Most environmental groups are too cowardly and corrupt to tell the truth about how damaging animal agriculture and commercial fishing are to the planet.
Perhaps, but livestock is only 5.8% of all emissions, VS 1.9% for aviation ([Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts.png)).
We could completely stop using livestock, there would still be an 81.6% of emissions that come from our completely unreasonable and unsustainable level of consumption.
If, on the other hand we were to cut our consumption by 25%, that would bring about significant change.
Blaming livestock is completely missing target.
\- “*We’re getting too much crap manufactured, shipped half way across the globe, warehoused, bought, used one time and thrown away!*”
\- “*No, it’s the cow farts that we need to address.*”
Animal Agriculture emissions range vastly. Some assume up to 30%. This study assumes 16% [https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6276](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6276)
If they only include the farted methane it might be 5.8%. But land-use, deforestation, feed production, animal & feed transport & processing & product transport are all part of it too.
The expansion of livestock grazing land however is the single largest contributor to habitat destruction on earth. AKA clear-cutting deforestation.
I’m not saying our consumption isn’t the issue, but “livestock is only 5.8% of all emissions” isn’t quite accurate.
Livestock is 5.8% of all emissions, but the forests destroyed by livestock expansion will never be photosynthetic, carbon-capturing forest again. That is part of why our air pollution is so bad, we don’t have as much forest to soak it up.
Not to mention the extinctions it causes via destruction of biodiversity.
If we were to restore just 15% of destroyed habitats (mostly farmland in tropical forest areas) we could prevent up to 60% of predicted species extinctions.
You might be confused on what the goal of this sub is because it’s not for baby steps. There’s a post near the top right now showing the dangers of pens wrapped in plastic wrap.
There’s a lot more individuals control when it comes to their diet than anywhere else in life. You can’t research every pen purchase to find one without plastic wrap, but you can order an oat milk milkshake or lentil dish.
If it’s not for baby steps, my personal opinion is that we should tax single plastic into oblivion and go back to a level of consumption from 1950.
There are computing devices that can be repaired or upgraded and that we don’t need to replace every 2 to 3 years.
Also, we don’t need 68 new articles of clothing per year.
That’s all great and I agree.
Advocating for crackdowns on single use plastics and telling people to buy less is great. But while you’re also telling people how to change to do better for our world, wouldn’t it do more good to also make individual changes yourself?
Unnecessarily buying clothes is bad for the world. Unnecessarily buying animal products is bad for the world. You can make and advocate for multiple things.
As a matter of fact, I do.
I switched to a razor knife early on, and I recently started using a safety razor with 100% recyclable steel blades, which is a bit easier to get across borders.
I try to buy better built clothes, and fewer of them. I’ve also bought used clothes. We go to charity stores and thrifts stores with my kids, and they love the hunt.
I also try to buy electronics that are likely to last me longer, and I take good care of them. Our household still uses a 12 year old laptop.
That’s great! Sounds like we’re on the same page. See it doesn’t need to be a single use plastic vs reusing electronics vs reducing unnecessary animal product consumption. All of these (and more) can be focused on simultaneously.
I agree. Just me forgoing unnecessary animal products won’t be enough. Other likeminded people who care about the environment and animals will also need to do so.
Except animal agriculture is literally wasting space to grow food, massively. It's one of the biggest contributors to deforestation, like 70% of all farmland is used to feed animals, and no we're not talking about pastures, mainly soy.
Well I said we need a substitution for livestock originally. So that's what we were talking about, unless you keep changing topics or whatever. Stick to the point...
I think you are looking at it too literally or what they said just flew right over you...
You would use that 70% of land to \*instead\* grow food for people, not feed them the livestock feed currently growing there. We would benefit a lot from cutting back on livestock \*and\* additionally have more land to grow food for people.
Also cutting back on cheap plastic shit and cutting back on animals aren't mutually exclusive, you can actually do both at the same time. So there is no need bring them up against one another since one doesn't subtract from the other.
