Reading this I should live like a medieval peasant and only eat potatoes, onions, and root vegetables and drink nothing but beer. I’m kinda down with that.
YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat
Submitted 8 months ago by Wulri@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3041d99b-25ff-4dac-8c2f-21bda6a1210d.png
Comments
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Jarix@lemmy.world 8 months ago
So only eat beef from dairy herds? And you will half your footprint? Anyone know the rough specifics (Eli5 style) of why that is?
Poxlox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won’t just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it’s only 6% of our global annual emissions that we’d save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won’t happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we’re having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.
MellowYellow13@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You have anger problems as well as responsibility problems.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 8 months ago
Anything to pass the blame away from you, eh? Are you not responsible for your own actions?
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Until billionaires are illegal we’re probably all fucked anyway.
rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I agree that systemic change is important, too, but 6% of global emissions attributable to a single factor is HUGE. Plus, it’s not one or the other. Changes by individuals supports change at a systemic level.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
From a selfish perspective, why should the entire populace be forced to give up small luxuries in their increasingly difficult lives just so that a handful of large corporations don’t have to make any changes?
Why isn’t it that these large corporations should be forced to change, thus removing the need for everyone getting rid of their small luxuries?
Just seems ridiculous that the message is “everyone should give up their creature comforts and live as simply and tediously as possible so that billionaires don’t have to change”.
0x0@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Changes by individuals supports change at a systemic level.
I’m interpreting that as changes by individuals supports changes by corporations and it’s making zero sense.
stepan@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Exactly.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
It’s enough to make it difficult to keep to 2C climate targets on its own. Its not something we should ignore - especially since much of it comes in methane emissions which means reduction in it can be felt quicker and reduce chance of hitting feedback loops
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
That’s also on top of other environmental issues that it contributes to besides just climate change. Land usage, water usage, waste runoff
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
And pesticide and fertilizer usage is lower
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0921344922006528
The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Unrelated - tagging in Voyager is really handy!
I recommend everyone give it a try, helps you identify, say, people who might be talking a big contrarian game without providing any of their own peer reviewed sources to back themselves up. Very interesting feature.
grueling_spool@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
How do you do this? I can’t finf it anywhere
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
In Voyager, tap a username to view someone’s profile, then 3-dot menu > edit tag
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Yeah commie definitely materializes every time the subject of animal rights comes up on here, and always has the most tired, long-debunked takes on it. Maybe trying to take a page from the alt-right: repeat a lie enough and it becomes truth.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
That dude is +4 for me, and I haven’t noticed any weirdness!
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I have a steak maybe once a year, usually as a sudden or persistent craving. But other than that it was amazingly easy to convert to poultry for all my regular recipes. Very easy step to make without much thought.
Reducing dairy is my dietary wall.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I personally don’t eat red meat, and I agree it’s worse for climate change, but I’ve heard the argument that meat from larger animals is more ethical, because to get the same amount of meat from smaller animals means a much larger number of them have to die, and I’m not sure how to weigh that against the climate, assuming that someone isn’t going to give up meat entirely.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Plants are great and sidestep this quandary entirely.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Sure, but this is more addressed to the people who do not intend to go vegan, but are considering replacing the red meat in their diet with other meat for ethical reasons.
Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
That’s like saying “it’s more ethical if Nazis killed only adults, because they take up more space than kids in a gas chamber.”
The needless suffering and killing of any animal is horrifically unethical, and if we can, we should actively stop participating in it.
There are a ton of mental gymnastics used to justify the consumption of animals. Almost none apply to modern civilization.
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
That doesn’t add up at all because cattle ranches are notoriously known for pretty low quality of life environments if they arent pasture raised or free range
Then again that basically goes for all farm animals that aren’t considered free range, but it’s a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
but it’s a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.
I don’t know about that, it’s pretty difficult to keep (what I would consider) genuinely free range chickens because of predators and various other factors, and the commercial definition of free range doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good quality of life. There’s also how meat chickens are mostly all a specific type of crossbreed that is perpetually hungry, prone to cannibalism and health problems, and not meant to live longer than a few months.
But even if you could say that the average chicken raised for meat is better off than the average cow raised for meat, there’s still how you need vastly more of them for the same amount of meat, so if their lives are still a net negative and you’re weighing it by sum of individual experiences, it could be considered worse from a utilitarian perspective because of the numbers.
LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The solution for meat eaters is something like a farm co-op where you can literally drive by your food and see how it is
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I heard a similar news report on PBS a couple weeks ago. Aside from the obvious, and already mentioned, don’t have kids. Both for the environment, and to not put your kids through the coming bullshit.
njm1314@lemmy.world 8 months ago
God who could even afford red meat anymore
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
literally the only (pure) meat i feel comfortable buying anymore is ground pork, even chicken is hilariously expensive at this point…
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Also not having kids. Strange how that one is left out.
0x0@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Noooooo! You must breed little consumers!
Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 8 months ago
It’s horrible advice though if you wish your woldview to pass onto the next generations. Statistically, the people not caring so much about things like climate change are having kids.
Fleur_@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Well the actual best thing you can do is kill as many people as you can and then yourself.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Watched the news in say, the last three years? The end of growth means people revert to type: impulsive, savage animals killing each other over tribal allegiances and god myths. I don’t need to do a thing.
Penny7@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Considering this is about food that humans eat it makes sense that they don’t include children on this chart.
Unless you’re living in a candy house in the middle of the woods, then yeah, you have a point.
BorgDrone@feddit.nl 8 months ago
The title mentions not owning a car and voting, that’s not in the chart either.
You can drive 12 hummers powered by crude oil and eat steak every day at not have even a fraction of the impact of just one child. Having one less child results in a ecological-footprint reduction equivalent to 58.6 tonnes of CO2 a year. By contrast, living car-free saves 2.4 tonnes a year, eating a plant-based diet saves 0.82 tonnes a year.
Not reproducing is the single most impactful thing you can do for the environment by a huge margin.
AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Well the post tile says “other than not having a car and voting” which are also not about food.
I get the linked article is about food, but OP worded the post in such a way that it’s just factually incorrect
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Oh ho, I see, I didn’t realize children aren’t human and they don’t eat. My bad.
thesystemisdown@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I like to go bottom up. If chocolate and coffee are off the menu, I’m not sure this life is worth continuing.
Senal@programming.dev 8 months ago
I would assume a competently executed strategy of eliminating the worst offenders (and/or the managing infrastructure thereof) would probably have more impact, they probably meant legal things though.
For instance, a solo campaign of taking out the biggest data centers would probably work. Difficult though.
jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
you could firebomb every data center on earth today and global energy usage would go down like, 10-12% at most.
a lot, yes, but literal peanuts compared to other industries like shipping and agriculture.
frankly am sick of seeing people dressing their ignorance up as environmentalism. if you actually care about the environment then stop chastising things like people eating meat or data centers that create much more value per kwH than anything in the other top energy hungry industries, and start directing your anger at the people who are really responsible for the status quo. jane down the street streaming netflix and eating a weekend steak has fuckall to do with climate change when companies like duponte or cargill or nestle are continually allowed to rape our planet on the daily. it’s not even close and acting like they’re remotely comparable is corpo propaganda to shame people who are victims.
Senal@programming.dev 8 months ago
If you’ll notice I mention the biggest offenders and/or the the underlying management infrastructure.
Private jet owners getting systematically luigi’d would also fall under that remit, I was just using data centres as an example.
Oil rigs, Nestlé, blackrock etc would also all work , with varying degrees of efficacy and difficulty.
To address your argument directly, before you get all preachy think of the actual consequences of major data centres going down, all the critical infrastructure running on said data centres would also go down.
That’s air traffic control, shipping and logistics ,and yes, agriculture; any system relying on cloud services running those data centres
If you pick the right ones and do it properly (a competently executed strategy, if you will) then you could cripple most industries, with all the consequences that brings.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
For agriculture at least, the differences are often quite categorical. The best cast production will not get you the same differences as reducing meat consumption
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
It’s an even larger difference than eliminating all food waste (which we should also work to reduce)
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
Senal@programming.dev 8 months ago
I think you meant to reply to the other person.
muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
This has gotten easier as I’ve gotten older. I just don’t care for beef anymore. I’m not disgusted by it. I just prefer other things anymore.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
i’ve never understood the obsession with beef, sure it tastes good but like… bacon also tastes good, chicken nuggets also fucking taste good don’t they??
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Taste is subjective and adapts to what you eat. I didn’t particularly care for tofu at first, but it only took eating it a few times to start actively liking it (part of which has to do with getting better at cooking it).
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there’s very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
One thing I never see brought up about the factory farm systems, maybe cause it is a bit of a distraction from animal rights, is that hypothetically these systems are turnkey human genocide infrastructure. It is infrastructure for a sort of perpetual animal, uh… regenocide? afterall.
