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.
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
##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).
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.
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.
Would you support enforced veganism, and jailing anybody who eats or prepares meat?
Would you destroy the world for taste? I don’t get where your question is coming from
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.
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.
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.
Shoutout for NYT for not rightly blaming the corporations and instead passing the responsibility to the poor people