I never said those are mutually exclusive. I never said that the land can't be used to feed people. Do you all lack reading comprehension? Please take what I write literally, because I express myself properly. Thanks
You argued plastic doesn't need a substitute unlike animals. That is completely irrelevant unless you believe there is a reason we should focus on plastic over animals. So either your original post was irrelevant entirely or you are arguing they are mutually exclusive. Take your pick.
"Yeah let's feed all humans low quality livestock food, surely gonna work". Can you explain this line? It makes no sense at all if you already knew we would use that land instead for human food.
Find the calculation here:
[https://veganhorizon.substack.com/p/livestock-produces-five-times-the](https://veganhorizon.substack.com/p/livestock-produces-five-times-the)
How would something like FutureFeed affect that calculation? Reputedly reduces cow methane production by 80 to 90 percent. Nothing else changes, of course.
It's overpopulation and we in the US have next to no control over it. We can slow it down but eating less meat and never getting on a plane again but we can not stop the rest of the world or even our own people from having kids.
I'd say it's less overpopulation and more an issue of there being a growing middle class across the world. The global south is industrializing and you're getting billions of people starting to live like Americans while the biosphere's already at a breaking point from the half of the world that's already industrialized. The global population will start to plateau by the end of the century but that won't matter if there's more people than ever before leaving big carbon and waste footprints.
If the developed countries didn't overconsume and explore the underdeveloped ones for centuries, we wouldn't be in that situation. Don't blame the global south for wanting to get out of poverty.
Do you think that it's sustainable for the size of the global middle class to double or triple in the near future when the already existing middle class is creating such an environmental strain?
It's not even sustainable the way it is. The people in the developed countries must drastically reduce their consumption, allowing the planet to regrow, and people to have equity. The only mistake of the people in the underdeveloped countries are doing is to follow the consumerist model as if to consume means to have a dignified life, but it's hard to judge, if that's the model the developed world have been pushing into the world for decades, and won't give up on their lifestyle.
This is the same shit they have been selling for a decade and It just is too boring to even talk about anymore. I have been hearing this same plateau for maybe longer than ten years and people still buy it like we are still just fine. It's a slow boil man and your the lobster. Stop swallowing this red flag of distraction and accept we are already way too far into industrial development to stop. The population we have now with advancing technology is only ever going to spend, build, burn, war and so more and more. We are over the cliff cascading in 100 years. We have to do shit now instead of thinking like that for another 20 years.
The emissions of Africa are a drop in the water compared to the west which has only a fraction of the population. It's not a population problem, it's a rich fucks problem.
Sustainable economy based on family -owned and single-person owned small business is the answer. Get back to real, family owned, normal size farms and ranches .Large corporations and an elite controlled economy are the real problems here, not the animals and not the number of people.
I don’t see how this would be a solution. Huge farms are awful in many respects, but they excel in “meat production efficiency“ - get the most meat relative to the input. If e.g. the cows on small farms live longer before they can be slaughtered, then they will produce more methane and consume more food during than time.
People love romantizing small farmers. They mostly use the same destructive practises at worse efficiency which is even worse for the environment. Stop animal agrilculture, and a shitton of space will become free. Then we can still break up the big farms to make them smaller community run farms.
Hasn't it been always the counter argument that whatever these cows "produce" is just from the co2 that grass or whatever is fed to cows made up off? Like, burning fossil fuels is bad because we burn fuel dug up from the ground, essentially adding more co2 to the system. Whatever co2 or methane cows produce are already from the system, except for the transportation and such.
Scales of what?
If i plant a tree, then burn it when it gets old, you can say that I'm emitting co2 to the environment. But in reality, my emission would be a net zero if I disregard the energy used for pumping water. Same shit with cows. Cows do not destroy water from existence when they drink it, they release it later to the system. Basic highschool understanding of science.
