Saving the climate is not going to be done by guilting consumers into changing individual consumption habits. Enough with the green consumerist bullshit that only serve as neoliberal justifications for inaction.
If the meat industry is hurting the planet, REGULATE IT.
The problem is not that the method that meat is produced, it is that it is produced at high levels at all. The inefficiencies don’t go away by changing regulations. We are going to have to have changes in production and thus consumption levels. It’s going to be difficult politically to get any policy like that through if people are unwilling to reduce any on there own as well
Do I think systematic actions are needed, yes, but if we’re going to get there we’ll have to start with some degree of individual action before any of it is paltable to the larger society
In order for regulations to stick, they should come from the people. If you try to regulate meat consumption without convincing people that it’s good, it will just not stick. It needs to be a consolidated effort, and guilting regular people into better choices is a big part of it
Guilting people makes them dig their heels in. Especially when bacon is on the line. There is no good vegan bacon substitute
Right because capitalism is bad we should all feel free to never care about our choices
You’ve got some downvotes … and there’s a pretty strong “don’t be obnoxious to people if you want to persuade them to do something” attitude here … which I generally agree with.
Just to provide my own sentiment here … at a broad, like “historical” level … it does bother me that it seems like we’ve kinda become this coddled culture. Yes, we can be obnoxious about how our choices are better than someone else’s bad choices.
But having frank discussions about what choices and actions are good and bad without getting stuck into ego shit fights is not only healthy but I’d argue pretty fundamental. And that includes whether it makes sense for an issue to be elevated to the government/regulatory level … and then … how we as the electorate are going effect that (because in the end, leadership from government these days isn’t really a thing … which is also part of the this coddled “make every feel good about themselves” culture I feel).
I recently started calling this something like “secondary climate denial” (which I got from somewhere I can’t remember). The idea being that a fair amount of people (myself included I’d say) have acquired a sort of learnt helplessness and passiveness about the climate crisis … have learnt to deny the possibility of there being things that they can actually do and that are actually worth doing. Sometimes we expect things to be more effective and more quickly than is reasonable, so we do nothing. Sometimes we think the world is too big and powerful for us to move it, so we give up.
Sometimes we get worried about letting perfect be the enemy of good and so we give up. And what have we all got to show for it … what have we actually done?!
If/when it goes to shit and we’re sitting grand-children who are asking us why we didn’t stop it from happening and what we actually did … are we really going to be satisfied that, well, we had some arguments online about it and tried to eat vegan as much as possible? Won’t the grand-children then say “I’m vegan too, but what did you do to stop it? Didn’t you do anything?”
>If the meat industry is hurting the planet, REGULATE IT.
i’d say “attack it”. i don’t care to ask people in the seats of power to pwease pwease hewp.
You can’t even get people to oppose livestock subsidies, and you’re talking about proactive blocks? The action you propose has the least chance of success. Individuals with self-control is the only certain action you can count on.
>Saving the climate is not going to be done by guilting consumers into changing individual consumption habits.
💯
Vegans love to conflate all meat into one big group because their goal is to make veganism look good in comparison.
In reality, beef is the main problem.
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead, but vegans aren’t interested in that because for them it’s not really about the climate - it’s about reducing animal suffering and death.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
I would hazard saying “environmentally effective” here unless we are willing to ignore some of the other large environmental issues with meat production outside of just green house gases emission. Plant-based foods are lower not just on GHG emissions, but water usage, land usage, eutrophication, fertilizer usage1, etc.
There’s all kinds of other pollutants such as Nitrogen runoff. The rise of the pig farming is has helped fueled a crisis in Nitrogen runoff in the Netherlands for instance
There’s the high level of antibiotic usage to maintaining the high levels of production fueling antibiotic resistance.
And so on.
If we do want to look at the suffering, we should also note that chicken farming does not just keep things the same, but actually makes it worse with more chickens required than other creatures due to their smaller size.