Seems outlandish and unthinkable, maybe. But then again, all bets are off with the current administration in the US.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Given the amount of perpetual torture these very-likely-to-be-sentient creatures go through, it’s certainly worse than any genocide in history has ever been. Even if you only think that animals are capable of 5% of the suffering of humans.
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What else?
Fleur_@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Murder
CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafe 8 months ago
All of these things put together pale in comparison to not reproducing, not having children. Technically, apart from just dying…not having children is by far the greenest thing of all.
thatradomguy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t cook red meat out of fear I’ll catch something by being a klutz and rubbing my eye or something while prepping food. Anyway—I will happily chow down at a Fuddruckers once in a while when I can bank it.
Jarix@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Seems an odd concern so I’m wondering if there’s something in unaware of?
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
some countries have terrifying food safety standards
Worstdriver@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I wish I could afford red meat…
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I don’t buy it.
In 2008 when the travel industry crashed in the wake of the market crash, and again in 2020, we saw significant decreases in pollution.
Meat isn’t the problem. Fossil fuels are.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 8 months ago
There is not one thing that is the problem. It’s a bunch of big problems adding up into a colossal one.
BussyCat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Are you comparing that to a time that everyone stopped eating beef or how are you using that information to make the claim that meat isn’t the problem?
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m pointing to observable cause-and-effect.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Are you comparing that to a time that everyone stopped eating beef
like the mid-90’s mad cow scare?
CXORA@aussie.zone 8 months ago
More than one thing can contribute.
Jayve@lemmy.world 8 months ago
SCOP, it’s what’s for dinner.
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
the graphic you posted comes from this article, which shows it is based on poore-nemecek 2018. i’ve detailed teh problems with this study in another top-level comment here, but, basically, it’s not good science. i feel you’re spreading misinformation.
4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
The ballpark numbers seem well in line with similar studies I have seen elsewhere. So while I don’t doubt there might be minor flaws in this particular source material, the point still stands.
We shouldn’t nitpick too much about stuff that’s generally trying very hard to get facts right while the right or making up shit left, right and center and call fact-checking a limitation of their free speech.
Suggestion: point out flaws but also confirm that it’s definitely not just made up and probably largely correct
droopy4096@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
this only holds for industrial red meat. I love it when everything gets lumped together and presented as “evidence”. Non-industrial, small scale farming actually can have reverse effect. But we don’t talk about avoiding industrial products, because… why? 100mile diet that includes sustainably raised meat (white, red blue - whatever) from local farm will have minimal impact on environment. Shall we talk about avocados in Canada or Almonds? Study lack nuance and produces flashy headings with no substance.
LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 8 months ago
Just looked through our past few menus. We only eat beef once a week by nature it seems.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 8 months ago
What if I eat ostrich and emu?
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Thats crazy!! I do eat it, but not very often. However I do a lot to offset it, but still. Hard to get other foods that make you feel full and get you protein like a good steak though.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m not voluntarily giving up jack shit unless the wealthy who devised and profit off the systems that make carbon footprints matter, are brought to heel. If the wealthy can’t be stopped, we’re all dead anyways. It’s their fucking mess, they can be the ones to sacrifice to fix it.
chunes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not having a kid eclipses all of these by orders of magnitude.
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 8 months ago
…fuck, my coffee habit by itself is probably responsible for a solid 0.01 *C global temperature increase.
Sorry all… I didn’t know.
potate@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Perfect is the enemy of good only if you WAIT for perfect. I eat minimal meat, get my veggies from a local farm share, have solar panels, an EV that charges only off excess solar production, a heatpump, have re-insulated the attic, ditched the gas range for induction that runs off solar, etc. My footprint is less than anyone around me, but probably still way higher than your average individual living in the global south.
I’m trying to hit net zero and once I hit it, I’ll keep going because Canada (where I live) is rich and I want to continue to reduce my footprint (the dream is net negative in my life) because I’m privileged and have the resources to push harder. I make it a game - figure out what’s my best opportunity to reduce my footprint, do it, move on to looking for the next thing I can do.
Giving up (most) red meat and patting yourself on the back is severely minimizing what you COULD be doing. I’m a long, long way from perfect, and am exceedingly lucky to have the resources to play this game - but carbon reduction is a way of life, not a checkbox IMO.
JiminaMann@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
to some degree maybe, but even a doubling for most of these things still puts them way way way below the emissions of beef.
but things like beans are trivial to grow on a small local scale, if you can get your food from local farmers that aren’t using 500 tractors and tons of artificial fertilizer then it’s hard to even theoretically do better.
usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
This graph is normalized per kg. Graphs look similarly per kcal as well