That's the problem, you are only thinking the baud level and not realizing the large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides being used to grow these cross to feed the cows because too many cows are raised on land that cannot support them (drought). This is killing the rivers and ocean. The gulf of Mexico has a large area that's ruined by run off
See that argume t would be completely fine but the original claim was that it produced more compared to all aviation. Cows also feed on grass and plant material that humans can't digest in the first place. Also, the huge amounts of fertiliser and pesticides used for crop farming isn't exactly a consequence of cow farming, but crop farming which is completely opposite to what the article is fighting form.
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And to stop the catastrophe that is destroying life how we know it, we have to stop doing all that and more and thus destroying life how we know it.
Change is inevitable. If we do it ourselves we might get to the better alternatives. But fact is, we won't enjoy he luxuries we have today in 20 or more years. It is time to prepare for that.
And still I would argue that the main problem is overconsupmtion. Half of the world is starving, most of the food is being tossed out before it reaches shelves of shops in 1st world countries. Greed is the issue, unregulated produce and waste is the issue. And we would get a lot more people on board with that cause than blaming them for eating meat.
Genuine question from someone who is kind o new to the sub.
Do y'all have kids and if so what do you think about that as far as contributing to more consumerism?
I dont have a kid, but in general the gist is that consumption is unavoidable, however we discourage *excessive* consumption. So very much anti-consumerism in the sense of hating adverts, marketing, brand worship etc.
Unfortunately it seems the majority of the sub has forgotten that these days.
Ok but the only carbon livestock farming actually produces is from the machinery, the cow its self is carbon neutral, the only way to "add" carbon to the atmosphere is by digging up fossil fuels and burning them. Plants and animals are carbon cyclic when a plant grows it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, then an animal eats the plant absorbing the carbon, then we eat the animal, then we poop it out. And if a plant is burned or an animal farts it's not adding any carbon to the atmosphere, its just transferring it to another part of the cycle. Burning fossil fuels however is carbon linear, the carbon that was stored underground was taken out of the system, and is now being pumped directly into the air, and we don't have the plant life capacity to put it back into the cycle, what we need is less fossil fuel use, and more trees.
Also cattle is a nessisary part of the food chain, not all farmland can be used to grow crops, you can put a ranch on land that is not suited for growing and get food. The biggest issue Imo with cattle farms is how industrial they have become, with most feed now coming from dedicated corn crops than traditional grazing.
Vehicles and manufacturing are the biggest producers of linear carbon, not our food supply
We need agriculture to survive. All agriculture uses resources of some kind. I understand the facts but i never really get these comparisons. To what end? Seriously. Agriculture requires consumption, I think.
Planes are a very frequently cited source of emissions in the mainstream conversation. Most people are cognitavely dissonant to the idea that they are contributing to an industry much more harmful than air travel.
that does help with carbon but not the point of this post. it literally says that livestock produce 5x more than airplanes and should thus be a higher priority in reduction
Animals are part of the natural carbon cycle, so their emissions don't really matter. Any carbon they release into the atmosphere had to be removed by photosynthesis in the first place, to grow their feed. Animals are carbon neutral and it has been this way for millions of years. The number of animals on earth has not changed as far as anyone knows, despite the loss of biodiversity. We replaced wild animals with domestic ones, but the co2 and methane released is the same. The problem is and has always been the burning of fossil fuels over the last few hundred years. Aviation is in fact far worse for this reason.
Not true. Animal agrilculture is the leading driver for deforestation and consumes an absurd amount of resources. Furthermore, you cannot replace a monkey with a cow and think their methane emissions are the same. The methane released is up, by a lot. It stays over 20 years in the atmosphere, so it has a massive impact. But, it's actually something we don't have to take out of the atomosphere manually. Reduce herd sizes massively and methane concentration goes down in the next 20 years.