1 Even less synthetic fertilizer even compared to the maximal usage of manure per https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
EDIT: I should also mention that land use change (deforestation) factor can change as you rapidly increase these industries size. Deforestation makes up a large portion of beef’s current emissions. Plant-based foods require overall less cropland due to not needing to grow any feed and removing that energy loss. This is not the case for chicken production. Currently beef does make up the majority of Amazonian deforestation, however, the second largest portion is growing animal feed primary for chickens. Switch from beef to chickens and you might risk just moving around where the deforestation comes from
Yes. Sloppy choice of words on my part but this is a climate change topic, here.
Chicken meat uses 4x less water than beef. I’m not disputing your point, just firming up the perspective for anyone lurking.
Clearly, vegetables are way way better. But in terms of what kind of behavior change people are willing to consider, cutting out beef is a way way easier sell than cutting out all meat.
Yes. Sloppy choice of words on my part but this is a climate change topic, here.
Chicken meat uses 4x less water than beef. I’m not disputing your point, just firming up the perspective for anyone lurking.
Clearly, vegetables are way way better. But in terms of what kind of behavior change people are willing to consider, cutting out beef is a way way easier sell than cutting out all meat.
one aspect of this is that many vegans care about the environment and the victims of animal agriculture. Things are so bad for the animals (we kill trillions per year. That’s insane.) that people are desperate to do or say anything to get people to stop supporting it.
Clearly not, as, humans being as humans are, merelly getting people to just start having vegetarian meals once in a while, reducing meat consumption (which is even a good thing healthwise) and eating more of the less environmentally harmful meats and less of the worst ones, is a far faster path to reduce the Environmental problem and avoiding the kind of push-back reaction that will put many people altogether against the idea.
The genuine, pragmatic approach to maximizing the Environmental outcomes both on the long- and short-term is the very opposite of how Moralists, driven by their own Moral standpoint and self-righteousness, are abusing broader Environmental concerns to push their morals.
People putting Environmentalism first aren’t pushing for absolutist “abide by my Morals” pseudo-“solutions”.
Then keep beef. One cow is a hundred meals, one chicken is two. 50 chickens die to save one cow.
And chickens don’t give milk
If tofu is still ten times better for the planet than cheese I don’t think it’s “mostly beef” that’s the problem.
Given cheese is a beef-related product I don’t see the issue with the reasoning
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead,
Let’s not drive a wedge between the eco-vegans and the animal welfare vegans. Beef is the worst for climate while chickens get the least ethical treatment.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
Dividing an already tiny population of much needed activists is not how you get progressive change. Non-beef meats still shadow plant-based food in terms of their climate harm.
Your pic was too big for me to download but if it’s the same data I’ve seen, then beef is the worst and lamb is 2nd at about ½ the emissions of beef, and all the meats are substantially more harmful than plant based options.
Honestly this whole argument reminds me of the importance of intersectionality. Yes different groups have different forms, levels and styles of oppression, but there is still a joint cause for dismantling oppression as a whole.
Wow. I didn’t know chocolate was so bad.
Coffee too
Note as well that if the chocolate comes from:
- #Nestlé
- #HaagenDazs or
- #Hershey’s
then the supply chain has child slaves as well.
I came to say that. Not everyone has to change completely, reducing meat intake a little, eating meat with less emissions and even different beef farms haslve large range of emissions. There are different ways of raising beef.
So for sustainability there are multiple solutions.
For promoting veganism and reduce animal suffering only one, which I do support, but don’t put them together. It will only pusg people away from any improvement.
Note that there are developments in reducing the methane production of cattle. Supplementing their food with seaweed lets the bacteria in their gut fully digest the grass, breaking the methane to CO2
As it is if you removed the cattle and re-wilded the land they were on, that land would produce as much methane and CO2 as the cows did, as the same bacteria would break down fallen grass, or work in deer guts and no one will feed the wild land and deer seaweed
Do you eat beef?
I feel like it’s so unfair that there’s so many people in the world we need to stop eating our favorite foods. How about reduce the human population instead? Such that we could all sustain an enjoyable existence where we don’t have to worry about what we eat…
Also, in general, eating no or less meat and dairy can be a healthier diet https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/6nh87mb/vegans-are-they-right
But cheese is so good…
I’ve already swapped to oat milk, but cheese…
I used to love cheese and ate a lot of it but after foregoing for a while now I find it revolting. One thing I feel that doesn’t get talked about a lot among vegans is that after you break out of the habit of eating something you realise it was never that important.
