##THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS NOT OUR FAULT, ITS NOT OUR FUCKING DIET’S RESPONSIBILITY TO FIX, GODDAMMIT. STOP TALKING ABOUT OUR “CARBON FOOTPRINT” (a term and concept invented by BP publicists) AND BREAK GODDAMN INDUSTRY INTO PIECES SMALL ENOUGH TO FUCKING FLUSH DOWN THE DRAIN
If every single person went vegetarian, we’d still be in deep shit. And it’s not our previous meat-eating that’s responsible. It’s the companies that have buried, obfuscated, lied, and manipulated everything and everyone for a goddamn century. And they’re still getting away with it with articles like this.
Idk what’s going on but I can’t reply to the people who replied to my comment so I’ll do it here.
According to this data, approx 50 billion tCO2 per year are emitted worldwide by human action.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
2t/CO2 per year per person X 6b people= ~12 billion tCO2/year.
Or about 25% is done by BILLIONS of people every year.
Regulations are the only way because corporations have a death grip on society. Even if we reduced individual emissions by 50% as people are saying that’s only a 12% difference in emissions, versus 35% if corporations halved their emissions. Creating laws to reduce individual emissions would go over like a lead balloon, and a lot of the cause of individual emissions, if I had to guess, is due to the circumstances around their lives. Availability of public transportation, cost of goods and how their goods are produced, etc. However, corporations have a direct choice in doing these actions.
If you regulate corporations you have a much larger overall affect that if you were to make laws limiting consumption. It’s simply more practical in many many ways to force corporations to hit emissions goals than it is to force people. What are you going to do if people emit too much? Fine them? Good luck they’re already broke. Jail them? I think we can both agree how that would go. There are many multitudes fewer corporations than there are actual people, so managing and controlling their output is easier from a governmental standpoint.
It’s companies making vehicles that emit high amounts of CO2, it’s companies making ecological disasters on a global scale, it’s companies who are being given tax cuts that could instead go towards fighting this issue. Planning for people to individually emit less isn’t as feasible as controlling the source of emissions itself.
I was going to disagree with you but then I noticed that you put everything in capitals.
If you go to a FRIGGIN supermarket & have two choices, a Hamburger or a plant-based burger, & you choose the Hamburger, no amount of CAPITALS will make that the right choice.
If you choose to drive 5 miles in a big diesel truck to pick up a hamburger, regardless of what BP said, your direct carbon emissions & the indirect methane emisisons are a part of the problem.
I agree that we need regulation. But I think you also discount the effects of individual consumption.
In the long-ish term, the animal farming indistry has to go. It cannot be made sustainable, no matter how you regulate industry. It’s just a waste of resources. So at some point you as an individual have to adapt to a vegan diet, either by choice or because there is no alternative. What will it be? Do you want to stop eating meat the moment it is outlawed?
People who cling to eating meat nowadays actively oppose regulation. Otherwise they couln’t eat meat. There is still a demand. We need both regulation to end animal farming and convince individual consumers, that they have to become vegans. It’s the masses who have the most power. If veganism came from the majority population, it would be far easier to regulate industry.
Would you support enforced veganism, and jailing anybody who eats or prepares meat?
Why does everything have to go to the extreme end of straight to jail?
The post to which I replied said:
So at some point you as an individual have to adapt to a vegan diet, either by choice or because there is no alternative.
Do you want to stop eating meat the moment it is outlawed?
We need both regulation to end animal farming and convince individual consumers, that they have to become vegans
If they want “regulations” to “end” animal farming then I just want to be clear that they support imprisoning people who prepare or eat meat. They went to the extreme of jail without mentioning the word jail.
Mate, it’s illegal for teenagers to buy R rated movies and I’ve never heard of anyone going to jail for it. Why can’t meat be like that?
Would you destroy the world for taste? I don’t get where your question is coming from
I just want to be clear what your position is. You’re not just encouraging veganism, you’re calling on the violence of the police to beat and imprison people who eat meat.
I’m not necessarily arguing against it, I just want the clarity that you finally provided.
It’s easy to suggest outlawing stuff without considering the violence necessary for outlawing things. You have clearly considered (and enthusiastically endorse) that violence.
Of course if you imprison all meat eaters but still use oil to harvest, process, and distribute all the plant based foods then the world will still burn, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular issue.
Congratulations, you perfected strawmanning. I have no idea who you are replying to. There is nothing in there that I wrote.
k
No, I don’t support jail for anyone, because it’s a bad way to solve crime. I think anyone who eats meat should be sentenced to something productive like community service, or therapy to get to the bottom of why they think they have the right to kill others.
I would refuse that community service and therapy. What would happen then?
At that point you aren’t being punished for the (hypothetical, in this scenario) “crime” of eating meat, but instead the crime of not obeying your sentencing.
In the same way if I refuse to pay a parking ticket they can (eventually) lock me up for noncompliance. You wouldn’t make the argument that I’m being locked up for a parking ticket in the same way no one would argue you bring locked up for avoiding your community service sentence is akin to being locked up for eating meat.
Granted, a less extreme approach would just be to tax the everliving shit out of meat production and use the proceeds to mitigate the environmental impacts as well as provide assistance for the lower income families who may be otherwise disproportionately impacted. Sin taxes can be very effective if done properly.
Either way, you’re just being hyperbolic.
Well then under communism, you wouldn’t be invited to any of the cool parties, and you’d be refused service at most non-essential places like restaurants and gyms. People would think you’re a weirdo.
