Save the Planet, Put Down that Hamburger
Save the Planet, Put Down that Hamburger
Researchers examined the diets of 55,500 people and found that vegans are responsible for 75 percent less in greenhouse gases than meat-eaters.
Dr. Scarborough said while critiques of plant-based diets often highlighted environmental effects of select vegan foods, such as the volume of water required to produce almond-milk, the new research showed that plant-based diets had far less of an environmental toll than animal-based ones, regardless of how the food was produced.
Meat eaters love to point to almonds, forgetting dairy is even worse in terms of water footprint
It's all 'whataboutism' without ever looking inward. I remember when Impossible and Beyond meat started becoming readily available and I read a news article that discussed how healthy they were. Their conclusion that was they were safe and healthy in moderation, but you shouldn't eat them every day....like, yeah, you shouldn't eat a fucking hamburger daily either, what's your point?
They just have to plant the tiniest seed of doubt for many consumers who will never compare the two and only want a reason to justify their consumption.
##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.
Why do you think the oil & gas industry exists? To satisfy the needs of consumer. The industry isn't just burning oil just to fuck the climate up. It all comes down to the consumer.
Now about carbon footprint. The Paris agreement aims to limit global warming to 1.5ºC. To do, we collectively have to emit less than 250 Gt (from the start of 2023). That means each of the 8 billion persons on the planet get a 1.16 t/year budget until 2050, and then zero.
You cannot reach this footprint while eating meat like the average American does. You cannot reach it by keeping driving, or even owning a car. You cannot just hope anymore to keep same lifestyle, which was only made affordable by an era of cheap fossil energy.
Of course you can keep blaming other in all caps text but that's not going to change anything, nor inspire change. Are the companies to blame? Sure. But companies are made by people, and are all eventually financed by the consumer. You. Me. Us.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/260363/largest-corporate-air-polluters-in-the-united-states/
It's billionaires and corporations dude, stop blaming individual people. Only regulations on industry can save us now. Otherwise we're fucked, and yelling at people to change does nothing. Once industries are regulated, there's a higher chance of being able to reduce the emissions of individuals. Right now it's akin to pissing in the wind.
I understand what you’re saying, but the chain is long. The climate denialism runs deep. 70% of emissions since 1988 are caused by just 100 companies. And those companies aren’t just direct-to-consumer. They supply industries that supply industries. We are the last step in a very long line of handoffs between the true polluters.
Again, I understand your reasoning that if we change, they have to change to adapt, but our change is nearly insignificant when you factor in how much you’d have to change and how inaccessible that kind of change is for people. Your clothes, food, transportation, utilities, your work—literally everything we rely on to exist and survive in this capitalist world contributes to climate change. You can make all sorts of changes, provided you have the means. But not everyone does. And your going vegetarian needs about 100 other people to go vegetarian for years before you cancel our a few private jet rides.
You’re looking from the bottom up, but you can’t see past the ground floor. Not everyone has the means to change in the way you’re suggesting, and it’s just peanuts when compared with the change that would come from punishing and changing one or two companies. Thousands of people would need to go vegetarian to see the change we could achieve with much larger goals in mind. And yes, we are consumers of the companies products, but they are the ones that lobbied to make the US a car-centric country, that kept train tracks from being built—shit, that’s still happening with Elon Musk. He killed he light rail almost single-handedly because he wants people to rely on electric cars.
And that is another perfect example of this predicament. All we hear about is EV, how it’ll change the world, save the environment blah blah blah, but that’s still all marketing. to maintain the status quo while mostly greenwashing the problem of runaway capitalism. That solution serves the markets first!!
It’s smaller, personal change when we weren’t the ones that buried the environmental reports and funded climate denialism while dumping toxic sludge in rivers and escaping culpability—and this debate is still happening in places like this! Between environmentalists! Come on! How is this still happening?!
So, changing one aspect of our lives that contributes to climate change, while all of the other aspects of our consumption still do—not to mention the privilege inherent in that decision—and needing to rely on thousands of people to make that change, while we could go after the real culprits of this problem?
I’m not arguing we shouldn’t do everything we can, personally. But again, there is an inherent privilege bias in that thinking, while this type of framing lets the true motherfuckers off the hook. It keeps the heat off of them while making us argue over how best we, as individuals, can limit our minuscule contributions (relatively speaking).
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.
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 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.
Likewise, if we stopped burning all fossil fuels right now, animal agriculture alone would push us past 1.5C.
It's not either-or, it's both.
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.
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
Shoutout for NYT for not rightly blaming the corporations and instead passing the responsibility to the poor people