Climate activism has intensified in the past few years as the planet warms to dangerous levels, igniting more extreme heat, floods, storms and wildfires around the world.
The 1% do more damage to the planet than consumer habits could ever hope up mitigate.
If you feel better making what you see as more sustainable life choices I fully support it and more power to you. But the reality is that it doesn’t matter whether or not we eat meat, sort your recycling, or bring our canvas bags to the grocery store.
If you change the mind of one billionaire and you’ll have reached the same result as a million of ordinary people. But he’s got you convinced your mission is to punch down.
You mean the half of humanity without clean water, reliable electricity, and certainly no Internet emits less CO2 than the top 10% (630M!) wealthiest people in the entire world? There are not 630M Billionaires. There are not even 630M Millionaires. An income of $80-100k puts you at 10% worldwide.
Sure, go right ahead. Tell the family with an income of $80k that they need to cut out their use of private jets and mega yachts. That’ll fix climate change right up.
The polluting corporations all sell consumer goods.
and we NEED to demand that they are made using green energy. The price incentives offered by the US government now are so fucking insane that the only thing keeping these companies from making a change is whatever fossil companies can offer them.
Eat this food that’s made in a way that causes a lot of environmental problems
Eat this food that’s made by the same company, except it claims it’s vegan, hides the fact it’s the same company by using 10 middle-men, but has great marketing
Eat this actually environmentally friendly food. Wait, scratch that, you’re too poor to actually eat this regularly
We can all adopt a plant based diet which will absolutely slow change as well as cost less than a diet that involves meat.
Found the vegan.
Some people need to eat meat: Like my room mate who has mass cell activation.
Also many indigenous peoples have dishes that involve meat. They are not apart of this problem.
Frankly there are a lot of reason to eat meat.
If I go out and shoot my own deer and butcher it and cook it this does not effect the climate the same way as buying beef of the shelf.
And while beef is particularly resource and land intensive so are many vegetables you see at grocery stores.
Do you eat avocados? Because most avocados grown in mexico are done under control by violent cartels.
Many people probably should eat less meat. But acting like EVRYONE can do this is wrong on many fronts.
If you want to be a vegetarian please do. But lets stop acting like its a real solution to climate change or even a option for many people. It isnt.
I gotta be honest, this comes across more like excuses to not make changes or even admit your part. I’m not a vegetarian myself, but I’m under no delusions that my meal preferences aren’t bad for the environment and have ethical concerns. I eat meat anyway because honestly, I just like the taste and struggle to give that up. But I fully support those who can give it up and want to see lab grown meat be a viable replacement.
Like your roommate, nobody is saying literally everyone has to stop eating meat full stop. If you have a medical need, obviously keep eating meat. Similarly, reducing how much meat you eat is still an improvement. You don’t have to go 100% vegetarian.
Similarly, if indigenous folks can sustainably eat meat, cool. But most people simply aren’t doing that. And are you aware of why meat is so bad for the environment? I mean this 100% seriously: cow farts. Raising livestock ethically only addresses the moral problems with animal husbandry. This thread is about environmental problems. Land intensiveness doesn’t actually matter that much. The amount of land used isn’t the problem.
The avocados thing isn’t related to environment. Again, I gotta be honest here, this feels like an attempt at a “gotcha”. I get it. I struggled with the idea that my own consumption (which again, I still do) is bad for the environment. Plus I could never kill an animal myself. I can only eat meat because I emotionally separate myself from it. It’s a hard reality to face and I’m still not really comfortable with it. But we can’t act like “oh, you eat a bad thing, so I’m okay to do different bad things” is a good reasoning.
Don’t take things literally when someone says “we should all do X”. That’s not a personal attack on you if you don’t. That’s just how we talk. We say “everyone should watch the new Barbie movie because it’s really great” but I don’t actually mean literally every single human needs to watch it.
Changing what we feed cows from like corn by-products to barley and hops by-products reduces this problem greatly. But of course the scale isn’t big enough.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, 70 miles?! That’s egregious even for a car commute! Even without doing the math, I’m pretty sure that your environmental savings from not eating meat is a rounding error compared to that kind of clown car habit.
If you can’t find a home closer to work, you need to find a new job closer to home. Something’s got to give, if not for the planet then at least for your own sake!
