“new” study, draws half it’s methodology from referencing older papers, including the problematic poore-nemecek 2018 piece.
There are an estimated 1.475 billion cars/trucks/vans in the world, as of 2023. 8 million is 0.005% of 1.475 billion.
Now, if they’re going by the number of vehicles in the UK, then that number is obviously different. 41.2 million estimated vehicles in the UK. 8 million is a significantly larger percentage in that equation (19.4%). They also don’t mention whether they’re talking about ICE or electric cars, but I think it’s safe to assume ICE. In 2023 there were 851,000 licensed zero emissions vehicles in the UK, up 57% from the prior year.
I’m a strong proponent for cutting your beef, lamb, cheese, coffee, and chocolate consumption , as they’re among the worst, emissions-wise (bearing in mind this chart is by kilogram, not by calorie) by a long-shot, but we should be realistic about the things that are likely to do the most good.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
Its also way better for you.
Legit, I was so warned about eating disorders when I was young, I never learned to just eat light and how fasting is a thing.
Eat some nuts and enjoy some other stuff. Meat shoumd ve cuts, and it should only 2-3 times a week.
Hey how about you cut down on private jets and I keep eating my burgers
Two things can both be done. Saying one thing is worse is only an excuse to do nothing. Those rich fucks on their jets will probably point to companies polluting more. Do what’s best and advocate the same for others. Everyone just pointing to something else is how we end up in the situation we’re in. “I got mine. Go attack them!” Changing ourselves allows us to see all issues and work on them all.
Yeah right, eating less meat smells awful lot like “calculate your carbon footprint”
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.
Dat odorless, anxiety-free, harmles fun of vegan farts!
Not kidding. Had a vegan apologize when she ripped a loud fart because steamed carrots made her gassy.
Not a single person smelled anything.
8 metres of cars??? What is that these days, one ford f150?
Additional note: per UK. :) The predicted effect, either in meters or millions of cars, is if the UK inhabitants currently eating a high-meat diet switched to a low-meat diet.
Eight-metre cars.
Astute
I exclusively drive strech limos
I wish cloned meat was a viable thing. No animal suffering, far less pollution, sticking it to the vegan.
Why would this be sticking it to a vegan if you are eating a cloned organism with no experience of life? Its not a zero sum game, you can both have some (vegan) pie.
There are great alternatives today like impossible, beyond and tofurky. There’s no need to wait for lab grown meat. That’s like saying sticking it to the abolitionists and feminists. It’s silly to want to stick it to the most moral people in the world.
abolitionists and feminists fight for human dignity. comparing them to animals undermines human dignity
Removed by mod
I don’t care what anyone says, take some dry aged ribeye cooked to perfection, or some smoked ribs falling off the bone and compare that to some frozen tofurky log and tell me with a straight face that that’s an alternative. Forget about ballpark, gardein and beyond aren’t even playing the same sport when it comes to something like a smoked turkey leg.
Veganism is admirable. Animal welfare, carbon emissions, nutrition, these are all good reasons to stop eating meat altogether. But let’s not delude ourselves here, meat can be just about the most delicious food in existence. I have tried tons of fake meat products and they all taste like sodium cardboard nuggets.
No idea what that is about, maybe because I do want to eat meat, without the moral implications.
Anyway, I doubt I can get away with it in this conservative shithole country. If I didn’t live with my parents, I would have cut meat quite a lot. I actually prefer salads and such.
• save the planet• save the animals• stick it to the people who thought of all that first
Very mature of you.
But they hurt my fee fees with their mean words!
“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.
I absolutely agree with you. Meat is something that has a big impact on the climate and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control. If society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint. However, this is nothing that is possible without the government supporting this change.
society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint
this isn’t causal
I may have articulated myself badly. What I mean is the following: If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions. If I now switch to only 500g of higher quality meat the amount of CO2 emissions goes down to about 1/2x(I know this isn’t exactly true, due to the lost efficiency, but for bigger reductions its absolutely true, that the amount if CO2 you emitted goes down).
If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions.
I don’t think that’s true. those emissions happen regardless of whether you eat it. they happen regardless of whether you buy it.
Source please.
Your analysis undermines genuine science by disregarding the reduction in demand which reduces the supply and forming a data set with a sample of 1.
reduction in demand which reduces the supply
this isn’t causal
it’s obvious that the emissions happen before you decide whether to purchase a product. that’s how linear time works.
and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control.
didn’t you try that?
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.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them.
