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Yes, go vegan and stop driving if you actually want to change your impact.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
And if not vegan then at least not beef
Beef is 10x more carbon intensive than pork
Yet pigs are way more intelligent than cows and are usually kept in even worse conditions. So be aware that you sacrifice the little wellbeing of some animals for that.
Agreed, but I'm talking within the context of climate change
I get that and it may be that someone decides that this is a worthy trade-off. I'm not gonna judge, we all have to do moral loopedy loops all the time to exist in the world we exist in, just wanted to point out that there is a loopedy loop to be found in this ;)
Going fully vegan isn't hard tho :)
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Most people simply arent going to go vegan, and many need to take baby steps toward it. Cutting out beef is a great first step.
But let's also not make it seem more difficult than it is, it's very easy to avoid animal products.
Shouting "BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO IT ALL THE WAY" every time veganism is brought up is a bit silly.
It's really not these days, but it is much easier if people start at least reducing. It is also much more approachable to people still used to animal products. It is a natural transition and still helps.
Or drive electric, and minimise your meat consumption - this is much more feasible.
I don't drive and live in one of the cities with the best public transportation in the world, but am still looking to get a car because public transport is still terrible. E.g. if you need to pick up or return something, or to take one of my friends to work who works outside the city and at night.
A car is required to live freely, otherwise you're just trapped in cities.
What we need is easily accessible rental cars for when we really need them. Private cars and jets should never have been a thing...
Maybe with self-driving cars it'll be more doable as the cars can drive themselves to-and-from their hubs and charging point, etc.
But we're still a while away from that being widely achievable.
In Europe the roads and parking are nightmare in most places, so I'm not really a huge fan of it, but it's really the only option for freedom for the foreseeable future.
Sadly the likeliest outcome will just be governments continuing to make it more and more expensive to get a licence, own and insure a car, drive in cities or on motorways, etc. until it becomes the reserve of the wealthy again, just like they're steadily doing with air fares too (increasing air fuel duty whilst exempting private jets). So the rich can drive their SUVs and private jets whilst the working class are trapped in overcrowded cities, in their tiny pod apartments eating bugs all in the name of the environment.
Much better is to eliminate the need for a car. Good public transport would make a massive difference.
If you had 100% rentals, the amount of cars on the road stays the same because everyone needs the at the same rush hours.
We should be incentivizing work from home. E.g. require an extra 1 hour of pay per for any employee that needs to be on site. We’d soon see how essential offices are.
The average British person emits 76 times more CO2 than the offset of one person going vegan for life. Even if everyone on the planet went vegan today, forever, their sacrifice would be undone by the number of new babies born in a single year, globally. Veganism isn’t going to solve climate change. It’s not even going to make a dent. We should be focusing on practical, real measures to reduce global CO2 output. For example, the move from coal to LNG halves CO2 output. This transition alone is an order of magnitude more impactful than the entire world going vegan for life. If you care about climate change you’ll invest your limited time and energy where it counts.
You can easily be vegan while advocating for other change like less coal.
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
Sorry, but major lifestyle changes are not "easy." It's "easy" to lose weight, and yet two thirds of Americans can't do it. I like eating meat but would be willing to give it up if the juice were worth the squeeze. It's not. Instead of spending your time telling people to make major lifestyle changes with almost zero impact to the climate, why aren't you focusing on real, sustainable solutions?
FYI the top four metrics in the image you linked are for agriculture, not meat production alone. Agriculture includes the production of plants, fruits, and grains. It's all food production.
It really isn't hard, buying the plant based products instead of the animal ones is easy.
I find it very difficult. It appears that what you find easy and what others find easy are not the same.
What's hard about choosing the plant based option in the grocery store or restaurant?
It's literally just buying a different product.
I like meat a lot. Not eating meat will significantly degrade my standard of living.
You'd be surprised how many vegans said that exact same thing.. and then went vegan.
I used to eat meat too and know it's tasty but you're probably not as addicted to it as you think.
Plant based food can be just as tasty and knowing your food isn't harming animals or the planet is great.
Are your tastebuds really more important than the lives of other animals and the health of our planet?
I appreciate the affirmations but I've spent enough years on this planet, and attempted various diets enough times, to know what I like and do not like. I like meat. Many people like meat.
My tastebuds are definitely more important than the almost zero impact I have explained such a diet has on the planet. You slipped up a bit there and fell into ethical concerns. Remember, this is a discussion about the impact meat has on the environment. Or is your argument not in fact about the environment at all?
How is reducing farmland from 4 to 1 billion hectares zero impact?
Animal agriculture is incredible inefficient and wasteful.
In the context of our discussion, it has minimal impact on climate change. The scope of harm is really limited to deforestation, but this has minimal impact on CO2 emissions as a proportion of all other output.