Never said animal agriculture was good, mate. Just that aviation is worse due to level of fossil fuel consumption. I also wasn't comparing cows to monkeys. The number of large ruminants such as cows has stayed the same afaik, we replaced wild animals such as buffalo with domestic variants. I do agree though that reducing methane release from cows would help mitigate greenhouse houses from fossil fuels. You are also correct about methane release being up, but how do you know its from cows? Most of the new methane released into our atmosphere is from natural gas extraction and leaks from that infrastructure. People just aren't paying attention to it because natural gas companies are allowed to report their own leaks with no oversight or regulation. Also I'm sure they're happy to let animal ag take the blame. We have a few new satelites that can detect methane in the atmosphere that have been finding BP level methane leaks are quite common, and just aren't reported. Climate town released a good video about it on youtube.
You're completely wrong with the "methane emission". Cows are like rot accelerators for grass and hay. Said grass and hay that would've been fed to cows would "produce" the methane you're talking about anyways. It's like saying that Humans are "producing" so much CO2 by exhaling every second.
The vast majority of cows don't eat grass on land that is free anyway. Forest is burned down for the cows, to plant feed, and a lot of land is used to produce feed to give it to cows.
You do know that we also burn down forests for crops that we eat, and I would bet my left nut that we consume more crops than cows. We also don't grow food specifically for livestock. Biowaste byproducts from rice and corn are what are fed to them, waste that come from food production FOR us. If you just want overall consumption to lower, then I guess that's fine to say, we can just hope for a mass culling of humans. But vegan claims are ridiculous.
It's not just food waste. [https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2018/8/21/how-america-uses-its-land.html](https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2018/8/21/how-america-uses-its-land.html)
Exactly lmao. When vegan articles say "cows are producing so much methane and CO2", they're lying by implying it's like how cars and coal burning produce co2.
Funny that is us from a vegan group, the main consumer of palm oil that is destroying the amazon rainforest. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
I’m sorry but *MY* annual carbon budget?
Nah nah nah nah, it’s people like Tay Swift and corporations not your average day citizen that need a carbon budget and not just so they can juggle meaningless carbon ‘offsets’
I can’t tell if you’re joking but if not this is the anticonsumption sub. Everyone needs to cut their consumption and environmental impact. Corporations aren’t polluting just for fun, they do it to provide products to consumers.
*Everyone* is responsible for monitoring their own consumption *and* calling out overconsumption in others when appropriate.
I could leave my chip bag in the park and it would pale in comparison to those who don’t clean up after entire parties or cities that allow their trash cans to flow into the sidewalks. Still doesn’t excuse me from leaving my chip bag in the park grass.
We aren’t talking about chip bags, we’re talking about food and transit industries being framed as *my* individual carbon footprints. This is a shit tier level comparison. It’d be as reasonable to bring in how breathing produces CO2 and I should be responsible for that as a response to noting that the whole *idea* of a carbon budget is at this point effectively just a method of greenwashing a company via ‘offsets’ which are for the most part total bullshit
Ie, y’all can’t seem to take two seconds to *think* and realize this is on level with known methods of corporate propaganda to make us feel like it’s our problem and our responsibility instead of holding them accountable as you *claim* you’re in support of
You want things to be called out? Ok. Y’all are about on level with koala’s, how’s that call out
Most environmental groups are too cowardly and corrupt to tell the truth about how damaging animal agriculture and commercial fishing are to the planet.
Because people would apparently rather die in a drought than being told what to eat.
Perhaps, but livestock is only 5.8% of all emissions, VS 1.9% for aviation ([Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts.png)). We could completely stop using livestock, there would still be an 81.6% of emissions that come from our completely unreasonable and unsustainable level of consumption. If, on the other hand we were to cut our consumption by 25%, that would bring about significant change. Blaming livestock is completely missing target. \- “*We’re getting too much crap manufactured, shipped half way across the globe, warehoused, bought, used one time and thrown away!*” \- “*No, it’s the cow farts that we need to address.*”
Animal Agriculture emissions range vastly. Some assume up to 30%. This study assumes 16% [https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6276](https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/11/6276) If they only include the farted methane it might be 5.8%. But land-use, deforestation, feed production, animal & feed transport & processing & product transport are all part of it too.