Sorry to say this, but these boycotts rarely do anything. If enough people would boycott some company, or business practice to matter only a little bit, then there also would be enough people to effect politics to try to get better regulation in place, via electoralism, direct action of just getting actively involved in politics.
" If enough people boycott the meat industry, then it’s enough to cause political change." I’m not seeing a downside here to doing something versus not doing something.
I wouldn’t worry much about the “I’m doing X more to offset you doing Y!” crowd. Probably a few act like that but firstly they’ll say it to everyone they don’t like (and one meat eater eating 2x meat can’t feasibly offset more than one vegan, so their impact is limited) and secondly most of them are just ragebaiting.
The same people post shit like “omg getting a Starbucks!!!” under videos calling for boycotts due to Gaza.
I’m definitely not worried about the people saying they’ll spite-eat more meat. I’m talking about us putting so much effort into shaming people for not going veg—so I’m talking about the opposite.
The blame isn’t at our feet. It’s not on us. That’s the companies literally pitting us against each other, baiting us into shaming other .00002% contributors to climate change while they, the true 99.99998% culprits, increase their output and greenwash their literal mass murder crimes.
Your numbers are way off here. (https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/research-report-carbon-inequality-era.pdf ) in 2025, the top 1% only accounted for 15% of global emissions. The rest are still generated by the general public. Sure, per person, the richest 1% have a disproportionally higher impact, but on a large scale, they dont matter that much.
Pushing this narrative takes the incentive of reducing your own impact away.
That study doesn’t account for what their money and influence does. These people use their money to, sure, fly private jets and heat massive houses and drive big luxury cars and eat exotic foods. But they also use it to prop up massive businesses, push for outsourcing, drill, mine. We don’t. That’s what I’m talking about.
That is what needs to change. And that isn’t quantified. It can’t be. But that is insurmountable.
But then you look at things like this and we can start to understand how massive the imbalance is.
They dont drill and mine for fun. They do it because people consume their products. Sure, they do a lot of manipulating and lobbying to ensure that doesnt change, but the decision stilllies with the consumer.
‘I wont change my behaviour because the rich manipulate us not to change our behaviour so the system has to change’ will never bring any change.
Politics does not know what inside the populations heads. They wouldnt know if 90% of the population wants automobile companies banned when everyone is still using cars. Sure, there are questionnaires and statistics but thats not what drives politics. Its where the moneys at.
‘I won’t change my behavior because the rich manipulate us
I think you missed the part where I said I have changed my behavior to be kinder to the environment. I don’t drive, I ride my bike most places or use PT, I rarely eat meat, I don’t order things online, especially from Amazon and major retailers like that. Doing what we can is always great.
My entire point is that we are responsible for 20% of emissions and massive corporations are responsible for 80%. And then when you factor in the fact that the richest 1% account for an inordinate amount of individual emissions—I mean, it feels like you’re going way out of your way to throw yourself over the puddle of blame so the poor, poor wealthy elite don’t get their farragamo loafers a little damp.
No shit companies need customers, but that just feels so incredibly disingenuous of an excuse when you factor in the decades—centuries of lobbying, covering scientific reports on the subject, recklessness with environmental safety to save a few thousand dollars, the endless outsourcing to bring profits up, the endless greenwashing.
It’s pretty goddamn tough to shield your eyes from the truth that the wealthiest among us are largely responsible for the current climate catastrophe, but you’re somehow finding a way and don’t see how ridiculous it is to throw yourself between the truth and them.
Sure, it’s more than just encouraging people to drop meat and dairy. It’s also voting for people who will make it financially impossible for those industries to continue.
Relatable
I ain’t gonna stop eating meat to save 100g of CO2 a year while Taylor Swift takes her jet when she needs to tinkle.
Why is your moral compass calibrated according to the worst people? Is not being the worst possible human being good enough?
Also, as long the general public doesnt change whats acceptable and what not through their actions, why would the rich change anything? Theyre not the ones who will suffer from climate change and they dont care.
It’s about efficiency.
What’s better? Forcing 1000000 people to eat bugs and beans, or summarily executing one Elon Musk?
You dont need to force anyone. People make their own decisions.
By the same reasoning, would you abolish elections because letting a single person decide is more efficient?
In theory, I agree with you, it is way more efficient to just ban cars, ban billionaires, distribute their money and end world hunger. But thats not realistic. There is absolutely no indication that any politician will even consider any of that, as long as the population still keeps driving around in massive SUVs, eating mass produced meat and buying everything from Amazon.