Sure, sure. Whatever makes you sleep at night and keeps your overlords happy. Seriously, stop putting down your fellow men and start punching upwards. They are the problem, not people who eat meat.
But who is buying the goods and services these corporations produce? Mysterious figures in the night, or humans?
Greenwashing is a result of a change in consumer desire, not 100% what was wanted but a change non the less. If the people buying goods actually think before they buy and don’t just look at the lowest priced item then change will happen.
Many times people have no choice but to buy those goods due to years of monopolistic practices
actually think before they buy and don’t just look at the lowest priced item then change will happen.
When the choice is between saving the planet and eating and being able to afford rent, you can’t possibly blame someone for choosing the cheaper option.
[Edit] also want to add that while I’m still eating meat, I fully support vegetarianism.
I see this argument a lot about choosing between saving the planet and eating and affording rent. Of course that person is barely surviving they aren’t making choices for their food. The same can not be said for the middle class and up.
To instantly dismiss any argument that you as a person don’t have any responsibility in this, no matter how small, is ludicrous. We should all be doing all we can. Not blaming corporations but then still buying their products, eating their fast food, etc. Blame a corporation and then do something about it, like avoiding nestle products even if it means going without, especially for non essential items.
The demographic that can afford to make those changes, the middle class as you stated, have been a shrinking for decades due to wealth consolidation. They don’t make up the majority of people.
I’m not absolving any one person, I’m saying their impact is so minimal that combined with every other individual they wouldn’t come close to corporate impact so it’s stupid to single them out.
Not to mention, many people in that demographic are time-poor, even if they ostensibly have the money. It’s not like middle class people still have a stay at home parent to do all this emotional labor.
I’ve been flexitarian for decades, before it was a term. But it takes a lot more thought and time to eat healthy without animal products.
Of course that person is barely surviving they aren’t making choices for their food. The same can not be said for the middle class and up.
There is no “middle class.” There is only the working class, and the entire thing falls into that “barely surviving” category.
Blame a corporation and then do something about it, like avoiding nestle products even if it means going without, especially for non essential items.
Not only do boycotts not work, advocating for them is almost a bad thing because it only distracts people from advocating for the remedy that does work: enforcing antitrust law.
And that brings me to my main point, which is that both “blame corporations” and “blame consumers” are overly simplistic and wrong. The real problem is the systems that create the circumstances that both the corporations and the consumers are operating in. We should really be asking ourselves questions like this:
Why is cheap food so often unsustainable, despite the fact that “sustainable” basically means “least costly” in the long run, by definition? The answer is that there’s a whole pile of subsidies and externalities that mean the full cost of the unsustainable food is being borne by somebody other than either the consumers or proverbial “big ag.”
Why do even people who are “barely surviving” so often end up driving to buy fast food? The answer isn’t just that they “can’t cook” or “don’t have time” or whatever; there are deeper reasons for it. They don’t know how to cook because the public school system seems to have mostly stopped offering home ec class. They don’t have time because the zoning code forces their home to be far away from both their job and their grocery store, which not only robs them of the time spent making car trips between them the money spent owning a car in the first place, but also artificially incentivizes businesses with drive-throughs.
Of course, now you might think I’m simplistically trying to blame the government, but nope. Why’d the zoning code get written the way it was? Well, that’s for a whole bunch of reasons (most of them racist, BTW), but among them was the influence of corporate entities like Standard Oil and GM.
So now, taking all that shit I just wrote into consideration, what’s the bottom line? The bottom line is that the systems have to be changed, and that takes action from individuals and corporations and government – but mostly the latter, not because it’s the government’s “fault” but because government has the power to change laws. But even then, it’s not heavy-handed stuff like prohibiting eating meat or prohibiting driving; it’s stuff like ending subsidies, internalizing externalities (that’s what a carbon tax is for, BTW), and ending the failed Suburban Experiment by abolishing things like low-density zoning restrictions so that people can pop into the store for groceries on their walk home from work instead of having to make an onerous car trip to go “grocery shopping” or resorting to fast food.
The “cheapest” or easiest option has to become the most sustainable option, such that people freely choose it without being coerced. That’s the only way any real change will ever happen.
This took me a while to digest, but thanks for the thorough answer.