FYI, if they can produce plant based burgers that have the texture & tastes like beef, then l see no reason why they can’t do the same with a plant based cheese.
Food is chemicals (chemistry)
They haven’t succeeded yet. No good fake cheese, no good fake yoghurt, no good fake bacon
We haven’t even done the much simpler chemistry of replicating photosynthesis (sunlight and CO2 to sugar)
Well then, if they can’t make plant based cheese that tastes exactly like dairy cheese we’re doomed (FFS)
Don’t believe the losers that say science is impossible
https://impossiblefoods.com/products/burger“Photosynthesis”
Plants have evolved to do that already! That’s also why it’s far better for the environment to eat plant & fungi based diets. Less energy (fewer resources) is lost (used) by eating the plants inc. the milks that are made from plants. Compared to eating the animals that eat the plants
Eggs and parmigiano reggiano were the last thing I gave up before changing. It took the environment + health + morality arguments to cement it for me.
I hear you!
Whilst I’ve tried some plant based cheese they haven’t been comparably to dairy cheese.
I live with few people that, whilst they generally eat a 90% vegan diet, drink dairy milk & eat cheese (so kept in the fridge)
The only food l used to eat that l sometimes ‘crave’ is cheese & fried eggs. So yea, l still occasionally eat a vegy & cheese pizza & have the odd fried egg
I’m not religious about my diet. But, I don’t miss meat at all - the alternatives are satisfying
I wouldn’t eat anything invented in the last hundred years. Who knows whether oat milk is safe?
I’m allergic to cow dairy, I wouldn’t touch plant “milk”
Well, good news for you! Soy milk dates all the way back to 1300’s and almond milk to the 1700’s! However, almond milk is awful for environmental reasons, such as too much land and water use. But oat milk is just water and enzymes. We have enzymes in our body and have utilized them in cooking for centuries (like pineapple tenderizing meat).
But also, you’re using things invented in the last hundred years. You’ve been vaccinated for at least a few things. You’re using the internet. You’ve even eaten sliced bread (1928). Stop being obtuse with the whole “last hundred years” crap.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don’t bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it’s less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won’t even really miss meat after a few months.
People want to change nothing and point at corporations or billionaires like their own choices couldn’t reduce suffering and emissions.
And some people will point at people individual choices rather than the corporations and states who promoted this lifestyle.
What pisses me the most about ecologists nowadays is how liberals they are. If you want to feel good about yourself, feel free, but don’t pretend all people are responsible for climate change by themselves because they’re eating meat.
Systems can be broken and incentivise poor behaviour while individual actions also make a difference.
Besides, where will your political change come from? people who wont even change their diet? Just like how all those environmental protections were brought into being by people who criticised the people chaining themselves to trees for thinking individual actions mattered?
The meat industry is terrified of vegans, they spend millions rewriting laws and producing propaganda to limit us. maybe they have reasons why.
One place individual action worked was when people started making a thing of divesting from coal power plants. It worked because the pension funds followed the popular lead. With investors fleeing it is hard for coal power plants to maintain themselves, jars to get loans. It shortened many power plants’ lives significantly
Where it hasn’t worked: recycling
The industry loves vegans. It is an extremely profitable industry because those people are wealthier than average and already fanatised for their products. You’re a fool if you think you’re fighting the industry. You merely fight one industry for the benefit of another one.
The meat industry is fine. The terrified ones are the stupid conservative. But are they stupid or terrified? They’re merely using the vegan propaganda against them.
And oh boy is it easy to do! Vegans are already full fanatics about their ideology. It’s a full blown religion at this point : either you are vegan or a heretic causing the end of the world. If you’re not vegan, you are personally responsible for the climate change. Isn’t this the point of this article?
Conservative have nothing to do to make propaganda against this. Ecologists are as fascists as the fascists themselves, but in a green color.
Well I’m not gonna hold my breath waiting for whatever change you’re willing into being by tweeting about how nobody should do anything until somebody starts the glorious revolution.
Reminder that good is not the enemy of perfect. It is much easier to convince 100 people to eat 10% less meat than to convince 10 people to become vegetarian.