Man you guys sure love to jump to absurd conclusions using apples to oranges comparisons… First the guy comparing eating beans to child abuse, now you… It’s almost as if trying to force your lame lifestyle on billions of people requires leaps of logic only a protein deprived brain can achieve.
First off, you can’t measure the efficiency of one person deciding vs multiple.
You can, however, determine how much co2 one person emits.
There’s also no indication that politicians will ever consider banning meat and yet here you are trying to make people eat beans on toast every meal.
Look, all I’m saying, if you truly care about the planet, instead of trying to force lifestyle changes on 99% of the population, there’s 1% of them that emits 15% of CO2 without really contributing anything useful to society.
There’s a quick ROI. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Or you could eat beans I guess.
You are strawmanning and coping so hard I dont have enough time to address all of that, so ill just pick a few.
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Im not trying to force lifestyle changes on anyone and I dont know why youre claiming that. I am simply arguing which life choices can make a difference and which cant.
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What exactly do you suggest the average person does to ensure the 1% stop emitting 15%? Vote green? That has worked wonderfully over the past 30 years right?
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Is ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ supposed to be a summary of my arguments? Coz it sure as hell doesnt fit you attitude of ‘dont change anything as long as rich people dont change’.
That has worked wonderfully over the past 30 years right?
veganism has been around since the '40s and the meat industry grows every year.
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Yes, yes you are. The only reason you are arguing right now is because you’re mad that I refuse to stop eating meat while some rich fuck’s personal jet flies around the world just so he can have a shit in a different toilet every day. If you didn’t care about changing my way, you’d be doing something else.
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You really want to get politicians involved, huh. You haven’t figured out yet that they’re part of the problem?
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Be the change you want to see in the world is meant as an encouraging statement to go and take things into your own hands instead of relying on third parties to fix your problems.
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I ain’t gonna stop beating my children while Israel drops bombs on schools to take out a hamas laptop.
Eat your bugs, you need to offset the damage caused by a billionaire’s third yacht.
What is with you guys and bugs? Do you really think vegetarians eat bugs or want you to eat bugs?
We eat and want you to eat beans, but I guess that’s not disgusting enough for you to get mad over.
Bugs, beans, whatever. That’s not the point.
Feel free to feel good about saving all that planet.
Oops some billionaire’s megayacht just dumped more CO2 in the atmosphere in a day than you banked by eating beans for the past decade.
But yeah, more beans please.
Also, 'people like men talk about bugs because that’s what the elite is working hard trying to manufacture that delicious bug eating consent
I will, and i will also feel good about not assaulting children even though there are people out there slaughtering droves of them.
So your evidence for this grand elite conspiracy is one article from the new York post. Tell me what’s the advertising budget for crickets, or if you’ve ever even seen an ad for crickets? Cause the advertising budget for Tyson foods alone is over $200 million . That’s just the industry itself, that doesn’t include restaurants like McDonald’s etc. That are also pushing you to buy meat. Tyson foods alone also lobbies the government to the tune of $2.8 million. The big money is not trying to get you to eat crickets, it’s trying to get you to eat meat.
Man you’re still missing the whole point of my argument just because I said bugs, huh?
Your brain that starved for real protein? Try meat.
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…
12 yards long, 2 lanes wide, 65 tons of American pride!
That’s because I ate less meat, duh.
great. but why don’t we go double and also take 8m cars off the road?
I didn’t eat meat today so apparently I took 8m cars off the road.
I refuse to drive, I walk and transit, 1 car off road for decades.
How long have you been doing that, and I’m guessing you live in a city?
Yes, I live in a city. When young living with my parents (2 cars as they both worked and couldn’t car pool) I lived in what we called the “land of 3 numbered busses” aka the suburbs. I decided before 16 I didn’t want to drive, so never did. Started then to make my footprint as small as possible. Easiest way to make my footprint small was to live downtown where almost everything I need is 20 mins away by foot, sadly if I move now I will not be able to afford anywhere near where I am. I’m 50 next year.
Good for you. Personally, I can’t stand living in the city nowadays. I certainly can’t justify that rent.
Right now, due to how long I have been there, I am paying less for a 3 bedroom apt than one would for a 1 bed or bachelor
Dang. Lucky. Is that rent control or do you own?
Let’s aim for at least a nice billion.
The price of electric cars will do that on its own, once we phase out petrol.
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.
While I support not eating meat, I am also realistic and reducing is good enough.
No, we gotta completely uproot the animal agriculture industry if we want to save the planet and no “regenerative farming cattle” still uses too much land/water and has bovines abused and slaughtered for nothing.
