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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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
I don't think it's worth fighting the meat industry when the other big Corp companies are harming the ecosystem far heavier. The Argicultural industry is 4th largest, so I think main efforts should be regulating big power, manufactoring sector or the oil sector honestly.
41% of the land in the US is used for meat production, and 1/3rd globally. The Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned for cattle farming. Animal agriculture means habitat destruction and is a large part of why 21 species were declared extinct in the US this past year. We can and must fight them both.
But it's the marginal land, where food plants can't grow or where it's too steep for mechanical harvesters to work
If you want to hit climate targets, it's extremely important
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
you misunderstand, what I'm saying is I think that it's a wasted effort to split your concentration the way it is being done, the agricultural industry is going to be one of the most resistant changes out there, the other Industries such as manufacturing and oil, you have your lesser groups that are not going to be impacted so it's going to be fairly easy to gain support for those groups, however with the agriculture industry there is a vast more people that are going to be out to disregard the entire study because they won't want to change their lifestyle. You can have all the statistics in the world however at the end of the day those deciding actors are generally decided by the general public who isn't going to bother looking at complicated statistics. So therefore it would be a better move to go towards the path of least resistance which is going to be the other top emitters. My opinion is that if reducing the top three emitters somehow makes it so you don't hit your climate goal, the climate goal isn't going to be feasible to hit in the first place.
This isn't me saying that it shouldn't happen I'm just saying that the changes posted won't happen all at once and likely won't happen at all if too many Focus points are attempted at once.
I don't think the goal is feasible, but I would love to be proven wrong
There already is momentum in the right direction in many countries such as Germany. I don't think it's a hopeless fight at all
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23273338/germany-less-meat-plant-based-vegan-vegetarian-flexitarian
The global food systems biggest carbon source is from fertiliser production
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
Something something tobacco New Zealand
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.
You know who opposes livestock subsidies? Cattle ranchers. You know why? Because they pay for most of them.
A lot of people don't realize what's up with the livestock subsidies, and just treat them as a boogeyman. The biggest monsters are usually the feed subsidy and the LIP. The LIP is just like FEMA for food, and it applies to all farms to prevent disasters cutting off our food supply. The feed subsidy, otoh, is truly a monster. It's mostly funded by a tax levied on farmers when they put their livestock up for wholesale. Think of it as an "origination fee" or a VAT tax. For red tape reasons, virtually all of it goes to providing discounted or free feed to a few large corporations. You know, like Tyson.
Ask any farmer who owns a few cows. Killing the feed subsidy would be a massive windfall for local animal agriculture.
Of course, since they're the ones paying for it, people who discover it's not really hitting their own tax dollars stop complaining about it and that's why it never changes.
>Saving the climate is not going to be done by guilting consumers into changing individual consumption habits.
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