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Eating less meat ‘like taking 8m cars off road’
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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I mean, I’m 90% veg for environmental reasons mostly. But every time we share this narrative that the effort needs to be on us while the true culprits are literally upping their consumption is fucking sick. Don’t guilt people for not doing 1% of what is needed while the people/corpos doing the other 99% are pushing this “personal responsibility” narrative and literally created the language to deflect blame. We should be way more upset and spend 20000x the effort shaming and shutting down those organizations.
It doesn't matter if you put 2000x your effort into something if it has no effect. If you spend all your day shaming these corporations on lemmy that won't do anything. So the question should be what actions can make an effect?
Protests don't really do much. Electoral politics, at least here in the u.s. , are completely captured by these corporations and will never truly challenge them. I doubt what just happened in NYC is a valid tactic either. A revolution or even just a general strike is pretty much out of the picture right now.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them. The meat industry is burning the Amazon and emitting tons of methane, boycott them and eat less / no meat. The fossil fuel industry is lobbying congress to deny climate change while increasing production and emitting more every year, boycott them and buy less gas by driving less or taking public transit.
In this capitalist hellscape the only real choice we have is of consumption, and choosing what to consume and more importantly what not to consume is the only real way we can effect the system.
Sorry to say this, but these boycotts rarely do anything. If enough people would boycott some company, or business practice to matter only a little bit, then there also would be enough people to effect politics to try to get better regulation in place, via electoralism, direct action of just getting actively involved in politics.
" If enough people boycott the meat industry, then it's enough to cause political change." I'm not seeing a downside here to doing something versus not doing something.
I wouldn't worry much about the "I'm doing X more to offset you doing Y!" crowd. Probably a few act like that but firstly they'll say it to everyone they don't like (and one meat eater eating 2x meat can't feasibly offset more than one vegan, so their impact is limited) and secondly most of them are just ragebaiting.
The same people post shit like "omg getting a Starbucks!!!!" under videos calling for boycotts due to Gaza.
I’m definitely not worried about the people saying they’ll spite-eat more meat. I’m talking about us putting so much effort into shaming people for not going veg—so I’m talking about the opposite.
The blame isn’t at our feet. It’s not on us. That’s the companies literally pitting us against each other, baiting us into shaming other .00002% contributors to climate change while they, the true 99.99998% culprits, increase their output and greenwash their literal mass murder crimes.
Your numbers are way off here. (https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/research-report-carbon-inequality-era.pdf ) in 2025, the top 1% only accounted for 15% of global emissions. The rest are still generated by the general public. Sure, per person, the richest 1% have a disproportionally higher impact, but on a large scale, they dont matter that much.
Pushing this narrative takes the incentive of reducing your own impact away.
That study doesn’t account for what their money and influence does. These people use their money to, sure, fly private jets and heat massive houses and drive big luxury cars and eat exotic foods. But they also use it to prop up massive businesses, push for outsourcing, drill, mine. We don’t. That’s what I’m talking about.
That is what needs to change. And that isn’t quantified. It can’t be. But that is insurmountable.
But then you look at things like this and we can start to understand how massive the imbalance is.
They dont drill and mine for fun. They do it because people consume their products. Sure, they do a lot of manipulating and lobbying to ensure that doesnt change, but the decision stilllies with the consumer.
'I wont change my behaviour because the rich manipulate us not to change our behaviour so the system has to change' will never bring any change.
Politics does not know what inside the populations heads. They wouldnt know if 90% of the population wants automobile companies banned when everyone is still using cars. Sure, there are questionnaires and statistics but thats not what drives politics. Its where the moneys at.
I think you missed the part where I said I have changed my behavior to be kinder to the environment. I don’t drive, I ride my bike most places or use PT, I rarely eat meat, I don’t order things online, especially from Amazon and major retailers like that. Doing what we can is always great.
My entire point is that we are responsible for 20% of emissions and massive corporations are responsible for 80%. And then when you factor in the fact that the richest 1% account for an inordinate amount of individual emissions—I mean, it feels like you’re going way out of your way to throw yourself over the puddle of blame so the poor, poor wealthy elite don’t get their farragamo loafers a little damp.
No shit companies need customers, but that just feels so incredibly disingenuous of an excuse when you factor in the decades—centuries of lobbying, covering scientific reports on the subject, recklessness with environmental safety to save a few thousand dollars, the endless outsourcing to bring profits up, the endless greenwashing.
It’s pretty goddamn tough to shield your eyes from the truth that the wealthiest among us are largely responsible for the current climate catastrophe, but you’re somehow finding a way and don’t see how ridiculous it is to throw yourself between the truth and them.
I absolutely agree with you. Meat is something that has a big impact on the climate and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control. If society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint. However, this is nothing that is possible without the government supporting this change.
this isn't causal
I may have articulated myself badly. What I mean is the following: If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions. If I now switch to only 500g of higher quality meat the amount of CO2 emissions goes down to about 1/2x(I know this isn't exactly true, due to the lost efficiency, but for bigger reductions its absolutely true, that the amount if CO2 you emitted goes down).
I don't think that's true. those emissions happen regardless of whether you eat it. they happen regardless of whether you buy it.
Source please.
Your analysis undermines genuine science by disregarding the reduction in demand which reduces the supply and forming a data set with a sample of 1.
this isn't causal
it's obvious that the emissions happen before you decide whether to purchase a product. that's how linear time works.
didn't you try that?
Sure, it's more than just encouraging people to drop meat and dairy. It's also voting for people who will make it financially impossible for those industries to continue.