Okay, then I might as well just keep eating as much meat as I do now though? If we have to be perfect and most people aren’t going to be perfect, there’s no point in even trying.
Or maybe get off your high horse, accept that humanity isn’t perfect, and try to get people to eat less meat first, then worry about getting them to eat no meat at all. 50% of people doing 70% of what they should is more useful than 10% doing 100%.
That’s a straw-man fallacy. Just because you’re trying doesn’t mean you have to be perfect right away.
I also believe that we have all reason to go completely vegan long-term. Thanks to food-science, it’s not a radical shift anymore, just a slow adjustment and a little bit of discipline until you’ve adapted that new habit. I was a very much into meat and slowly adapted to a vegan diet, it get’s easier over time until a point (for me at least) that you even prefer the vegan/vegetarian option.
I agree, but the other commenter specifically was saying that it’s a case of do or do not, there is no try.
There are no baby steps to stoping animal abuse. It’s not hard to follow a 31 day challenge.
Do that first then comeback critic my “big ask”.
Each child born produces as much CO2 as 71 people going vegan for life. That ignores all the other ways humans pollute. Given that 130M babies are born each year, even if the entire planet went vegan right now (forever), it would only offset the next 324 days. If you care about the environment at all, you would focus all of your ire on the the real danger: countries with high birth rates.
However I suspect this has nothing to do with the environment for you. There is a duplicitous tactic employed by vegans which seeks to hijack the environmental movement for moral aims. People such as yourself have a moral problem with eating meat, and you know that many others care about the environment, so you attempt to wed the two. I am of course happy to be proven wrong.
Isn’t the calculation misleading? It looks like it calculates the modern lifestyle CO2 and applies it to a baby. So the argument just goes, if no people, then no co2. Which is correct, although completely skipping anything about the actual underlying systemic issues for producing this much co2 in the first place.
This isn’t an argument about morality or veganism, the link just seemed like a hit peace against environmentalism
Which in effect tells me that we need to be even more radical in policies to bring this to net-negative. It just doesn’t help when there are a lot less people in the future as we need to get net-negative. Fewer people means also potentially less leverage here.
But I agree that we need to split between moral and environmental factors (though it doesn’t help when these are often correlated).
Your effect on people opting NOT to eat less meat because you’re trying to moralize them is going to outdo your personal contribution at least 10 to 1, maybe 100 to 1 if you interact with enough people.
Well okay then.
If my only options are, “Continue eating all the meat you want and the planet is fucked.”
…or, “Stop eating all meat and go completely vegan…and the planet is still fucked unless everyone else does it too.”
Well…
… fire up that grill, man, I’ve got some steaks and burgers in the freezer.
God, seeing the comments from some people that I’m even nominally on the “same side of the aisle” makes me see how the other side finds it so easy to not only ridicule, but automatically unite in opposition against it.
Like, nothing brings me closer to being understanding and sympathetic to the people I’d normally be ideologically set totally against…like visiting Lemmy and seeing the shit flowing from the people I broadly tend to align with.
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 eat bison instead of beef, that way I’m a big part of a smaller problem rather than the other way around.
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.
Beef should be easy, too, because it’s so goddamn expensive.
Lamb is popular in the UK. Beef is actually behind chicken and pork already.
Is lamb a regular dish or more of a Christmas and special occasion dish? I’m not in the UK so I genuinely don’t know. Not sure that you can get lamb at a fast food joint like you can with beef burgers.
Shepherd’s pie is a fairly regular Sunday meal.
And kebab meat is normally lamb. You can get that at pretty much any takeaway chippy in the country, and is traditionally eaten with about six pints of cheap lager.
A joint of lamb is a special occasion dish, but I think the statistics are skewed by the massive number of drunkenly-consumed kebabs
I’m in the US and can get lamb at fast food joints. Go to any Mediterranean shop for a gyro. Afaik it’s even more available in the UK since it’s primarily sold as people food, not dog food like the US market.
I’m in Canada and there aren’t a lot of shops with gyros. Tons of shawarma though, but that’s all beef or chicken.
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.
This is BBC which speaks for big oil…
Eat less meat but don’t be confused what BBC is doing here…
yUoR CaRBON FoOTPriNt
So the problem is the hypocrisy of the news empire, not an idiotic thesis?
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 🫡
No need, most articles are bad and much longer than needed. Luckily chatgpt&friends are good at summarizing.
why are the slabs of meat in little towels like they’re on a spa day
It’s cheesecloth, and not sure. Dry aging? My immediate thought is someone has an Egyptian predilection. What are mummies, if not dry aged meat.
