Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
That’s almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.
But for overall impact, there’s one winner and it’s bigger than everything else put together.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Capitalism hates this one weird trick.
The methodology here is kinda bs IMO.
They’re adding up the emissions of the descendants and dividing that by a parents life expectancy.
However, if a society achieves net 0, then surely the emissions of every person there in are 0, so it’s disingenuous to count them at today’s rates.
Its an attempt to illustrate the environmental cost of over-population, but it needs to be considered within the context of that methodology.
OK, if society achieves net zero, you can have as many children as you like.
But given that it’s been going up since the industrial revolution, and it’s still going up, it seems rather fanciful to suggest that it’s within our grasp.
A number of countries have reduced emissions massively, but realistically that mostly means “we’ve moved all our emissions to China”. I could buy green energy from my supplier, but for me that was still coming from a big coal power station a few miles up the road until last year when they finally closed it.
And frankly, if corporations can count the carbon a tree will capture over 30 years and somehow “offset” that against a dirty great factory when they hurl a few pennies at a third world farmer, then we can count the carbon our descendents will emit over that time as well.
How much carbon will a child born today emit in their lifetime?
Thats unknowable.
Your reference to emissions increasing since the industrial revolution is not a forecast.
incorrect, humans produce co2 by breathing
Yes but we also consume CO2 if we’re part of a society which is net 0.
As i said up top, the infographic is designed to demonstrate the environmental problems caused by over population.
However, the methodology used to represent that impact is problematic.
I’m not saying overpopulation is not bad. I’m not saying you should have n children. I’m saying the numbers here dont withstand a moments critical thought.
Not for the carbon reduction, but for the reduced
slave laborwork forceStarve the beast.
Hey, as it stands I’m just indentured. If I were cursed with a child, then I would probably do crime to provide for it and Then be used for slave labor once I was inevitably incarcerated.
It’s the circle of life.
Live Carfree (from petrol) - 2.4
Petrol to hybrid - 0.52
Electric Car to Carfree - 1.15
Seems they left out a pretty large item in “switch from petrol to electric - 1.25”
Yeah, that’s one that doesn’t take a lot of lifestyle change either.
Although it’ll vary based on how much you drive. My wife drives a tiny car and did under 3000 miles last year, so wouldn’t actually make a lot of difference for us. Might as well run it until it keels over, by which time electrics will be even better than they are now. Or enshittified beyond belief. One of the two.
So I just have to upgrade my lightbulbs 8 time and I’m effectively vegan!
I had a buddy that ate 8 lightbulbs this one time. He just got a hospital visit and totally flunked his vegan exams.
I’ve got an LED bulb so efficient it glows slightly even when it’s not plugged in.
So I wanted to have 9 kids but ended up finishing out at 3. So technically a savings of 6 kids! I’m helping the environment!
Being pedantic a nebulous “having one fewer kid” means nothing unless there’s a benchmark. I think they mean “having one fewer kid as a country average” so if the average Canadian has 1.26 children per women we want to see it .26 per women.
On an individual level I can’t unalive a child.
Well, with latest in Israeli technology…
Counterpoint
My kids aren’t brown lol