Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds

BlackRose@slrpnk.net to World News@lemmy.world – 681 points –
Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, study finds
independent.co.uk
883

You are viewing a single comment

Nah Corporations and industries creates 1000x more greenhouse gases than meat and agriculture.

Exactly. While certain dietary habits will most certainly have to shift if we're to adequately tackle climate change, the framing of this as "everyone should just go vegan" falsely puts the onus on individual consumers to solve what is ultimately a systemic problem of production.

And who supports these corporations and industries by buying their shit?

"Companies have customers and therefore they have no responsibility to climate change whatsoever. They don't have to manage their waste, they can dump recyclables into the landfill, and it's the customers fault!"

Fuck off with this shit.

So you think there is some perfect way to manage waste? Because if you can understand that's not the case, then you can understand that the more people like YOU support these companies, the more waste there will be. This really is not complicated. I know the average person is adamant about not taking any responsibility and shifting it onto politicians and corporations, but that's the kind of retarded thinking that got us to 8 billion redundant people.

The maximum number of people who care enough about this to change their lifestyle is the number of people who are doing it right now. How do you increase that number? I can't even convince my family to cut down on meat. My wealthy friends don't give a shit. My right wing friends care even less.

People do not like change. Least favourite part of my job is trying to convince something they need to change their habits.

Companies can be regulated and fined. The government is supposed to represent the people, I'd rather them penalize companies than me.

one time i was sad that i buyed a product from nestle, i still ate it because i notiden only after opening but still. I did not like it ;.;

Meat and agriculture are part of the greenhouse gasses that corporations emit...

It's time for this unfortunate headline to go away. I see a variation of this posted in nearly every thread about climate and emissions, a complex topic that the average person understandably doesn't know much about beyond some headline that stuck with them. Snopes has a good article debunking The Guardian's grossly misleading headline.

To see the actual sources of GHG emissions, at least in the US, the EPA has good resources. In short, agriculture is 10% (methane from cows fits here), transportation is 28%, electric power generation is 25% (fossil fuel power plants generating electricity), residential and commercial buildings are 13% (in practice, the building sector overall is about a third of emissions after attributing the emissions from the electric power slice. Residential and commercial buildings use 75% of the power generated in the US), and finally industry is 23% (again, a bit more factoring in their share of the electric power emissions. Industry uses about a quarter of all power in the US).

As you can see, emissions, or at least GHG emissions, are spread across the economy. Some industries are heavy polluters (e.g. cement manufacturing), but that's ultimately to make products for the market, even if they do have plenty of room to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, as do all other areas of the economy, especially buildings.

If you choose to drive a car and burn 10 litres of fuel, the responsibility is on you, not the oil company that produced it for you