I agree that silly subsidies should be abolished and climate friendly subsidies should be enacted worldwide. However looking from the American lens you are talking in the change seems almost impossible. Democracy worldwide has been corrupted America being the largest example of this with “lobbyists”. How are these uneducated, time poor, malnutritioned people meant to make any change? Maybe I just have my doom and gloom face on today.
In Australia we can barely stop our government from cutting down ancient forests to make woodchips. Let alone the 3 new coal mines they opened, and this is the climate concious party.
Looking at all that I feel making personal changes is the only way I can personally stay motivated. At least I am doing what I can in the face of this seemingly impossible task.
Food production is 35% of global greenhouse gases. Meat accounts for 60% of the emissions from food production. So yeah, if we cut global meat consumption in half it would absolutely make a dent.
Blaming the corporations is just a convenient way of putting the responsibility on somebody else. You can’t eat beef and then blame the farmer for the emissions caused by cattle production. You can’t drive a big truck and then blame the oil companies for the emissions. You can’t fly around the world and then blame the airlines. Corporations are selling stuff to people. Their emissions look huge because they’re the aggregate emissions of millions of people.
The entire system of food production, such as the use of farming machinery, spraying of fertilizer and transportation of products, causes 17.3bn metric tonnes of greenhouse gases a year, according to the research. This enormous release of gases that fuel the climate crisis is more than double the entire emissions of the US and represents 35% of all global emissions, researchers said.
In case you’re curious about plants, they’re actually only 29%:
The use of cows, pigs and other animals for food, as well as livestock feed, is responsible for 57% of all food production emissions, the research found, with 29% coming from the cultivation of plant-based foods. The rest comes from other uses of land, such as for cotton or rubber. Beef alone accounts for a quarter of emissions produced by raising and growing food.
I’m not blaming the farmer, I’m blaming the megacorps that have control over the food supply. I’m blaming the lobbyists and corrupt politicians who push deregulation of industry.
I’m blaming the 1% whose hoarding has left so many people struggling, forcing them to work against their own best interest.
I said it in another comment, but you can’t blame someone for choosing to pay rent instead of buying eco-friendly products.
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You fell for the propaganda.
The 1% do more damage to the planet than consumer habits could ever hope up mitigate.
If you feel better making what you see as more sustainable life choices I fully support it and more power to you. But the reality is that it doesn’t matter whether or not we eat meat, sort your recycling, or bring our canvas bags to the grocery store.
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It’s understandable that you are overestimating your own impact.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-percent-more-double-emissions-poorest-half-humanity
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/08/billionaires-emit-a-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-than-the-average-person-oxfam.html
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If you change the mind of one billionaire and you’ll have reached the same result as a million of ordinary people. But he’s got you convinced your mission is to punch down.
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Lol okay chump
You mean the half of humanity without clean water, reliable electricity, and certainly no Internet emits less CO2 than the top 10% (630M!) wealthiest people in the entire world? There are not 630M Billionaires. There are not even 630M Millionaires. An income of $80-100k puts you at 10% worldwide.
Sure, go right ahead. Tell the family with an income of $80k that they need to cut out their use of private jets and mega yachts. That’ll fix climate change right up.
and we NEED to demand that they are made using green energy. The price incentives offered by the US government now are so fucking insane that the only thing keeping these companies from making a change is whatever fossil companies can offer them.
Ok, I’ll give you a choice!
What great choices you have!
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what your suggesting takes time and equipment (and some experience with seasoning). the time alone can make it cost-prohibitive.
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many people still cannot afford it, no matter how your arrange the facts.
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money isn’t the only cost, there is also the matter of time. no amount of money saving would add more time to my day.
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Found the vegan.
Some people need to eat meat: Like my room mate who has mass cell activation.
Also many indigenous peoples have dishes that involve meat. They are not apart of this problem.
Frankly there are a lot of reason to eat meat. If I go out and shoot my own deer and butcher it and cook it this does not effect the climate the same way as buying beef of the shelf.
And while beef is particularly resource and land intensive so are many vegetables you see at grocery stores.
Do you eat avocados? Because most avocados grown in mexico are done under control by violent cartels.
Many people probably should eat less meat. But acting like EVRYONE can do this is wrong on many fronts.
