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Eating meat and dairy is not sustainable in terms of resources and greenhouse gases, and non-vegan environmentalists are clowns on the level of people flying private jets to climate conferences.
I mostly agree with you, with the caveat that industrial meat and dairy is not sustainable. Communal farms could be.
I saw it somewhere, and now I use it all the time. If you need an example of why capitalism is destined to fail, just look at the cheese caves. We have to bury cheese like nuclear waste just to be able to keep its market value up to a level that makes it worth producing.
This so much this. A mostly vegetarian lifestyle with the occasional meat IS sustainable. People forget that before industrialization, we ate meat like once every one or two weeks. You could count the number of times we ate meat in a month on one han
this argument that non industrial cattle is sustainable is totally moot. please check the literature available.
I apologize, but I'm struggling to catch your meaning.
it's not because a product is not made in a industrial fashion that it's de facto good, sustainable or eco friendly. it's like calling natural stuff better than chemical stuff. it's just a common bias.
you can't get meat without giving a lot of proteins to an animal. at the end if you end up eating this protein instead of giving it to the animal to grow tissue you always will win in efficiency.
some will argue that we can't eat grass. that's right we can't. but with all things considered if we eat proteins from plants we can digest, the balance will always be positive, regarding CO2 emissions, natural ressources being wasted like soil and water, and naturally the cruelty.
some will argue that prairies are stocking CO2. yes they are, but the cattle growing on them will produce more.
some will argue that eating soy will give you boobs. I'm sorry but it won't. too bad if it's boobs you were looking for.
etc etc. the scientific literature is quite explicit on this matter. all that I know is that if we decided to switch to a total plant based alimentation right now, we would need a period of transition were cattle or fishing will still be needed in some specific countries with specific ecosystem.
Well the main flaw in your reasoning is thinking that it's an issue addressed at the individual level rather than a greater systemic issue that cannot be addressed by the choice of individuals. And on top of that you colpevolise would-be allies whose life you don't know, ironically playing right into oil tycoons and meat industry's hands
It has to be both. Our World in Data puts it one way:
We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.
Or to cut through the flowery language - farms need to stop producing meat, and people need to stop eating it.
The biggest reduction would come from the adoption of plant-rich diets. Emissions would be halved compared to business-as-usual.
And that's cool and all but ain't no way you will convince everyone to quit eating meat. Especially given that it's not always a matter of choosing. Even then acting morally superior ain't helping.
It's the same discussion with cars, people will do whatever is most convenient and available, if you don't want people to use cars you don't go around telling tjem not to use it, you act on the city's design and public transport to make it so it is convenient to use the alternatives and then you start banning cars from city centers, then move towards the periphery, etc etc. All these are actions taken at the source. Sure telling people to mot use cars as much, to carpool, etc will help a bit but it ain't gonna solve your issues chief.
Maybe we can't convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.
That's the OP's point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.
But you're still pushing the responsibility to individuals, which is literally an oil company tactic.
"You eat meat? Guess you aren't a real environmentalist after all!" Is not the way we'll get more people to quit eating meat. In fact you can't even know why they eat meat despite knowing it's bad for the environment. And it still won't address the problem.
This isn't a race to moral purity.
Ok but remember this part?
We have a number of options – some fall on the shoulders of consumers; some on producers.