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.

  • Ileftreddit@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Until Exxon and BP are no longer in business and global shipping transitions to zero emissions, there is nothing an individual human can do that will have an impact in any way on global climate. They problem is systemic, not individual

    • threeduck@aussie.zone
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      3 hours ago

      If everyone decided to stop eating meat today, 10-15% of the entire planets GHG gasses drop, an area the size of all of the Americas can be rewilded (animal ag uses 50-100x the land per kilo of food over plant based), we stop wasting 70% of our antibiotics on animals, the plastic left in the ocean drops by half.

      Most things in life you have little control over: you can’t easily stop driving to work, you can’t easily remove all your plastic usage, you can’t easily cut back on your electricity usage.

      But you CAN easily cut out animal ag. Like, today. You can just look up plant based recipes for dinner instead of the meat ones. This is entirely consumer choice driven, entirely.

    • Alsjemenou@lemy.nl
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      16 hours ago

      Okay. But as an individual we still have a choice. And knowing what clearly is worse, while having minimal impact on your life if not doing it. It doesn’t exactly feel like a smart decision, to have red meat/animal products in general. Can i at least call you dumb?

      • Ileftreddit@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        I mean it’s really funny you asked permission to call me dumb, lol. “Carbon footprint” was a term invented by BP. The red meat industry is a methane polluter, but while we can estimate how much methane a cow produces, the oils and gas industry have no idea how much they lose. like they don’t even keep track of how much methane gets just wastefully vented into the atmosphere. https://youtu.be/K2oL4SFwkkw

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      16 hours ago

      and these companies often secretly fund other groups or companies telling “you” the customers to reduce your carbon footprint, so they dont have to. and you know those recent climate protestors defacing property, funded by these groups.