8 metres of cars??? What is that these days, one ford f150?
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great. but why don't we go double and also take 8m cars off the road?
"I want to help save the earth!"
"Great! Eat less meat."
" . . . . No."
I mean, I’m 90% veg for environmental reasons mostly. But every time we share this narrative that the effort needs to be on us while the true culprits are literally upping their consumption is fucking sick. Don’t guilt people for not doing 1% of what is needed while the people/corpos doing the other 99% are pushing this “personal responsibility” narrative and literally created the language to deflect blame. We should be way more upset and spend 20000x the effort shaming and shutting down those organizations.
It doesn't matter if you put 2000x your effort into something if it has no effect. If you spend all your day shaming these corporations on lemmy that won't do anything. So the question should be what actions can make an effect?
Protests don't really do much. Electoral politics, at least here in the u.s. , are completely captured by these corporations and will never truly challenge them. I doubt what just happened in NYC is a valid tactic either. A revolution or even just a general strike is pretty much out of the picture right now.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them. The meat industry is burning the Amazon and emitting tons of methane, boycott them and eat less / no meat. The fossil fuel industry is lobbying congress to deny climate change while increasing production and emitting more every year, boycott them and buy less gas by driving less or taking public transit.
In this capitalist hellscape the only real choice we have is of consumption, and choosing what to consume and more importantly what not to consume is the only real way we can effect the system.
I've seen very few 8 metre cars on the road...
Visit the US, look for "dualies." 6.5m long trucks and people use them as daily drivers.
That's too dystopian for my mind to even imagine...
That's because I ate less meat, duh.
If eating no meat at all is too hard, from a climate perspective eating no beef will have the biggest impact. Eating no ruminants to be specific, but hardly anyone is eating bison/sheep/goat on the regular.
I went like 90% vegetarian and switched to the meat substitutes. If I can do it, anyone can. I've always had a meat-a-saurus diet until 2-3 years ago.
I've only met one person who couldn't go veg, because they had allergies to everything: soy, legumes, nuts.
There's been a lot of obsession with protein in popular culture when in reality unless you're a bodybuilder you don't need a ton and a veg diet will suffice. And there are tons of vegan athletes.
The point I was making is that there is one step even the laziest can take to have an impact: just stop eating beef. Going full veg is better of course.
Lamb is popular in the UK. Beef is actually behind chicken and pork already.
Hey how about you cut down on private jets and I keep eating my burgers
Yeah right, eating less meat smells awful lot like "calculate your carbon footprint"
While I support not eating meat, I am also realistic and reducing is good enough.
But the problem is that not every meat is created the same. There is one footprint for meat feom animals that are grazing and are used in regenerative agriculture and much bigger from industrial farming of cows fed with irrigated alfalfa in desert.
It should certainly be the first step. I've started like this, continuously less meat, your gut-biome slowly adjusts. I'm still not vegan/vegetarian but basically eat no meat anymore (mostly leftovers of others). A good part of it is that I just don't really like meat anymore (tastes kind of rotten?).
I recommend going this route, as I think it's easier to get into a vegan diet.
That said I think we (as a global society) should strive towards eating only vegan long-term. We got the food science and it just feels wrong (moral, inefficiency, health) and isn't sustainable.
How many cars off the road does a dead executive take?
What about Taylor swift...
I am all about eating less meat for various reasons but this some idiotic thesis.
Why not both?
Are you implying that we should only do good things if they are the most good things in existence? Like, I shouldn't have an electric car because planes exist? Please enlighten me.
You transition out of meat to save the environment.
I transitioned out of meat because of meat recalls and all the chemicals they sneak in a cow, and was ripping the hardest farts that would clear out a room.
We are not the same.
A bit underwhelming when put into the context of the estimated number of cars being closer to 1.5B, but worthwhile to pursue regardless.
This would be 8 million cars in the UK alone, which has a population of 68 million.
Serves me right for not reading the article. I'll keep my shame up for display in public
Thank you for your service 🫡