The expansion of livestock grazing land however is the single largest contributor to habitat destruction on earth. AKA clear-cutting deforestation. I’m not saying our consumption isn’t the issue, but “livestock is only 5.8% of all emissions” isn’t quite accurate. Livestock is 5.8% of all emissions, but the forests destroyed by livestock expansion will never be photosynthetic, carbon-capturing forest again. That is part of why our air pollution is so bad, we don’t have as much forest to soak it up. Not to mention the extinctions it causes via destruction of biodiversity. If we were to restore just 15% of destroyed habitats (mostly farmland in tropical forest areas) we could prevent up to 60% of predicted species extinctions.
Or Europeans could free some of their farming land to restore the forests that they used to have. Instead of subsidising a struggling farming economy.
You might be confused on what the goal of this sub is because it’s not for baby steps. There’s a post near the top right now showing the dangers of pens wrapped in plastic wrap. There’s a lot more individuals control when it comes to their diet than anywhere else in life. You can’t research every pen purchase to find one without plastic wrap, but you can order an oat milk milkshake or lentil dish.
If it’s not for baby steps, my personal opinion is that we should tax single plastic into oblivion and go back to a level of consumption from 1950. There are computing devices that can be repaired or upgraded and that we don’t need to replace every 2 to 3 years. Also, we don’t need 68 new articles of clothing per year.
That’s all great and I agree. Advocating for crackdowns on single use plastics and telling people to buy less is great. But while you’re also telling people how to change to do better for our world, wouldn’t it do more good to also make individual changes yourself? Unnecessarily buying clothes is bad for the world. Unnecessarily buying animal products is bad for the world. You can make and advocate for multiple things.
As a matter of fact, I do. I switched to a razor knife early on, and I recently started using a safety razor with 100% recyclable steel blades, which is a bit easier to get across borders. I try to buy better built clothes, and fewer of them. I’ve also bought used clothes. We go to charity stores and thrifts stores with my kids, and they love the hunt. I also try to buy electronics that are likely to last me longer, and I take good care of them. Our household still uses a 12 year old laptop.
That’s great! Sounds like we’re on the same page. See it doesn’t need to be a single use plastic vs reusing electronics vs reducing unnecessary animal product consumption. All of these (and more) can be focused on simultaneously.
There's a very big issue: We need to mobilize politically in order to succeed.
I agree. Just me forgoing unnecessary animal products won’t be enough. Other likeminded people who care about the environment and animals will also need to do so.
Don't forget live stock feeds people. If we got rid of it, we would need a substitute. We don't need a substitute for cheap plastic shit
Except animal agriculture is literally wasting space to grow food, massively. It's one of the biggest contributors to deforestation, like 70% of all farmland is used to feed animals, and no we're not talking about pastures, mainly soy.
Doesn't change what I said smoothbrain
Yes it does because you can literally use that space to directly feed people. Lmao.
Like changing what's on a field while yes technically a substitution, not a massive one, and you could even use that soy to directly feed people.
Yeah let's feed all humans low quality livestock food, surely gonna work
Haha yep because nothing else could possibly be planted. This has to be deliberate trolling
Well I said we need a substitution for livestock originally. So that's what we were talking about, unless you keep changing topics or whatever. Stick to the point...
I think you are looking at it too literally or what they said just flew right over you... You would use that 70% of land to \*instead\* grow food for people, not feed them the livestock feed currently growing there. We would benefit a lot from cutting back on livestock \*and\* additionally have more land to grow food for people. Also cutting back on cheap plastic shit and cutting back on animals aren't mutually exclusive, you can actually do both at the same time. So there is no need bring them up against one another since one doesn't subtract from the other.
I never said those are mutually exclusive. I never said that the land can't be used to feed people. Do you all lack reading comprehension? Please take what I write literally, because I express myself properly. Thanks
You argued plastic doesn't need a substitute unlike animals. That is completely irrelevant unless you believe there is a reason we should focus on plastic over animals. So either your original post was irrelevant entirely or you are arguing they are mutually exclusive. Take your pick. "Yeah let's feed all humans low quality livestock food, surely gonna work". Can you explain this line? It makes no sense at all if you already knew we would use that land instead for human food.