I’ve started eating vegetarian several days a week and all it’s done is introduce me to some amazing tasting food that I haven’t tried before because of the dumb stigma that vegetarian means not tasty. I find that I enjoy some of these vegetarian dishes more than it’s meat counterpart because it’s not ruined by tough overcooked tasteless meat.
Substituting some of your mince for plant based alternatives is something I highly recommend everyone does.
You’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference because you still get all the oils and flavours from the meat, and the substitutes have a nearly identical texture. It’s a super easy way to reduce your meat intake without changing your food much.
I’ve been vegan for a week now, shits hard - snacks suck but Oreos are on the menu.
Good job! Snacks do suck, nowadays I usually forego snacks entirely but fruit is always ol reliable for quick and easy.
How do you not snack? What do I do with my hands during my finite spare time?
Futile vegan activism on the internet lmao
Remember to supplement the missing vitamins. I think B12 is the big one, but also about 40% of people can’t turn beta carotene into vitamin A (retinol) and need to supplement it. If you run into odd vision problems, try vitamin A - the first sign of a deficiency is night blindness
(Hardly a full diet when one supplement is needed for everyone, and several more for some)
I take a multivitamin just for the hell of it, figure I’ll piss out what’s not needed and take what is.
It’s the specific proteins I’m worried about missing out, though macros weren’t a concern when I ate meat so seems silly to care now.
I thought the proteins thing was a myth. If you have a diverse enough diet, you should be fine. Just make sure you’re getting nuts, beans, etc.
All worth it to punch a heart on moon for your SO.
I’m in the process of going vegan. It’s taught me how to cook and how to appreciate food more. Veganism is awesome. You should try it.
Massively agree, it’s made me get into food science and it’s just so cool
Same, meat is just something you don’t need in life. The satisfaction I get from a nice delicious meal is no different than it was before I was vegan just now it is better for the environment, my health and animal welfare.
it would be better for the environment and animal welfare of it diminished the effects of the industry. it doesn’t. production continues to grow year over year.
Production keeps growing because there is still a demand for meat. The demand for meat isn’t coming from vegans btw. ie more vegans less demand, less climate impact.
even with more vegans, we have seen production increase. it’s not as simple as you make it sound.
It is
China’s world wide illegal fishing operations begs to differ with their blue ranking.
The above map doesn’t include fishing, it’s showing land use. This shows fishing:
Here is another one about land animals:
The great thing about meat and dairy consumption is that it is linear; if you eat 50% less you cause 50% less pain. Instead of trying to go full vegan, go half-vegetarian first. The next step can be taken later.
The biggest polluters are
- Transport 28%
- Electricity 25%
- Industry 23%
- Commercial & residential 13%
- Agriculture 10%
Agriculture (fertiliser, wild rodents, diesel, animals, rotting plants, not including plants wasted by consumers) is only 10%
We’re making the best inroads into electricity. It is clearly possible and economical to convert all electrical grids to carbon neutral technology
We’re starting to convert residential and commercial to entirely electric (except for the carbon and methane emissions from humans and pets, especially ones that eat beans) so that 13% is solvable
So at the moment 38% of greenhouse gases are easy, just needing political will
Another 23% is harder, industry needs some inventions, especially a green steel making process, and a green concrete making process. Both are years away and probably possible
Transport is hard. 6% is personal transport. That’s easy to electrify. Trucking is harder, planes are harder still. I don’t know how feasible wind power is for shipping, at least the trade winds blow the right way for Asia to America
The best bet for transport was a green liquid fuel, but the company trying to grow diesel from bacteria folded several years ago.
We are never going to decarbonise agriculture by abandoning any part of it. We can do a bit by practicing permaculture - that keeps more carbon in the ground; we can clean up animal agriculture by not feeding cattle human food, let them eat grass, and there is promising technology for reducing their (and other ruminants’) methane emissions by feeding them seaweed
If we waved a wand and removed all farm animals from the world it wouldn’t make a dent in carbon emissions or methane, cows would be replaced by deer which also make methane in exactly the same way cows do, but with no one feeding them seaweed
Uneaten grass would rot and be turned into methane (it’s the same bacteria that work in cow and deer guts to break down grass). No one’s treating rotting grass with seaweed.
