Uni starts in less than a month so here’s a little moodboard 🏛🎧☕️
How would becoming vegan help climate change? Real reasons please, not just the made up reason of cow gas.
dairyisntscary
people refuse to talk abt veg*nism when discussing climate change because there is no chance it would make any sort of meaningful change whatsoever and meat isn’t actually the issue at all. You can’t be mad that actual scientists don’t share ur agenda
that is patently false.
according to the UNs IPCC, vegan diets have the highest potential for ghg mitigation by 2050 of all diets
The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land. its the main driver deforestation in the amazon
and a vegan diet could reduce global agricultural land by 75%
it would reduce food’s ghg emissions by 49% (61 to 73% in the US), acidification by 50%, eutrophication by 49% (for a 2010 reference year). the rewilding of the lands previously used for animal ag would allow soil carbon to re-accumulate and take a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere.
the livestock sector emits more ghg than the entire transportation sector, with the majority coming from beef and cattle milk.
in 2006 the FAO said: “The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”
Just in case you guys need more proof that these animal agriculture industry shill accounts are lying to you:
- Livestock’s Long Shadow UN Report
- World Watch Institute Report on livestock and climate change
- World Bank causes of amazon deforestation report
- Chatham House Thinktank report on meat and climate change
- National Academy of sciences biomass and gas emissions report
- Animal agriculture “a leading cause of everything”
- Livestock methane pushes climate change
- Vast animal-feed crops to satisfy meat needs destroying planet
- Growth in Dairy affecting environment
- Food Footprint- Animal Waste
- NRDC – Livestock production destroying environment
- WRI World Greenhouse Gas Emissions Charts
- WRI Greenhouse Gas Emissions Flowchart
- Scientific American on Methane
- National Geographic Hog Farms Pollution
- The planet’s prodigious poo problem
- NCBI – Animal Farming and Global Warming Mitigation
- Science Daily – Animal agriculture direct driver of deforestation
- Environmental impacts of fish farming
- The Guardian – Emissions from 13 dairy farms matched entire UK
- Oceans are increasingly bearing the brunt of global warming
- Farming emissions set to rise 80% thanks to meat eating
- Cattle ranching leading cause of deforestation in Amazon
- 2,500 dairy cow farm produces as much waste as city of 411,000
- Global animal farming and climate change
- Biomass use, production, feed and emissions of animal agriculture
- Impact of dietary change in greenhouse gas emissions
- Impact of European livestock production
- Environmental impact of beef
- Biomass distribution of earth
- WHO: Climate Change and Health
- Misinformation on the Science of Grazed Ecosystems
- Food Climate Action Network – Grazed and Confused?
- The regenerative ranching racket
- Benefits of Removing Livestock from Rangelands to Sequester Carbon
- FAO: Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock
- Is Feedlot Beef Better for the Environment?
- Food-miles and the relative climate impacts of food choices in US
- The Inefficiency of Local Food
- Tyson Foods linked to largest toxic deadzone in US history
- 20 meat and dairy companies more GHG emissions than Britain, Germany or France
- Big meat and dairy heating up planet
- Meat industry using ‘tobacco company tactics’ to play down role in climate crisis
- Fish trawling may unleash as much carbon as air travel
- Animal agriculture’s impact on climate change
It’s not about what you eat - it’s about where your food is sourced and how it was produced. If I eat meat that was produced by a small scale farmer whose cows are free-range and largely pasture-fed, it’s going to have a smaller footprint than if I eat quinoa that was grown halfway around the world; picked and packed by locals who used to eat it as a staple foodsource, but who now can no longer afford to purchase it; packaged and shipped across the world, and trucked into my local grocery store. Eggs from the chickens a neighbour has in their back yard are less impactful than the protein powder made from a bunch of different ingredients which all had to be mechanically dried and crushed and put into plastic tubs or bags and shipped to me.
If your only driving force for being a vegan is the desire to decrease your carbon footprint, then veganism may not actually be the best way to do that. Locally sourced animal products are going to have a smaller impact than distance-sourced vegan products.
