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Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Yes.
The best thing you can do to limit global warming without political power is to not reproduce. The next best thing is to quit eating meat. The less meat you eat the better. And as a bonus it’s highly unlikely to be as much of a sacrifice as not having a wanted child.
This relies on some assumptions that I question. Each person doesn't contribute a fixed amount to emissions, and it's not even a bell curve distribution. The rich contribute orders of magnitude more to the problem than the poor. The top 1% contributes almost twice as much as the bottom 50%..
And with birth rates where they're at, at different levels of income/wealth, I'm thinking that plenty of childless people can contribute more to the problem than an entire bloodline of people who have huge families.
That's complete bullshit as the article is based on complete bullshit.
Iirc, there's a population of livestock that can be sustained without feed crop (instead living off of by-product and untillable pasture), and reducing it past that is less sustainable overall. So while it's true that we eat way too much meat, it's not a great idea to get rid of it entirely in the context of sustainability. There are other arguments regarding the ethics of the meat industry, but that goes beyond the scope of the discussion.
Yeah my attitude is to carbon tax it and stop subsidizing it. If meat is a luxury it’s not something people bitch about accidentally not having in their dinner.
I think that's a splendid idea.
Global warming isn't from cow farts ffs. Container ships etc though
The methane production from bovine rumination absolutely has an impact. As does the massive supply chains and absurd amount of agriculture necessary to feed those cows.
Look up the number of buffalo circa 1800
Look up the main cause of the deforestation of the Amazon. Look up the number of cattle alive today compared to any other point in history.
North american cattle population is roughly equal to buffalo population of 1800. Maybe i had looked this up long before you suggested it. Whining about cattle is an entirely different issue than just stopping deforestation, which is more for palm oil in the region you speak of anyways.
FFS it's not only the methane. It's all the GHG sinks we destroy to let cattle graze and feed other animals caught in CAFO. In addition it's the whole infrastructure around the system
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Half of habitable land is used for agriculture (5x the USA). 2/3 of that is grazing land. 1/3 crop land. One half of the 1/3 crop land is used for plants that are directly consumed by humans. The rest is animal feed and stuff like biofuel.
Crop land and grazing land for animals combined make up 80% of all farmland. Meat, dairy and fish combined make up only 17% of all calories and 38% of protein.
If everyone went plant based the global farmland use would be reduced from 4 billion to 1 billion hectares and therefore crop death would be dramatically reduced. The land could be rewilded and natural GHG sinks could be established again.
Everyday 5000 soccerfield sized areas of amazonas rainforest are razed to the ground for cattle, leather, soy (for animal feed ofc) and palm oil. Mafia like cartels of cattle breeders threaten and murder indigenous people and activists there and implemented a complicated system of cattle laundering to hide that they burn intact rain forests (green lung of the earth) there. The 10.000.000 anually slaughtered cows there are also exported to US meatpackers. The leather ends up in european car seats. Via container ships.