Our best bet is to keep the marginal lands occupied by cattle and regulating people running cattle, requiring them to minimise their animals’ emissions, or offset them
*Edited to fix typos
It looks like you’re citing the EPA estimates for US GHG emissions by sector: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Unfortunately this is only a small part of the overall picture. For instance, it notably doesn’t include carbon sinks (areas that have a net reduction of GHG) like protected wild lands. One of the biggest climate issues is deforestation, since it not only produces emissions, but also damages the earth’s ability to sequester CO2. https://thehumaneleague.org/article/meat-industry-deforestation-cop26
In fact, if you look at total land use, an alarming percentage of habitable land is being used to produce meat and dairy, accounting for a relatively small percentage of protein and calorie consumption.
You also have to be careful using GHG emissions as your only metric. Animal agriculture is a major contributor to many of the environmental issues we face:
Biodiversity loss and mass extinction attributed to deforestation and use of land for agriculture.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria resulting from overuse of antibiotics to promote livestock growth.
Eutrophication and dead zones from fertilizers used to produce animal feed and runoff from farms.
Zoonotic diseases which very often originate in livestock before jumping to humans: see swine flu, avian flu, etc.
Additionally, the claim that eliminating livestock would result in a 1:1 replacement in wild mammals is patently false. Livestock is farmed intensively, whereas wild animals live in areas that are, again, carbon sinks. Just looking at the numbers, wild mammals are only a tiny fraction of mammalian biomass, with the vast majority being humans and livestock.
Considering the greater picture, the best bet is for those who are able to eliminate their consumption of animal products to do so.
The problem is only 9% of the beef production and 30% of global sheep and goat production are feed using grazing. The rest so most of them are feed using some form of human edible plants and they would not be replaced by wild animals. Furthermore it is something, which can be easily done today. We would still be able to produce enough food for every human on the planet and it would even be easier, as all the feedstock for animals would no longer be needed. So it really is a nice and easy few percent to get, which pretty much everybody can easily do themself.
https://www.fao.org/3/X5303E/x5303e05.htm#chapter 2: livestock grazing systems & the environment
- Transport 28%
- Electricity 25%
- Industry 23%
- Commercial & residential 13%
- Agriculture 10%
I can opt to significantly reduce my impact for no extra money in one of these sectors.
Self reply. I wonder what the climate impact of my compost pile is. Should I add seaweed? I live a long way from the sea, is the pile worse than a 400km round trip (presuming the right weed grows in the nearest bit of sea).
I hope fixing electricity, residential, commercial, transport, and industry is enough. The world could handle the carbon load of the same sort of biomass as we have now before we started burning all the oil
Meat, fish from overfished oceans, plantations from pesticides and deforestation.
Guess ill starve
For anyone unaware, deforestation is driven by animal agriculture. In fact, most of the crops grown are for animal feed. It’s inefficient, and the more efficient we make it, the crueler it is for the animals.
Eating plants will definitely do the least harm.
Sucks, but that will provide decades of benefits for the rest of us
Don’t worry, we’re all gonna starve. The rich are making sure of it. It’d really only take one of the super rich to choose to do good instead of evil and literally save the whole world, but humans, evidently, just don’t make good people.
I’m just just curious, what do you think Elon Musk(or whoever is the richest person in the world at this point) could do to save the whole world?
OK, well tax everything that harms the environment equally and appropriately, and I’ll choose if I want to carry on eating it.
mhm, and you won’t be screaming “cost of living crisis”, right?
No, but it should be applied to everything, not just the weekly boogeyman industry.
All those out of season fruits and vegetables that get transported from southern Spain or Israel. All that plastic tat imported from China on a dirty old boat. Everything. Hell, put it on the price tags so people know exactly how much of that price is down to climate tax.
Cry poverty? Increase the minimum wages then. Somebody has to pay, and it has to be the ones doing the consuming. Us. We won’t choose the cleaner option unless it’s cheaper, so make the dirty stuff cost more.
I get that tons of folks just don’t want to stop eating meat. I’m the same. I cut out red meat because it’s very much the worst offender. It was much easier than I thought to do, and I can’t say I miss it or even really think about it aside from months like this.