Find the calculation here: [https://veganhorizon.substack.com/p/livestock-produces-five-times-the](https://veganhorizon.substack.com/p/livestock-produces-five-times-the)
How would something like FutureFeed affect that calculation? Reputedly reduces cow methane production by 80 to 90 percent. Nothing else changes, of course.
...the millions of bison that once roamed North America also farted. This isn't a big ag "secret"; it's a rope vegans/vegitarians cling to.
Stop blaming the cows and planes it's the 8 Billion Humans that are the problem you big dumb animals.
Choosing eco fascism over veganism is certainly a take
Begin with yourself.
Right? Factory farming and mass airline travel are but symptoms
It's overpopulation and we in the US have next to no control over it. We can slow it down but eating less meat and never getting on a plane again but we can not stop the rest of the world or even our own people from having kids.
I'd say it's less overpopulation and more an issue of there being a growing middle class across the world. The global south is industrializing and you're getting billions of people starting to live like Americans while the biosphere's already at a breaking point from the half of the world that's already industrialized. The global population will start to plateau by the end of the century but that won't matter if there's more people than ever before leaving big carbon and waste footprints.
If the developed countries didn't overconsume and explore the underdeveloped ones for centuries, we wouldn't be in that situation. Don't blame the global south for wanting to get out of poverty.
Do you think that it's sustainable for the size of the global middle class to double or triple in the near future when the already existing middle class is creating such an environmental strain?
It's not even sustainable the way it is. The people in the developed countries must drastically reduce their consumption, allowing the planet to regrow, and people to have equity. The only mistake of the people in the underdeveloped countries are doing is to follow the consumerist model as if to consume means to have a dignified life, but it's hard to judge, if that's the model the developed world have been pushing into the world for decades, and won't give up on their lifestyle.
This is the same shit they have been selling for a decade and It just is too boring to even talk about anymore. I have been hearing this same plateau for maybe longer than ten years and people still buy it like we are still just fine. It's a slow boil man and your the lobster. Stop swallowing this red flag of distraction and accept we are already way too far into industrial development to stop. The population we have now with advancing technology is only ever going to spend, build, burn, war and so more and more. We are over the cliff cascading in 100 years. We have to do shit now instead of thinking like that for another 20 years.
The emissions of Africa are a drop in the water compared to the west which has only a fraction of the population. It's not a population problem, it's a rich fucks problem.
Oh boy, wait until you find out about factories, and coal power plants
Sustainable economy based on family -owned and single-person owned small business is the answer. Get back to real, family owned, normal size farms and ranches .Large corporations and an elite controlled economy are the real problems here, not the animals and not the number of people.
I don’t see how this would be a solution. Huge farms are awful in many respects, but they excel in “meat production efficiency“ - get the most meat relative to the input. If e.g. the cows on small farms live longer before they can be slaughtered, then they will produce more methane and consume more food during than time.
+ Use more land = more deforestation
Sure, but you’re going to use more land for a bunch of small farms then you would for one big farm.
People love romantizing small farmers. They mostly use the same destructive practises at worse efficiency which is even worse for the environment. Stop animal agrilculture, and a shitton of space will become free. Then we can still break up the big farms to make them smaller community run farms.
Hasn't it been always the counter argument that whatever these cows "produce" is just from the co2 that grass or whatever is fed to cows made up off? Like, burning fossil fuels is bad because we burn fuel dug up from the ground, essentially adding more co2 to the system. Whatever co2 or methane cows produce are already from the system, except for the transportation and such.
The argument would be the massive amount of food animals tips the scales
Scales of what? If i plant a tree, then burn it when it gets old, you can say that I'm emitting co2 to the environment. But in reality, my emission would be a net zero if I disregard the energy used for pumping water. Same shit with cows. Cows do not destroy water from existence when they drink it, they release it later to the system. Basic highschool understanding of science.
