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 🙌 🙌

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. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

  • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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    6 hours ago

    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

    • ardrak@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Nah, I think their biggest con is making people believe this exact discourse right here, don’t change their habits and keeping giving them money.

      They are psychos that can care less about being blamed for this or that when they can simply keep bribing governments and never facing any consequences.

      But they have real fear that people start being more conscious about their own consuming and stop giving them money.

    • booly@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      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.

      • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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        27 minutes ago

        They could also, I didn’t know … clean up their production processes and use alternative materials that aren’t as harmful. Exxon isn’t a good example of this, but there’s plenty of mega corps which can do this. But they won’t because our laws are structured in such a way that they are not Incentivized to do so.

        And those CEOs flying their private jets for an hour are more harmful than me driving my car all year.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

        But that’s just it. The plane doesn’t burn less fuel because you didn’t buy a ticket. Hell, I’ve been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).

        They’re polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There’s no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone’s life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.

        • Ksin@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          You’re gonna need to come up with a better example, when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air. Companies usually want to be as cost effective as possible, meaning they will do the least amount of work needed to still get their customers money.

          One big problem that regulation can tackle is that corporations seek to externalize as much of their costs as they can, which means the corporation won’t have to pay for the externalized cost, so they can sell their good/service cheaper, so consumption of the product increases, leading to an outsized environmental/societal cost compared to the cost of the product.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            54 minutes ago

            when covid hit a and fewer people where buying plane tickets there where a lot fewer planes in the air

            Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them

            In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

    • Outwit1294@lemmy.today
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      5 hours ago

      Both things are important. And most importantly, vote with your wallet when thinking about what corporations do.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Sure. Vote with your wallet.

        But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.

        This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn’t actually reducing your carbon footprint because you’re not actually the one emitting the carbon.

        This isn’t like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by driving less” it’s like saying “I’m going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus”.

        • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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          3 hours ago

          They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it, despite so much going to waste. Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it long term.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

            They’re overproducing because they’re heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

            Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

            Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

            Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you’d see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

            But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there’s no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you’re impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.

            • LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
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              2 hours ago

              No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.

              Plus it’s not just a supermarket. It’s all the little mediocre burger shops that prop up around it and other restaurants like it.

              Take some responsibility. Do what’s right even if it won’t work globally.

              If you think something is wrong and is fucking up the planet don’t just throw your hands up and go “meh it’s gonna be at the grocery store anyway might as well eat meat 5x a day hehe yum, guilt free.”

              • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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                48 minutes ago

                No politician is ever gonna run on a “no meat” platform lol.

                Plenty do, in countries where the agricultural industry isn’t dominated by animal farming.

                When meat over-production threatens the general quality of life, the issue flips from an anti-consumer issue to a luxury waste issue.

                Just like with private jets and super yachts, the issue only becomes untouchable when your slate fills up with anti-populist corporate flaks.

    • Wilco@lemmy.zip
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      4 hours ago

      Exactly. This right here. Blame the politicians that deregulate the industry and let these corporations destroy the environment so they can post an extra .5% profit.

    • LanguageIsCool@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Yep, it’s definitely nobody’s fault people eat so much meat that the Amazon is deforested primarily for cattle and for soy (which is for cattle). Nobody feel bad or take responsibility because Exxon is greedy. Lmao gottem.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      You can never make animal production green. The amount of clear-cutting needed for beef as an example would blow your mind. Then you factor in the ground, air, and water pollution from these factory farms, and you’ve just fucked up into entire regions, just to sustain a food source that isn’t even needed.