Do you recommend we all give up and not try to do what we can with our own agency? Is that how you live your life, have you given up?
The “personal responsibility for climate change” angle is a distraction. In the grand scheme of things, meat eating makes little difference. It’s the burning of fossil fuels by cargo ships, cruise ships, airliners, private jets, and by governments and militaries.
We’re not going to make a dent in climate change by not eating beef. We need to lobby and fight for extensive regulations on pollution and for investment into green energy generation.
An article like this is just a distraction.
Meat eating isn’t just about CO2 emissions. The meat industry uses a disproportionate share of land and water as well, which are both critical to meeting our climate goals.
Take this article for example: https://www.wri.org/insights/mass-timber-wood-construction-climate-change in it they suggest that part of the reason mass timber is not a viable is because it takes away land from the meat and dairy industry - an issue that would not be there if we globally shifted to plant based diets and used less land overall.
Okay let’s hit the meat and fuel companies where it hurts: their wallets
Stop buying meat and fuel.
Look, I get that logic, I really do.
And do it. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going vegetarian at all. But think of how many people need to change before your not buying meat actually has an effect. Because, think about it: you don’t buy any meat, but the store you shop at doesn’t change their order. If you went full vegan today, the grocery store would still stock the exact same amount of those products.
My point isn’t that telling people to go vegetarian is wrong. Not at all, it’s a great thing.
My point is, it’s thinking way too small and it’s actively changing the tone of the conversation. And that change was literally crafted by industry publicists, drawing attention away from the true culprits. The waters are muddier.
If every article and every study that came out telling individuals how to change their lives and sacrifice in order to save the environment were, instead, about how 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions, how they had internal studies a hundred years ago about how their product was altering the environment, about how they’ve escaped change via lobbying and misinformation, the pressure wouldn’t be spread out—this conversation wouldn’t be happening. Our lifestyle changes would be exactly as important as they should be in this conversation: a nice addition. Nowhere near the focus. Instead, I see way more articles focusing on how we can all collectively change to fight the monstrous beast that is climate change. That’s telling people to fire bottle rockets at an attacking Air Force. It’s pissing in the wind. When there are white armies out there that get to write off doing shit because it’s on those people.
Again, changing your life for the good of the environment is a great thing. Doing it is admirable. But it’s also privilege-restrictive. Living an emission-reductive lifestyle is literally not possible for a lot of people. Just like being poor is expensive, being poor forces horrible carbon emission decisions on people. I haven’t crunched the numbers, (no one has) but if every privileged-enough person changed, would that be enough? Probably not. More and more people are financially restricted, and talking about eco-friendly lifestyle choices like it’s all about how much you care is incredibly unfair.
But that’s all after the fact of this being a tactic invented by the oil/gas industry to take pressure off of the few companies that literally are responsible for—and that could have a huge effect on—climate change.
This is playing marbles in a hurricane and yelling at the kid who is trying to blow the marbles out of place—is that contribution actually changing things? Sure, a little. But there is a fucking hurricane and any time spent talking about changing that kid’s behavior is time not spent talking about the hurricane.
But think of how many people need to change before your not buying meat actually has an effect
But there’s every chance that I’m the tipping point between one more order of meat from the supplier, and two. That I’m the drop in the bucket that saves a cow’s life. And as for fuel, well I’m definitely having an effect on the environment, because I’m avoiding the use of moles upon moles of carbon atoms. It’s not big, but it’s there. We need big, but we also need there. It ALL matters.
And besides, I’m not just a consequentialist. I’m a virtue ethicist too. I can honestly say that I’m not part of the problem, and that feels good. That’s more worth it to me than delighting in eating the flesh of slaves. And knowing that other people are part of the problem and they think eating slaves can be justfied by some excuse, well that’s disgusting and I don’t like those people. It’s morally bankrupt. I do not like slavers.
If every article and every study that came out telling individuals how to change their lives and sacrifice in order to save the environment were, instead, about how 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions, how they had internal studies a hundred years ago about how their product was altering the environment, about how they’ve escaped change via lobbying and misinformation, the pressure wouldn’t be spread out—this conversation wouldn’t be happening
That’s what the conversation has BEEN for the last 5-10 years. The 00s and early 10s, you’re right, it was all on the big companies and they used propaganda to delay us looking at them. But today, everyone knows the government and the corporations are to blame, and does it change their votes? Not really. We are already having the conversation about big business and it’s not working. And even if it did work, we don’t have the same luxuries we had in the 00s. In the 00s, climate change could have been solved by big companies taking responsibility. That’s not true anymore. In the 20s, it takes EVERYONE working to save the world. And since I’m part of everyone, I’m gonna work.
Stopping the climate crisis requires a greater reduction in carbon emissions than is physically possible if every individual were to give up their car and meat, and every mining, energy, and transport company were to be dissolved. The good ending requires 110% of EVERYONE working together.
So if we want to avoid the very worst ending, EVERYONE needs to put in their maximum effort. We need to end pollution at the governmental level, and we need to end pollution at the personal level on our way there. Everything we can possibly do isn’t good enough, and that means we need to do everything we possibly can and cross our fingers. There are no more excuses left, for anyone, corporate or personal.
While the link between animal agriculture and environmental harm is well established, earlier studies used scientific modeling to reach those conclusions. By contrast, the Oxford research drew from the actual diets of 55,500 people — vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters — in the United Kingdom and used data from some 38,000 farms in 119 countries.
Open access Journal article published in Nature Food here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w