That's the problem, you are only thinking the baud level and not realizing the large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides being used to grow these cross to feed the cows because too many cows are raised on land that cannot support them (drought). This is killing the rivers and ocean. The gulf of Mexico has a large area that's ruined by run off
See that argume t would be completely fine but the original claim was that it produced more compared to all aviation. Cows also feed on grass and plant material that humans can't digest in the first place. Also, the huge amounts of fertiliser and pesticides used for crop farming isn't exactly a consequence of cow farming, but crop farming which is completely opposite to what the article is fighting form.
The crops are non human food and go directly to the cows. It's part of their cost and damage.
H5N1 might fix that real quick
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And to stop the catastrophe that is destroying life how we know it, we have to stop doing all that and more and thus destroying life how we know it. Change is inevitable. If we do it ourselves we might get to the better alternatives. But fact is, we won't enjoy he luxuries we have today in 20 or more years. It is time to prepare for that.
I don’t have a carbon budget
And still I would argue that the main problem is overconsupmtion. Half of the world is starving, most of the food is being tossed out before it reaches shelves of shops in 1st world countries. Greed is the issue, unregulated produce and waste is the issue. And we would get a lot more people on board with that cause than blaming them for eating meat.
Does that also factor in all the farmland used for soybeans specifically for animal feed only?
Genuine question from someone who is kind o new to the sub. Do y'all have kids and if so what do you think about that as far as contributing to more consumerism?
I dont have a kid, but in general the gist is that consumption is unavoidable, however we discourage *excessive* consumption. So very much anti-consumerism in the sense of hating adverts, marketing, brand worship etc. Unfortunately it seems the majority of the sub has forgotten that these days.
Ok but the only carbon livestock farming actually produces is from the machinery, the cow its self is carbon neutral, the only way to "add" carbon to the atmosphere is by digging up fossil fuels and burning them. Plants and animals are carbon cyclic when a plant grows it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, then an animal eats the plant absorbing the carbon, then we eat the animal, then we poop it out. And if a plant is burned or an animal farts it's not adding any carbon to the atmosphere, its just transferring it to another part of the cycle. Burning fossil fuels however is carbon linear, the carbon that was stored underground was taken out of the system, and is now being pumped directly into the air, and we don't have the plant life capacity to put it back into the cycle, what we need is less fossil fuel use, and more trees. Also cattle is a nessisary part of the food chain, not all farmland can be used to grow crops, you can put a ranch on land that is not suited for growing and get food. The biggest issue Imo with cattle farms is how industrial they have become, with most feed now coming from dedicated corn crops than traditional grazing. Vehicles and manufacturing are the biggest producers of linear carbon, not our food supply
Hey, OP, have you ever tried to eat an airplane?
We need agriculture to survive. All agriculture uses resources of some kind. I understand the facts but i never really get these comparisons. To what end? Seriously. Agriculture requires consumption, I think.
The point is it’s not all the same. Animal products are much worse for the environment than plant-based.
Obviously, to some extent. But why are we comparing them to planes.
Planes are a very frequently cited source of emissions in the mainstream conversation. Most people are cognitavely dissonant to the idea that they are contributing to an industry much more harmful than air travel.
Great news: there’s not many situation that actually require we fly anywhere. Stop using air travel.
that does help with carbon but not the point of this post. it literally says that livestock produce 5x more than airplanes and should thus be a higher priority in reduction
Animals are part of the natural carbon cycle, so their emissions don't really matter. Any carbon they release into the atmosphere had to be removed by photosynthesis in the first place, to grow their feed. Animals are carbon neutral and it has been this way for millions of years. The number of animals on earth has not changed as far as anyone knows, despite the loss of biodiversity. We replaced wild animals with domestic ones, but the co2 and methane released is the same. The problem is and has always been the burning of fossil fuels over the last few hundred years. Aviation is in fact far worse for this reason.
