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.
Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories
Both things are important. And most importantly, vote with your wallet when thinking about what corporations do.
Sure. Vote with your wallet.
But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.
This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn’t actually reducing your carbon footprint because you’re not actually the one emitting the carbon.
This isn’t like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by driving less” it’s like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus”.
They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it, despite so much going to waste. Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it long term.
They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.
Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.
Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.
But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.
No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.
Plus it’s not just a supermarket. It’s all the little mediocre burger shops that prop up around it and other restaurants like it.
Take some responsibility. Do what’s right even if it won’t work globally.
If you think something is wrong and is fucking up the planet don’t just throw your hands up and go “meh it’s gonna be at the grocery store anyway might as well eat meat 5x a day hehe yum, guilt free.”
Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn’t dominated by animal farming.
When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.
Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.
Whatever helps you sleep at night lol
Well that person is literally helping you sleep at night by reducing the planets GHG emissions. You’re welcome I guess?
if it won’t work, why would anyone do it?
Because eating meat 5x a day at artificially low prices is the wrong thing to do and is a reflection of a poor culture
Nah, I think their biggest con is making people believe this exact discourse right here, don’t change their habits and keeping giving them money.
They are psychos that can care less about being blamed for this or that when they can simply keep bribing governments and never facing any consequences.
But they have real fear that people start being more conscious about their own consuming and stop giving them money.
Exactly. This right here. Blame the politicians that deregulate the industry and let these corporations destroy the environment so they can post an extra .5% profit.
They said voting is more important than this
They’re using the money they got from their customers to lobby politicians to keep doing business as usual. They have so much power because people vote with their dollar, for them, and not for sustainable alternatives.
Blaming politicians while continuing to fund these industries won’t lead to anything.
It’s just corruption. The politicians could fix it … but money.
That gets difficult when billion dollar industries are involved, especially multiple. Some politicians will oppose the corruption, but the corporations will just fund the campaign of other politicians that are willing to act in their interest.
Transparency and a vigilant civil society with consequences for scandals can mitigate that somewhat, to varying degrees. But ultimately there’s corruption in every government at every level of governance. Capital interests always find a way, unfortunately.
Yep, it’s definitely nobody’s fault people eat so much meat that the Amazon is deforested primarily for cattle and for soy (which is for cattle). Nobody feel bad or take responsibility because Exxon is greedy. Lmao gottem.
That’s one way to not comprehend what I said, I guess.
I think it’s pretty clear you said individuals shouldn’t feel responsible for any of this
You’ve made it extra clear you’re still failing to comprehend all the words I said together. It’s unclear if that’s on purpose or you’re just slow.
God what an insufferable person and shit communicator
I bet you think that about everyone who doesn’t let you twist their words 😘
cattle only eat some 7% of the global soy crop.
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2021/02/Global-soy-production-to-end-use-768x554.png
You can never make animal production green. The amount of clear-cutting needed for beef as an example would blow your mind. Then you factor in the ground, air, and water pollution from these factory farms, and you’ve just fucked up into entire regions, just to sustain a food source that isn’t even needed.
There are places already without trees where meat can be grown…
You’d be permanently destroying that land, and any waterways in the area, so is that really a solution?
And if the land isn’t already fertile, you need to set up alternative land to grow the food for those cows… then import the water…
This is not sustainable, and should be discouraged.
By the same logic, couldn’t you say that eating red meat doesn’t matter because ~8 agriculture companies produce 75% of the livestock-related pollution?