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

  • Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works
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    23 days ago

    What bother’s me about these sorts of posts is they don’t give people a consumption goal. Blindly telling everyone to consume less isn’t exactly fair. Say, for example, there’s person A who consumes 1 unit of red meat per month, and person B who consumes 100 units of red meat per month. If you say to everyone “consume 1 unit of red meat less per month”, well, now person A consumes 0 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 99 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Say, you tell everyone “halve your consumption of red meat per month”, well, now person A consumes 0.5 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 50 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Now, say, you tell everyone “you should try to eat at most 2 units of meat per month”, well now person A may happily stay at 1 unit knowing that they’re already below the target maximum, they may choose to decrease of their own accord, or they may feel validated to increase to 2 units of red meat per month, and person B will feel pressured to dramatically, and (importantly, imo) proportionally, reduce their consumption. Blindly saying that everyone should reduce their consumption in such an even manner disproportionately imparts blame, as there are likely those who are much more in need of reduction than others. It may even be that a very small minority of very large consumers are responsible for the majority of the overall consumption, so the “average” person may not even need to change their diet much, if at all, in order to meet a target maximum.