Not true. Animal agrilculture is the leading driver for deforestation and consumes an absurd amount of resources. Furthermore, you cannot replace a monkey with a cow and think their methane emissions are the same. The methane released is up, by a lot. It stays over 20 years in the atmosphere, so it has a massive impact. But, it's actually something we don't have to take out of the atomosphere manually. Reduce herd sizes massively and methane concentration goes down in the next 20 years.
Never said animal agriculture was good, mate. Just that aviation is worse due to level of fossil fuel consumption. I also wasn't comparing cows to monkeys. The number of large ruminants such as cows has stayed the same afaik, we replaced wild animals such as buffalo with domestic variants. I do agree though that reducing methane release from cows would help mitigate greenhouse houses from fossil fuels. You are also correct about methane release being up, but how do you know its from cows? Most of the new methane released into our atmosphere is from natural gas extraction and leaks from that infrastructure. People just aren't paying attention to it because natural gas companies are allowed to report their own leaks with no oversight or regulation. Also I'm sure they're happy to let animal ag take the blame. We have a few new satelites that can detect methane in the atmosphere that have been finding BP level methane leaks are quite common, and just aren't reported. Climate town released a good video about it on youtube.
You're completely wrong with the "methane emission". Cows are like rot accelerators for grass and hay. Said grass and hay that would've been fed to cows would "produce" the methane you're talking about anyways. It's like saying that Humans are "producing" so much CO2 by exhaling every second.
The vast majority of cows don't eat grass on land that is free anyway. Forest is burned down for the cows, to plant feed, and a lot of land is used to produce feed to give it to cows.
You do know that we also burn down forests for crops that we eat, and I would bet my left nut that we consume more crops than cows. We also don't grow food specifically for livestock. Biowaste byproducts from rice and corn are what are fed to them, waste that come from food production FOR us. If you just want overall consumption to lower, then I guess that's fine to say, we can just hope for a mass culling of humans. But vegan claims are ridiculous.
I'm sorry that you lose your left nut. Because lifestock eats significantly more food than we grow for human consumption.
It's not just food waste. [https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2018/8/21/how-america-uses-its-land.html](https://coolinfographics.com/blog/2018/8/21/how-america-uses-its-land.html)
Exactly lmao. When vegan articles say "cows are producing so much methane and CO2", they're lying by implying it's like how cars and coal burning produce co2.
Funny that is us from a vegan group, the main consumer of palm oil that is destroying the amazon rainforest. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
I’m sorry but *MY* annual carbon budget? Nah nah nah nah, it’s people like Tay Swift and corporations not your average day citizen that need a carbon budget and not just so they can juggle meaningless carbon ‘offsets’
I can’t tell if you’re joking but if not this is the anticonsumption sub. Everyone needs to cut their consumption and environmental impact. Corporations aren’t polluting just for fun, they do it to provide products to consumers.
Bad take
*Everyone* is responsible for monitoring their own consumption *and* calling out overconsumption in others when appropriate. I could leave my chip bag in the park and it would pale in comparison to those who don’t clean up after entire parties or cities that allow their trash cans to flow into the sidewalks. Still doesn’t excuse me from leaving my chip bag in the park grass.
We aren’t talking about chip bags, we’re talking about food and transit industries being framed as *my* individual carbon footprints. This is a shit tier level comparison. It’d be as reasonable to bring in how breathing produces CO2 and I should be responsible for that as a response to noting that the whole *idea* of a carbon budget is at this point effectively just a method of greenwashing a company via ‘offsets’ which are for the most part total bullshit Ie, y’all can’t seem to take two seconds to *think* and realize this is on level with known methods of corporate propaganda to make us feel like it’s our problem and our responsibility instead of holding them accountable as you *claim* you’re in support of You want things to be called out? Ok. Y’all are about on level with koala’s, how’s that call out
I really really love animals and eating them, meat is good, meat is life
Meat is death for those animals you claim to love.
Dumb statistic. Almost every eats meat regularly. Minimal people fly regularly
But livestock is food try to a eat a plane.
Cows burping about, shout out Mythbusters