If you want to be a vegetarian please do. But lets stop acting like its a real solution to climate change or even a option for many people. It isnt.
I gotta be honest, this comes across more like excuses to not make changes or even admit your part. I’m not a vegetarian myself, but I’m under no delusions that my meal preferences aren’t bad for the environment and have ethical concerns. I eat meat anyway because honestly, I just like the taste and struggle to give that up. But I fully support those who can give it up and want to see lab grown meat be a viable replacement.
Like your roommate, nobody is saying literally everyone has to stop eating meat full stop. If you have a medical need, obviously keep eating meat. Similarly, reducing how much meat you eat is still an improvement. You don’t have to go 100% vegetarian.
Similarly, if indigenous folks can sustainably eat meat, cool. But most people simply aren’t doing that. And are you aware of why meat is so bad for the environment? I mean this 100% seriously: cow farts. Raising livestock ethically only addresses the moral problems with animal husbandry. This thread is about environmental problems. Land intensiveness doesn’t actually matter that much. The amount of land used isn’t the problem.
The avocados thing isn’t related to environment. Again, I gotta be honest here, this feels like an attempt at a “gotcha”. I get it. I struggled with the idea that my own consumption (which again, I still do) is bad for the environment. Plus I could never kill an animal myself. I can only eat meat because I emotionally separate myself from it. It’s a hard reality to face and I’m still not really comfortable with it. But we can’t act like “oh, you eat a bad thing, so I’m okay to do different bad things” is a good reasoning.
Don’t take things literally when someone says “we should all do X”. That’s not a personal attack on you if you don’t. That’s just how we talk. We say “everyone should watch the new Barbie movie because it’s really great” but I don’t actually mean literally every single human needs to watch it.
Changing what we feed cows from like corn by-products to barley and hops by-products reduces this problem greatly. But of course the scale isn’t big enough.
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there is something you can do, but being vegan doesn’t help.
Bullshit. Do you drive a car? You can definitely change that!
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Jesus tap-dancing Christ, 70 miles?! That’s egregious even for a car commute! Even without doing the math, I’m pretty sure that your environmental savings from not eating meat is a rounding error compared to that kind of clown car habit.
If you can’t find a home closer to work, you need to find a new job closer to home. Something’s got to give, if not for the planet then at least for your own sake!
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That’s a myth, plant based diet won’t change shit.
Half the world could switch to a plant-based diet and it would barely make a dent
Our part is teeny tiny compared to corporations
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It won’t. Meat production has almost no impact. Switch to plant based diet will have bigger impact.
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Sure, sure. Whatever makes you sleep at night and keeps your overlords happy. Seriously, stop putting down your fellow men and start punching upwards. They are the problem, not people who eat meat.
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You sound really young
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Maybe so. Like I said in another comment, I fully support you making the choices that support your principles. It’s genuinely admirable.
But who is buying the goods and services these corporations produce? Mysterious figures in the night, or humans?
Greenwashing is a result of a change in consumer desire, not 100% what was wanted but a change non the less. If the people buying goods actually think before they buy and don’t just look at the lowest priced item then change will happen.
Many times people have no choice but to buy those goods due to years of monopolistic practices
When the choice is between saving the planet and eating and being able to afford rent, you can’t possibly blame someone for choosing the cheaper option.
[Edit] also want to add that while I’m still eating meat, I fully support vegetarianism.
I see this argument a lot about choosing between saving the planet and eating and affording rent. Of course that person is barely surviving they aren’t making choices for their food. The same can not be said for the middle class and up.
To instantly dismiss any argument that you as a person don’t have any responsibility in this, no matter how small, is ludicrous. We should all be doing all we can. Not blaming corporations but then still buying their products, eating their fast food, etc. Blame a corporation and then do something about it, like avoiding nestle products even if it means going without, especially for non essential items.
The demographic that can afford to make those changes, the middle class as you stated, have been a shrinking for decades due to wealth consolidation. They don’t make up the majority of people.
I’m not absolving any one person, I’m saying their impact is so minimal that combined with every other individual they wouldn’t come close to corporate impact so it’s stupid to single them out.
Not to mention, many people in that demographic are time-poor, even if they ostensibly have the money. It’s not like middle class people still have a stay at home parent to do all this emotional labor.
