Reducing meat/dairy consumption seems to be one of the easiest changes we can make to lower GHG output, since it doesn’t require major infrastructure changes.
But it also means changing habits, which is hard for other reasons.
It’s also going to be hard to convince the hardcore carnivores: just 12% of the population eat over half the beef in the US.
Are you saying if we eat the hardcore carnivores, the job is done, easy peasy?
It’s a lot harder to drop carbs out of my diet but I have to. I let any of them in my body and now I’m dying again woo! Yall can do what you want but I will find a source of animal products if I have to eat the local quails and their eggs. When you can’t eat legumes or tubers or fruit or grains, you’d be better off starving to death if you can’t even have a steak with your green beans. I just wish I weren’t addicted to carbs. I need to get back on keto to get my body back again… 😩
I have Coeliac’s and things with gluten are out for me unless I want a lot of misery for a couple of days (which sucks because I love bread). This cuts out a lot of things for me. I also typically do a very low-carb diet because, for whatever reason, it vastly improves my mood and how my body feels.
That said, I am moving to grow a lot more of my own food with plans to have my own chickens for eggs and eventually raising most of the meat my wife and I consume. The rest we plan on sourcing from local hunters (wild boar and overpopulated deer are big issues where we’re moving) and farmers We also eat a lot of seafood, so probably less land-based meat than most already (definitely less than when I lived in the US).
I think it is higher, the current food production is something like 25% of the global GHG emissions, 2/3 are from the animal industry. Besides the direct impact there is less land use and the opportunity to re-nature large areas.
So we decrease it from 13% of global to 10%? Not much of a dent in view of the 87% from fossil fuel use 🤷🏽♂️ but let’s not mention that
“Globally, the largest share of humanity’s CO2 emissions stems from burning fossil fuels, which made up about 87% of CO2 emissions over the past 20 years. Land-use emissions are responsible for the remaining 13%.” https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-land-use-drives-co2-emissions-around-the-world/
Seriously. If everyone on earth stopped eating meat tomorrow, we would still be just as fucked as we are now.
And do we expect the meat industry to just disappear? They have lots of land and equipment that they will try to use in other ways. Maybe they’ll even decide to drill for oil on their land.
Even if we could cut all fossil fuels, the animal industry would push us over the Paris goal. Changing what we eat is a option we all have but let’s not mention that
Cutting down on billionaires would do a lot more for the environment
Both things can be true at the same time.
Billionaires / the 1% / whatever category of rich assholes you choose obviously use much more resources than “the common man”. Still, if we, as humanity, do not change how and what we consume, cutting what the rich use would not even remotely be enough.
If I cut my meat by 75% can I keep my dairy at only a 25% cut? I need cheese more than meat.
