https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/21/climate/diet-vegan-meat-emissions.html
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.
By saying "only regulations on industry can save us now", you're placing your faith on a top-down system which has already failed us.
The article claims the bottom 90% produce an average of 2.76 tCO2/year. That's still twice too much. Again, I did not the say the billionaires and corporations were not partly responsible. But what makes the billionaires and corporations rich and able to do so are the consumers paying for it.
To blame everything on someone else is choosing what's most convenient for you. It's wrong and self-centered. If you're saying "someone is doing worse than me, hence I have no reason to improve myself", then everyone but the worst won't change. The correct mentality is "I will act in such a way that if everyone were to do the same, everything would work out" (also known as the categorical imperative).
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.
Meat eating isn't just about CO2 emissions. The meat industry uses a disproportionate share of land and water as well, which are both critical to meeting our climate goals.
Take this article for example: https://www.wri.org/insights/mass-timber-wood-construction-climate-change in it they suggest that part of the reason mass timber is not a viable is because it takes away land from the meat and dairy industry - an issue that would not be there if we globally shifted to plant based diets and used less land overall.
EXACTLY. The personal carbon footprint thing was literally made up by oil industry publicists. It wasn’t part of the discussion, the blame was being laid squarely at the feet of the companies who were destroying the earth for a buck. But lo and behold, here come the publicists and the entire environmentalist movement got caught in the trap.
Hold companies responsible. Do your own thing that makes you feel better, but even if everyone in this comment section went full-on vegan, we wouldn’t put the tiniest dent in the emissions of one individual company—and not even a big company, like, a small-to-medium sized company.
Think about your grocery store. How many people that shop at that one store would have to go vegetarian before they changed their order? And how many stores would have to change their orders for the distributor to order less from the supplier? And how many different regions would need all of those people to all stop buying meat before the supplier put out less meat?
Now punish one company for what they’ve done. It’s in the news, the investors change their tactics, an entire industry could shift with one prosecution. This debate is beyond silly. It’s not individual responsibility. We didn’t cause it, it’s not on us to solve it. We couldn’t if we all tried. This entire community could go vegetarian and not even move the needle.
EXACTLY. The personal carbon footprint thing was literally made up by oil industry publicists. It wasn’t part of the discussion, the blame was being laid squarely at the feet of the companies who were destroying the earth for a buck. But lo and behold, here come the publicists and the entire environmentalist movement got caught in the trap.
Hold companies responsible. Do your own thing that makes you feel better, if everyone in this comment section went full-on vegan, we wouldn’t put a tiny dent in the emissions of one individual company—and not even a big company, like, a small-to-medium sized company.
Think about your grocery store. How many people that shop at that one store would have to go vegetarian before they changed their order? And how many stores would have to change their orders for the distributor to order less from the supplier? And how many different regions would need all of those people to all stop buying meat before the supplier put out less meat?
Now punish one company for what they’ve done. It’s in the news, the investors change their tactics, an entire industry could shift with one prosecution. This debate is beyond silly. It’s not individual responsibility. We didn’t cause it, it’s not on us to solve it. We couldn’t if we all tried. This entire community could go vegetarian and not even move the needle.
Okay let's hit the meat and fuel companies where it hurts: their wallets
Stop buying meat and fuel.
Look, I get that logic, I really do.
And do it. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going vegetarian at all. But think of how many people need to change before your not buying meat actually has an effect. Because, think about it: you don’t buy any meat, but the store you shop at doesn’t change their order. If you went full vegan today, the grocery store would still stock the exact same amount of those products.
My point isn’t that telling people to go vegetarian is wrong. Not at all, it’s a great thing.
My point is, it’s thinking way too small and it’s actively changing the tone of the conversation. And that change was literally crafted by industry publicists, drawing attention away from the true culprits. The waters are muddier.
