this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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You Should Know

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Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.

https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption

Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

If you don't have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT πŸ™ŒπŸ™Œ πŸ™Œ

Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI's crap. Those are great ideas. But, don't drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

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[–] Tronn4@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Save the planet! Eat Deez Nutz!

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[–] blue_skull@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (27 children)

I could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.

As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.

Edit: folks still don't get it. It's not a matter of apathy, it's pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone's doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.

The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That's on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You'd have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.

Not gonna happen. That's just one industry.

Everyone's not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It's idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.

Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.

[–] LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Airlines, cruise lined oil companies are not immutable forces of nature. They have grown to their current size to meet the demand of individuals like you and me who want to buy shit and go places.

If everyone stopped flying, passenger airlines would be out of business and no longer flying planes within a year or two. Same with cruise companies. Oil is used in more things but if everyone switched to EVs or stopped driving oil production would go way down- even more if we cut our plastic usage as well.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking consumers are powerless. In a free market economy they are very powerful- that's why boycotts can be so effective.

[–] LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

Seriously. Some people here are so happy they’ve found the β€œperfect” justification for their apathy and inaction.

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[–] butwhyishischinabook@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A quarter of emissions is nothing? Yeah the overwhelming majority is attributable to major oil companies, but you're just being lazy and fatalistic. But sure, just sit there and wait for a paradigm shift to come save you from yourself I guess. Literally the first two search results I found:

https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148 https://www.c2es.org/content/regulating-transportation-sector-carbon-emissions/

[–] hans@feddit.org -1 points 14 hours ago

from your article:

That said, other areas of life are a bigger source of greenhouse gases β€” for instance the transport and aviation sector. Driving 10,000 kilometers (6,000 miles) a year causes over 2 tons in CO2 equivalents, as does a round-trip flight from Europe to New York. That figure doubles when you fly from Europe to Asia or South America.

[–] fuck_u_spez_in_particular@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Right but you have to begin somewhere, and being a good example for others certainly helps as well.

I try to change my life such that it doesn't impact me much while having fairly large effect. For instance I'm basically vegan (still eat meat occasionally, e.g. when it's otherwise thrown away), I even don't want to eat meat anymore, the taste just got worse for me over time.

It also has effects on the market, e.g. Meat replacement products are quite affordable and popular.

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[–] LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world 37 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

People will look at an image like this, read that 80% of deforestation in the Amazon happens for cattle, and go β€œI’m powerless, Exxon is bad” and continue to not only eat meat 5x a day but also actively try to convince other people that reducing their meat consumption is silly and they might as well keep eating it as much as they want because grocery stores will stock it anyway and Elon Musk rides a jet.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip 65 points 1 day ago (28 children)

Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories

[–] booly@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).

Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they're polluting on my behalf.

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[–] imTIREDnhungryboss@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

or eat the wealthy is a better start

[–] leftytighty@slrpnk.net 0 points 13 hours ago (10 children)

Ok go ahead, instead you'll do nothing.

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[–] Notyou@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago

I heard it would be better for our health to compost the wealthy and eat the crops that grow.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 7 points 1 day ago

May Luigi bless them all

I've been the bane of chickens all my life...

[–] hobovision@mander.xyz 18 points 1 day ago

The metric of per kg of product, while entirely fair, can be a bit misleading when it comes to making high impact decisions in your life. The switching to tea example is a good one to criticize because on this chart coffee is quite high up there, but I consume only 15g of coffee a day, compared to probably close to a kg of meat, egg, and dairy. Eliminating coffee would not be a high climate impact decision.

[–] poplargrove@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Mmm, close to 700 comments. Have fun yall.

[–] AnimalsDream@slrpnk.net 18 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The prevalence of people telling everyone not to have kids in the context of our current culture is weird.

Alt-right: "Hey we're trying to have as many kids as possible so there's more of us, and less of you. Do us a favor and don't have kids."

Evidently a lot of people on the left: "Sounds good dude."

May I propose a reasonable alternative? If you don't want to have kids, cool, don't have kids. If you want to have kids, have the financial and social security to do so responsibly, and a partner who wants the same thing, then have kids (but also go vegan, ride a bike, and raise them to do the same).

Aka, you do you.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm certainly not going to bring kids into this shitty world when I have no confidence whatsoever that they will have a good life. Things are going downhill FAST and there's absolutely no reason to believe that situation is going to change. It's going to be bad enough with just me having to live with this shit for another 20-30 years (assuming nothing kills me before that).

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[–] Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Until Exxon and BP are no longer in business and global shipping transitions to zero emissions, there is nothing an individual human can do that will have an impact in any way on global climate. They problem is systemic, not individual

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[–] brendansimms@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago

Not loving that the exact source of the data in this graph is not clearly linked in the description.

[–] DogWater@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not disagreeing that meat is bad for the environment, but I think not having kids is probably way above cutting out meat.

[–] dropped_packet@lemmy.zip 14 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Who looks at this world and wants to bring life into it? I fundamentally cannot wrap my head arround that.

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Yeah. Just had this convo with my partner two days ago.

Reasons why I don't want kids.

Number one, they can't consent to being born, If given the choice, I would not consent to being born right now, why should I force that on someone else.

Number two, we can't afford kids right now, even with both of us working full time jobs. (Not bragging, but both my partner and I make over the median household income for our area. I legit have no idea how other people do it, because we are paycheck to paycheck right now.)

Number three, even though abortion is legally protected in the constitution of my state, our legislators at the state and the federal levels are seeking to undo those protections against the will of the people. There is no guarantee that if we had a complicated pregnancy, that they would survive or even be able to find healthcare.

Number four, we are knowingly perpetuating an ongoing climate disaster. I can't in good faith bring someone into this world knowing that they will be displaced or die because the part of the planent they live on may become inhospitable due to our inaction.

Number five, we're seeing the rise of far right antagonist fascist movement worldwide. At this point a global war for basic human rights is inevitable, if not already started.

Number six, there are always hundreds of thousands of children stuck in the foster/adoption system who are destined to struggle for the rest of their lives because of a lack of family support. I would adopt long before I would consider bringing another person into this world.

Thanks for attending my doom rant.

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