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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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OK, but what if instead of going vegan, I just don't have kids. Because adding more people to the world also creates more greenhouse gasses.
Instead of going vegan or not having kids, I died when I was 5. Because living also creates more greenhouse gasses.
In fact, having a small footprint is just a matter of choosing how miserable you're willing to make your life.
Unfortunately the Earth cannot sustainably support so many people living COMFORTABLY, and eating WHATEVER WE LIKE. The more people, the more miserable is the globally sustainable way of life.
Curbing population growth - not Thanos-like, but through education and availability of contraceptive methods - is the only way we can all have the cake (and the meat) and eat it.
Many wealthy countries have their population declining. Maybe if we get to the same level of wealthiness everywhere, less people would engage in procreation.
In any case, if we just do nothing and the doomsday evangelists are even nearly right, extreme weather, plage and famine caused by climate change will indeed curb the population. Eventually it reaches equilibrium.
In this case, the faster we get to the edge of the abyss, the quicker the situation will solve itself.
In many areas yes, but not when it comes to food. A plant based diet is in no way miserable. There are still too many places with bad kitchens making it seem that way, but that's just a lack of skill on their part.
I'd say my food experience rather became less miserable when I stopped eating meat, and my footprint decreased by a lot.
If you open the window to ventilate for 20 minutes that's different from replacing the air in your room in 2 nanoseconds. The violent shockwave of the latter will probably damage your stuff and harm your health.
Similarly, the speed of climate change matters a lot. It is required for plants and animals to migrate and adapt, for people to migrate and adapt, for infrastructure to be built. It makes all the difference between a devastating blow and adaptation, while the reached equilibrium is the same in both cases.
How bout both? :)
What if you don't have kids and just make an effort to reduce intake of animal products knowing it contributes to global collapse and also represents a modern holocaust.
Animal products don't have to be as all or nothing as having kids.
That moment when your veganism goes so hard you commit a hate crime on the internet implicitly comparing Jews to cattle
Edit: I'm from Poland, the country where most of the Holocaust happened - this is where the Jewish population was the highest and where Germans build their death camps. We read about it extensively at school, including eyewitness accounts describing the atrocities involved in this horrific campaign of human extermination, from the home of the Jew, to the ghetto, to the transport train, to the camp, to the gas chamber and to the furnace. Many of us heard those stories from our grandparents, of their neighbors being humiliated and taken away, ghettos liquidated, and public executions. I don't know what kind of deplorable scumbag one has to be to equate factory farming with the Holocaust.
*implicitly comparing the treatment of Jews during the holocaust to the treatment of cattle today
also, you can compare two things without equating them
I think if you actually cared about the words you wrote, you wouldn't have used them as the basis of a lazy strawman to win an argument on the internet against veganism
I don't care about arguing about veganism. Just stop bringing up stuff like this. Also, do you think calling something a "modern holocaust" is not a comparison in terms of scale of harm? As opposed to every other time those words are used?
Edit: If you want to argue for veganism, stop bringing up Shoah. It's disgusting, downplaying the severity of the genocide, and earns you no favors with the general population. It has negative convincing power.
It's 90 billion every year. If their suffering is 15000 less significant, that's one holocaust a year, every year, since many years. Why are you using Shoah, if holocaust is so obviously only one thing? And why are the voices of holocaust victims/survivors/relatives totally fine to silence? Many have made that comparison, shouldn't they know best whether it's comparable???
You are correct however that this argument is utterly stupid and useless to make, esp. online, where there is zero context.
Yes, it's a tasteless comparison. I'm a German. Hello neighbor, nice to live in peace.
The comparison also falls flat because while the Holocaust was a genocide, meant to eradicate, factory farming is the polar opposite.
The population size of factory farmed animals is usually way above natural levels, because we farm them. A philosopher even called it an evolutionary win for the farmed species (which does not justify any harm done to individuals).
There are more ways to express 'very bad' than comparing to the Holocaust, and many reasons not to, if you understand it.
You're right, it's so much fucking worse than the Holocaust by orders of magnitude. At least the Nazis weren't raping women to keep the Holocaust perpetually going.
If you said that in Germany, you'd probably get arrested.
100 corporations contribute 71% of all emissions, and I'm supposed to stop eating the pork I bought from a local farmer? Fuck that noise!
Exactly. Not having kids covers my any excess from meat and driving easily.
We’ve been eating meat for millennia, while climate change has only been an issue for a century, yet somehow meat eating is the problem, not the billions of people we have added.
Fossil fuels are the problem, but not eating meat is a juicy, very low hanging fruit.
There is no other way to prevent that much emissions for basically not changing anything. You will still eat 3 meals a day for a similar price.
It’s not nothing to me. Eating isn’t a mere chore, I eat because it is enjoyable. Vegan entrees just are not consistently palatable to me. Take away meat and I’m sorry, but my list of reasons to live will dwindle.
And besides, I’d argue not having kids is an even lower hanging fruit by your reasoning. That even saves money. A lot of money.
Seems you haven't had a good veggie dish yet. I totally get how enjoyable food is central for a happy life, but you don't enjoy it because it was killed instead of harvested. I'm pretty sure you have a few veggie foods you enjoy, maybe without realizing they don't contain meat.
As said in a nearby comment: Only if you didn’t want to have kids anyways. In which case it should not be counted as a saving.
If you want to have kids but don’t because of climate, that’s probably tougher to stomach than a slight composition change on your plate.
Or maybe I have different tastes than you.
I really hate that attitude that because it isn’t much of a sacrifice for you, it isn’t for anyone else. People are different.
Heck, even if I found your one magical dish, I’m not going to eat it for the rest of my life. Even with meat, I choose variety.
Oh, so personal preference suddenly matters? Seems you haven’t found the right hobby yet. I totally get how kids are central for a happy life, but you don't enjoy them because they are your kids instead of pets. I'm pretty sure you have a few activities you enjoy, maybe without realizing they don't contain kids.
See how you sound?
How about this, you don’t eat meat, I’ll not have kids? We’ll see in 100 years who had a more meaningful impact on climate change.
The problem is not the amount of people but how much each individual consumes. Getting meat out of your diet is a simple and a small sacrifice. Besides the health benefits there is also the fact that you don't contribute to the culling of 70 billion animals per year (of which 40% is probably not eaten and thrown in the trash). Not only that but you don't contribute to the greatest cause of deforestation, antibiotics resistance, decline of biodiversity, water waste, ...
Besides the global population is steadily stagnating (Africa is still booming) as a lot of countries see population decline (less than 2 children per woman).
Couldn't we just stop food waste? Most food is discarded before even making it to the store. Seems to me being more efficient with how we distribute food is more realistic that trying to convince everyone to go vegan.
Because I'm not going to stop eating meat and the amount of ppl like me is larger than you think
Many people will also not reduce food waste, for exactly same reasons you won't stop eating meat. Convenience, habit, cost, time investment.
Except those two things are not the same. We already have regulatory organizations that determine how food is handled and distributed. We can't regulate veganism, we can regulate food waste
We could absolutely regulate veganism. Hell, it's the other way around at the moment. For pretty much every animal rights law, there's an exception specifically for farm animals. Just removing those exceptions would make factory farming (and therefore like 90% of meat production) illegal.
And in a more general sense, we absolutely can regulate carnism (aka the opposite of veganism), exactly how we regulate a million other moral questions.
You don't even need to cut it out entirely. Just not eat such a ridiculous amount of meat.
Stuff like this isn't helping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH9VLihKm2g