If every article and every study that came out telling individuals how to change their lives and sacrifice in order to save the environment were, instead, about how 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions, how they had internal studies a hundred years ago about how their product was altering the environment, about how they’ve escaped change via lobbying and misinformation, the pressure wouldn’t be spread out—this conversation wouldn’t be happening. Our lifestyle changes would be exactly as important as they should be in this conversation: a nice addition. Nowhere near the focus. Instead, I see way more articles focusing on how we can all collectively change to fight the monstrous beast that is climate change. That’s telling people to fire bottle rockets at an attacking Air Force. It’s pissing in the wind. When there are white armies out there that get to write off doing shit because it’s on those people.
Again, changing your life for the good of the environment is a great thing. Doing it is admirable. But it’s also privilege-restrictive. Living an emission-reductive lifestyle is literally not possible for a lot of people. Just like being poor is expensive, being poor forces horrible carbon emission decisions on people. I haven’t crunched the numbers, (no one has) but if every privileged-enough person changed, would that be enough? Probably not. More and more people are financially restricted, and talking about eco-friendly lifestyle choices like it’s all about how much you care is incredibly unfair.
But that’s all after the fact of this being a tactic invented by the oil/gas industry to take pressure off of the few companies that literally are responsible for—and that could have a huge effect on—climate change.
This is playing marbles in a hurricane and yelling at the kid who is trying to blow the marbles out of place—is that contribution actually changing things? Sure, a little. But there is a fucking hurricane and any time spent talking about changing that kid’s behavior is time not spent talking about the hurricane.
But think of how many people need to change before your not buying meat actually has an effect
But there's every chance that I'm the tipping point between one more order of meat from the supplier, and two. That I'm the drop in the bucket that saves a cow's life. And as for fuel, well I'm definitely having an effect on the environment, because I'm avoiding the use of moles upon moles of carbon atoms. It's not big, but it's there. We need big, but we also need there. It ALL matters.
And besides, I'm not just a consequentialist. I'm a virtue ethicist too. I can honestly say that I'm not part of the problem, and that feels good. That's more worth it to me than delighting in eating the flesh of slaves. And knowing that other people are part of the problem and they think eating slaves can be justfied by some excuse, well that's disgusting and I don't like those people. It's morally bankrupt. I do not like slavers.
If every article and every study that came out telling individuals how to change their lives and sacrifice in order to save the environment were, instead, about how 100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions, how they had internal studies a hundred years ago about how their product was altering the environment, about how they’ve escaped change via lobbying and misinformation, the pressure wouldn’t be spread out—this conversation wouldn’t be happening
That's what the conversation has BEEN for the last 5-10 years. The 00s and early 10s, you're right, it was all on the big companies and they used propaganda to delay us looking at them. But today, everyone knows the government and the corporations are to blame, and does it change their votes? Not really. We are already having the conversation about big business and it's not working. And even if it did work, we don't have the same luxuries we had in the 00s. In the 00s, climate change could have been solved by big companies taking responsibility. That's not true anymore. In the 20s, it takes EVERYONE working to save the world. And since I'm part of everyone, I'm gonna work.
No you’re missing my point. The stuff we read and share has a huge effect. If instead of aiming at the very bottom, hoping to pick up enough crumbs to stop the massive tsunami heading for us, we aimed all of our energy at the top, the mood would be very different. It wouldn’t be one of despair because we are reading about the lifestyle changes we need to make, knowing we can do everything possible and there are still millions if not billions of people that don’t have the luxury of making these decisions, not to mention all of the people that could but won’t. Instead, the feeling would be righteous indignation at the true culprits.
In fact, think of all the younger people reading this study, despairing that they don’t have the power or money to make these changes. We’re devastating an entire new generation, poisoning them against the feeling that they could do something positive against climate change. That has a powerful effect. That matters.
The feeling would be very different and we could see some true action that had the hopes of changing our course. Instead, with this kind of shit, it’s a mishmash of anger, despair, bickering over our lifestyle choices (as evidenced here)…it had the exact effect intended. To alleviate the pressure on the companies so they could continue destroying the earth while we sit here feeling guilty about having to drive to work here we live or about our clothing choices, eating habits, using our goddamn a/c in record heat, etc.