I’ve been flexitarian for decades, before it was a term. But it takes a lot more thought and time to eat healthy without animal products.
deleted by creator
There is no “middle class.” There is only the working class, and the entire thing falls into that “barely surviving” category.
Not only do boycotts not work, advocating for them is almost a bad thing because it only distracts people from advocating for the remedy that does work: enforcing antitrust law.
And that brings me to my main point, which is that both “blame corporations” and “blame consumers” are overly simplistic and wrong. The real problem is the systems that create the circumstances that both the corporations and the consumers are operating in. We should really be asking ourselves questions like this:
Why is cheap food so often unsustainable, despite the fact that “sustainable” basically means “least costly” in the long run, by definition? The answer is that there’s a whole pile of subsidies and externalities that mean the full cost of the unsustainable food is being borne by somebody other than either the consumers or proverbial “big ag.”
Why do even people who are “barely surviving” so often end up driving to buy fast food? The answer isn’t just that they “can’t cook” or “don’t have time” or whatever; there are deeper reasons for it. They don’t know how to cook because the public school system seems to have mostly stopped offering home ec class. They don’t have time because the zoning code forces their home to be far away from both their job and their grocery store, which not only robs them of the time spent making car trips between them the money spent owning a car in the first place, but also artificially incentivizes businesses with drive-throughs.
Of course, now you might think I’m simplistically trying to blame the government, but nope. Why’d the zoning code get written the way it was? Well, that’s for a whole bunch of reasons (most of them racist, BTW), but among them was the influence of corporate entities like Standard Oil and GM.
So now, taking all that shit I just wrote into consideration, what’s the bottom line? The bottom line is that the systems have to be changed, and that takes action from individuals and corporations and government – but mostly the latter, not because it’s the government’s “fault” but because government has the power to change laws. But even then, it’s not heavy-handed stuff like prohibiting eating meat or prohibiting driving; it’s stuff like ending subsidies, internalizing externalities (that’s what a carbon tax is for, BTW), and ending the failed Suburban Experiment by abolishing things like low-density zoning restrictions so that people can pop into the store for groceries on their walk home from work instead of having to make an onerous car trip to go “grocery shopping” or resorting to fast food.
The “cheapest” or easiest option has to become the most sustainable option, such that people freely choose it without being coerced. That’s the only way any real change will ever happen.
This took me a while to digest, but thanks for the thorough answer.
I agree that silly subsidies should be abolished and climate friendly subsidies should be enacted worldwide. However looking from the American lens you are talking in the change seems almost impossible. Democracy worldwide has been corrupted America being the largest example of this with “lobbyists”. How are these uneducated, time poor, malnutritioned people meant to make any change? Maybe I just have my doom and gloom face on today.
In Australia we can barely stop our government from cutting down ancient forests to make woodchips. Let alone the 3 new coal mines they opened, and this is the climate concious party.
Looking at all that I feel making personal changes is the only way I can personally stay motivated. At least I am doing what I can in the face of this seemingly impossible task.
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Food production is 35% of global greenhouse gases. Meat accounts for 60% of the emissions from food production. So yeah, if we cut global meat consumption in half it would absolutely make a dent.
Blaming the corporations is just a convenient way of putting the responsibility on somebody else. You can’t eat beef and then blame the farmer for the emissions caused by cattle production. You can’t drive a big truck and then blame the oil companies for the emissions. You can’t fly around the world and then blame the airlines. Corporations are selling stuff to people. Their emissions look huge because they’re the aggregate emissions of millions of people.
Meat does NOT account for 60% of food production.
They said emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-greenhouses-gases-food-production-study
As for the rest of what they said:
In case you’re curious about plants, they’re actually only 29%:
What this fails to account for is that a whole lot of land that produces beef can’t produce edible vegetables. It’s not so easy as flipping a switch.
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I’m not blaming the farmer, I’m blaming the megacorps that have control over the food supply. I’m blaming the lobbyists and corrupt politicians who push deregulation of industry.
I’m blaming the 1% whose hoarding has left so many people struggling, forcing them to work against their own best interest.
I said it in another comment, but you can’t blame someone for choosing to pay rent instead of buying eco-friendly products.
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