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Eating less meat ‘like taking 8m cars off road’
(www.bbc.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
Okay, then I might as well just keep eating as much meat as I do now though? If we have to be perfect and most people aren't going to be perfect, there's no point in even trying.
Or maybe get off your high horse, accept that humanity isn't perfect, and try to get people to eat less meat first, then worry about getting them to eat no meat at all. 50% of people doing 70% of what they should is more useful than 10% doing 100%.
That's a straw-man fallacy. Just because you're trying doesn't mean you have to be perfect right away.
I also believe that we have all reason to go completely vegan long-term. Thanks to food-science, it's not a radical shift anymore, just a slow adjustment and a little bit of discipline until you've adapted that new habit. I was a very much into meat and slowly adapted to a vegan diet, it get's easier over time until a point (for me at least) that you even prefer the vegan/vegetarian option.
I agree, but the other commenter specifically was saying that it's a case of do or do not, there is no try.
There are no baby steps to stoping animal abuse. It’s not hard to follow a 31 day challenge.
Do that first then comeback critic my “big ask”.
Each child born produces as much CO2 as 71 people going vegan for life. That ignores all the other ways humans pollute. Given that 130M babies are born each year, even if the entire planet went vegan right now (forever), it would only offset the next 324 days. If you care about the environment at all, you would focus all of your ire on the the real danger: countries with high birth rates.
However I suspect this has nothing to do with the environment for you. There is a duplicitous tactic employed by vegans which seeks to hijack the environmental movement for moral aims. People such as yourself have a moral problem with eating meat, and you know that many others care about the environment, so you attempt to wed the two. I am of course happy to be proven wrong.
Isn't the calculation misleading? It looks like it calculates the modern lifestyle CO2 and applies it to a baby. So the argument just goes, if no people, then no co2. Which is correct, although completely skipping anything about the actual underlying systemic issues for producing this much co2 in the first place.
This isn't an argument about morality or veganism, the link just seemed like a hit peace against environmentalism
Which in effect tells me that we need to be even more radical in policies to bring this to net-negative. It just doesn't help when there are a lot less people in the future as we need to get net-negative. Fewer people means also potentially less leverage here.
But I agree that we need to split between moral and environmental factors (though it doesn't help when these are often correlated).
Your effect on people opting NOT to eat less meat because you're trying to moralize them is going to outdo your personal contribution at least 10 to 1, maybe 100 to 1 if you interact with enough people.