We are facing down a massive, gargantuan snake. And there are still some of us talking about taking small bites from the tail up to devour it. Instead of cutting off the head. Do those small bites actually help? On the most minuscule level, yes. But that head is still mowing down on everything and everyone while we argue about how to properly and effectively bite from the tail up. Cut off the fucking head and deal with the rest when the most dangerous part is vanquished.
The ability and willingness among the people to make the necessary changes—not to mention the efficacy of those individual changes on such a massive problem—make this conversation about how to best keep your clean outfits dry on the titanic. Useless. (And as I’ve always had to do in this conversation, qualify my statements by saying that yes, going vegetarian and vegan are great, doing anything with a net positive effect on the world around you is admirable and we should encourage it. But in this context, he framing of the conversation is deadly important. And that’s my entire point.)
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.
The post to which I replied said:
So at some point you as an individual have to adapt to a vegan diet, either by choice or because there is no alternative.
Do you want to stop eating meat the moment it is outlawed?
We need both regulation to end animal farming and convince individual consumers, that they have to become vegans
If they want "regulations" to "end" animal farming then I just want to be clear that they support imprisoning people who prepare or eat meat. They went to the extreme of jail without mentioning the word jail.
Mate, it's illegal for teenagers to buy R rated movies and I've never heard of anyone going to jail for it. Why can't meat be like that?
Because in this scenario we are not just disallowing meat for some people. We are utterly outlawing the production and distribution of meat. The analogy simply does not work.
Also, if R rated movies are legal for some people, that means they're regulated. Outlawing something puts it on the unregulated black market. People will be buying unsafe meat.
If you sell outlawed videos (like snuff films or rape films) you can go to jail for that. Or even for possessing them. That's a better analogy than R-rated movies which are not actually outlawed.
But you didn't answer my question. How far are you willing foe the law to go? Do you want meat eaters to go to jail? To merely be fined? What about meat producers and distributors?
Good analogy, yeah, meat should be treated like child porn.
Outlawing something puts it on the unregulated black market. People will be buying unsafe meat.
Meat isn't addictive. If meat gives people food poisoning, then people won't eat it. That's a good thing.
Would you destroy the world for taste? I don't get where your question is coming from
I just want to be clear what your position is. You're not just encouraging veganism, you're calling on the violence of the police to beat and imprison people who eat meat.
I'm not necessarily arguing against it, I just want the clarity that you finally provided.
It's easy to suggest outlawing stuff without considering the violence necessary for outlawing things. You have clearly considered (and enthusiastically endorse) that violence.
Of course if you imprison all meat eaters but still use oil to harvest, process, and distribute all the plant based foods then the world will still burn, but that's beyond the scope of this particular issue.
Congratulations, you perfected strawmanning. I have no idea who you are replying to. There is nothing in there that I wrote.
No, I don't support jail for anyone, because it's a bad way to solve crime. I think anyone who eats meat should be sentenced to something productive like community service, or therapy to get to the bottom of why they think they have the right to kill others.
At that point you aren't being punished for the (hypothetical, in this scenario) "crime" of eating meat, but instead the crime of not obeying your sentencing.
In the same way if I refuse to pay a parking ticket they can (eventually) lock me up for noncompliance. You wouldn't make the argument that I'm being locked up for a parking ticket in the same way no one would argue you bring locked up for avoiding your community service sentence is akin to being locked up for eating meat.
Granted, a less extreme approach would just be to tax the everliving shit out of meat production and use the proceeds to mitigate the environmental impacts as well as provide assistance for the lower income families who may be otherwise disproportionately impacted. Sin taxes can be very effective if done properly.
Either way, you're just being hyperbolic.
Well then under communism, you wouldn't be invited to any of the cool parties, and you'd be refused service at most non-essential places like restaurants and gyms. People would think you're a weirdo.
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.
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