And yeah, there are some products that its impossible to consume without ethical issues in the supply chain. That’s why I don’t eat fish, because either they’re wild-caught in an ocean that’s being horrifically over-fished, or they’re farmed, which usually has massive environmental impacts. And any meat from an industrial factory farm like those horrible places they have in America is going to have a much larger carbon footprint than the meat from a small scale farm will.
But it’s far too broad a statement to say that veganism does or doesn’t impact climate change. It’s a more nuanced topic than that, that relies far more on “where was this food sourced and how was it produced” than it does on “is this an animal product or not.”
And furthermore - “pointing the finger at politicians and corporations”…. uh, do you mean, the people who are responsible for climate change??
It’s because of mega corporations that the climate is in pieces, and it’s because of politicians that the corporations have been able to get away with it for so long.
If I eat a chicken sandwich, it’s not going to have nearly the same amount of impact as some corporate CEO who presses the “destroy the climate” button on his desk 62 times before his first coffee of the day.
Yes, me making conscientious choices in what I consume is, overall, a good thing, but my impact is literally a drop in the ocean. Celebrities who fly their private jets have a far bigger impact than I do, and corporations that actively engage in destructive practices have a bigger impact again, and the politicians who could legislate to protect the planet we live on could have an even bigger impact if ever they decided to do something positive towards combating climate change.
Saying “me going vegan isn’t going to fix the world so long as corporations are allowed to do what the like unchecked” isn’t me passing the buck; it’s fucking true. I could spend the rest of my life eating only things grown in my back yard and it wouldn’t halt climate change. Corporations could choose to stop actively destroying the planet, and that WOULD have a measurable impact. And it’s not passing the buck to say that.
actually, what you eat is much more important than where it is from:
transport is only a small fraction of ghg emissions of foods
grass fed beef is not necessarily better than beef from a feedlot, as it needs much more land, the animals take longer to grow (and thereby emit more methane) and they can trample the grass and impede carbon storage. it also usually comes from just a few countries and is shipped pretty far.
so grass fed beef is probably not better than quinoa
the quinoa thing was based on one opinion article in a newspaper, and was disproved by an actual scientific study:
backyard eggs are probably one of the most sustainable and ethical ways of eating eggs, but its not like the only choice is between backyard eggs who were only feed food waste from the household and the worst protein powder lol? you can also eat tofu, lentils, chickpeas, seitan etc. you are comparing apples and oranges here. and while many people have no access to those backyard eggs, access to pulses is pretty universal
“If your only driving force for being a vegan is the desire to decrease your carbon footprint, then veganism may not actually be the best way to do that.” did you read any of the many sources provided in this post? because they include actual proof, while you are just saying these things. the more plant based a diet is, the less ghg it emits, generally.
we agree on the fact that factory farms are horrible (and i think most would agree on that right?) but its not like small farms don’t also have huge ethical problems, and harm animals by castrating them without anesthetic. and every farm is local to someone? small farms also commit horrible animal abuse. and they usually end up in the same slaughterhouses.
of course a single vegan is not going to change the world? but no singe thing is going to change anything. non single person fighting for corporations to take responsibility, no single person voting is changing something. but that doesn’t mean that collective action is meaningless. and we can do both things. we can change our actions and demand through protests, voting, legal challenges etc that big cooperation change. and with products it is a demand and supply thing. if we don’t demand meat, it wont be produced.
and anyway, this entire thing was vegans responding to the blatant lie that meat eating has nothing to do with climate change.
and just btw., while all those private jets ect. are horrible, i want to point out again what was said above, that the entire transport sector (all planes, cars, ships, trains, motorcycles, helicopters) have a smaller co2 footprint than animal ag.
there’s a snippet of this rhiannon mcgavin poem going around but the whole thing is too good not to post in its entirety
Iryna Kurennaya aka Ирина Куренная (Ukrainian, b. 1996, Poltava, Ukraine) - The girl is reading, 2021, Paintings: Oil on Canvas
A young Takuya Kimura, also known as the actor behind Howl’s original voice from Howl’s Moving Castle (Howl no Ugoku Shiro, Hayao Miyazaki, 2004)
Claude Buck (American, 1890-1974, b. New York City, NY, USA) - The Kiss, Paintings: Oil on Canvas
