in the region you speak of anyways.
FFS it’s not only the methane. It’s all the GHG sinks we destroy to let cattle graze and feed other animals caught in CAFO. In addition it’s the whole infrastructure around the system
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Half of habitable land is used for agriculture (5x the USA). 2/3 of that is grazing land. 1/3 crop land. One half of the 1/3 crop land is used for plants that are directly consumed by humans. The rest is animal feed and stuff like biofuel.
Crop land and grazing land for animals combined make up 80% of all farmland. Meat, dairy and fish combined make up only 17% of all calories and 38% of protein.
If everyone went plant based the global farmland use would be reduced from 4 billion to 1 billion hectares and therefore crop death would be dramatically reduced. The land could be rewilded and natural GHG sinks could be established again.
Everyday 5000 soccerfield sized areas of amazonas rainforest are razed to the ground for cattle, leather, soy (for animal feed ofc) and palm oil. Mafia like cartels of cattle breeders threaten and murder indigenous people and activists there and implemented a complicated system of cattle laundering to hide that they burn intact rain forests (green lung of the earth) there. The 10.000.000 anually slaughtered cows there are also exported to US meatpackers. The leather ends up in european car seats. Via container ships.
Exactly, in the last decade or so I went from pescetarian to vegetarian to vegan and for the last few years I have been “flexitarian”. My own adoption of it is different to others in the sense that most of what I eat at home is still vegan but on average I probably have 1-2 vegetarian meals at home a week and I don’t have many issues eating vegetarian (sometimes meat) outside of the house.
I still avoid a lot of meat, especially things like veal, but I find being “flexible” also helps talk to people about it. It is much less intimidating asking someone to try having 2 veggie meals a week than telling them they need to universally drop all animal products from their diet.
My spouse is vegetarian for health reasons, so there are always vegetarian options at mealtime.
I eat primarily vegetarian, but I don’t go out there and say “I am vegetarian.” I found it easier to go to restaurants and merely say “I am not eating meat today” if I need to order something odd.
I suppose that I have been a flexitarian for a while, then.
Man “carnivores” have vegetarian meals all the time. This internet discourse is worth less than used toilet paper.
I think it’s more about knowingly switching out a meal rather than just patting yourself on the back because you eat mac and cheese twice a week. For every conversation we have online there are a few people that learn something from it, myself included, I think the thread is interesting!
Its mostly horseshit.
I suppose that is meat free and you’d have to extraordinarily flexible, but sure, go for whatever works fr you
Basically. We have a couple no meat meals per week and we have cut back the amount of meat per recipe as well. Not for the environment so much but we have just naturally drifted away from eating so much meat.
Or we could eat like 3 billionaires.
i cut down my meat consumption to almost zero. maybe some beef pho on the weekend sometimes… but i HATE the term flexitarian… i refuse to call myself that…
Ehh, what you call yourself isn’t important. The point is you’re still eating a diet that’s compatible with not fucking the environment
what you call yourself isn’t important.
yeah, i agree… that’s why i hate labels.
diet that’s compatible with not fucking the environment
and for health, and for a bunch of other reasons… but we don’t need another label for it… my choice of food is simply my choice of food… it doesn’t need to be categorized
Half-vegetarian is another term
Plant forward is how fine dining advertises this concept. I tend to prefer that term over anything as vegetarian/flexitarian tends to have a stigma attached.
I think “plant forward” is actually a reasonable term.
I guess I’m essentially a flexitarian at this point, though I have never labelled myself as such. I tend to opt for non-meat options but am nowhere near vegan as I only learned after my daughter started dating one. What an incredible minefield it is! You have to sit around and analyze absolutely everything. Like can you believe pepsi is vegan but not diet pepsi?!? But diet coke is. I don’t know about coke zero and am frankly afraid to ask…
Wait what did they put in the diet pepsi?
I think it’s a trade secret. Probably something like how Guinness used to use fish bladders as a filter
For me being flexible help ramp down my consumption of meat. Each day without was a win. These days it’s very rare that I eat any meat. It’s become boring compared to the fun of a meatless diet.
I guess I’ve been a flexitarian since 2016ish. I have a few vegetarian days a week for environmental reasons.
My first goal was to preferably have 2 meaty days a week and leave the rest meat free. After about three years I got to the point where I realised I hadn’t eaten meat in a while. I simply forgot to.
Now I just eat meat when I visit friends and family, or to keep my iron levels in check. It’s surprisingly doable.
Yeah if you’re flexible (I get it now) you can totally get free meat on the regular. Plus my dad goes on Costco runs and just gives me spare meat. I haven’t really had to buy any in a while and like you don’t really notice when I don’t have any for weeks. The real thing for me is the odd hotdog or whatever craving, that’s when I actively seek it out.