Give it a shot. Nothing to lose except a little weight maybe.
Do you drive an electric car and charge it on solar or wind? Or an ICE car and run it on alcohol?
Personal transport is about the same as red meat emissions-wise. Red meat is getting better though, because farm animals are in the control of farmers (unlike wild animals that might replace them) the farmers can try different things to reduce the cow’s emissions. So far they have had success, with fairly light public pressure the good practices will spread.
Now replace the cows with wild deer. Try to fix their methane emissions. All ruminants make methane in their fore gut.
Incidentally I lost the most weight on a very low carb diet. Lower carb, better weight loss (and weight gain – muscle). You can go low carb as a vegan, but not very.
It comes across like you’re implying that if someone doesn’t drive a more eco friendly car, then making other eco friendly decisions is wasted.
People love to imply a zero sum game if it provides copium. It is what it is.
Not sure what point you’re even trying to make…
bad for climate change? good! i hate climate change!
Stop telling me what to do and get the corporations to oblige with laws. Oh wait! No one gives a shit because the corpos are running the world now? Oh no, guess i gotta eat shit to make up for their mistakes :(((
As someone who makes delicious plant based foods from inexpensive and available ingredients, I take a lot of issue with the idea that plant based food is “shit”.
rite? I take pride in my vegan food, and my non-vegan friends and family always ask me to bring entrées, treats and baked goods whenever I visit.
I eat GOOD, and if you think the contrary about vegans as a whole then that’s your own limited, small, sheltered little view.
Yeah, vegetables and legumes and grains. Horrible, horrible. Woe is you.
Climate change isn’t my fault! It’s those corporations that I refuse to stop buying from fault!
🙄
No one is telling you what to do, but the studies are undeniable. Even if the oil industries weren’t such a massive environmental disaster, that wouldn’t change the wild levels of inefficiency and waste in animal agriculture. As a whole the meat industry is unsustainable, whataboutism doesnt change the facts.
Stop absolving yourself of responsibility by claiming that the decisions you make are inconsequential. The reason things don’t get better is because people don’t make them better ffs.
being vegan doesn’t make it better.
“ffs”
The article is right there explaining how it’s better for the environment
it’s full of insinuation and half truths and bad science and wishful thinking. it’s a bedtime story.
No it’s quite credible
saying it doesn’t make it so
I’ve declared it
Who is telling you what to do?
We grow our own vegetables, raise our own meat, hunt, fish, forage, buy used everything with a few exceptions and we live on much less than most. Our house is appropriately sized but we drive a truck out of necessity. It’s our one vehicle, 16 years old and works every day. We take so much shit over that damn truck from folks who “know better”. How about we fuck up the trillion dollar capitalist corpos who rape and pillage the people, land and sea for God’s Almighty Profits instead of judging our neighbors whom we don’t even know many whom are struggling to even exist.
That’s exactly the problem is they aren’t on this crusade because it’s the #1 cause. If they can tie their crusade to a bigger problem then it gains them more traction. Even though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to corporate effects on the environment. the idea that it’s anything but a power move to convert more people to their life choices is hilarious at best. Not to mention the ableist BS that it is to believe everyone can stop eating meat, but I’m not explaining that to the 20 internet doctors that will message me after this like last time I brought it up.
Exactly. Why do these articles also act like the consumer is at fault and not the giant corporations selling these things?
Because in this instance companies are just meeting consumer demands.
So far, I see lots of consumers here in the comments justifying their continued consumption of the thing in question.
I think because we all know people could just learn a new recipe and buy something else at the grocery store they were already shopping at.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
Look at how much impact that first thing has, y’all. If you convince one person not to have another child that has the same impact as convincing sixty people to go plant based.
Fighting for reproductive rights is one of the most impactful things you can do for the climate.
Save the Earth, have an abortion.
Or convince 2-3 people to give up meat. If they each convince 2-3 people who each convince 2-3 people who… ok, I’ll stop…. But the point stands. They don’t even need to stop, just reduce their meat consumption.
Right so just convince literally everyone to go vegan. Sure.
Yes, that’s exactly what I said /s
Very true but these are separate things and both can be done.
More people is more minds working on solutions.
