You Should Know

My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.

Here's the perspective that helped me the most with this:

You don't have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.

Even cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact. Start by ordering a vegetarian option instead of meat every once in a while. Experiment and find veggie alternatives you actually like, there are tons of options now. I heard someone refer to this as "microdosing veganism", and it can really help make the change less exhausting.

Over time, you might even notice your tastes start to shift and vegan options become actually enjoyable instead of a "sacrifice".

Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories

Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.

Not having a kid eclipses all of these by orders of magnitude.

perfect is the enemy of good.

I wish vegans and vegetarians would be a bit more willing to promote this viewpoint. It’s insane how many otherwise normal people will refuse a single meat-free meal for no reason other than identity politics.

People will look at an image like this, read that 80% of deforestation in the Amazon happens for cattle, and go “I’m powerless, Exxon is bad” and continue to not only eat meat 5x a day but also actively try to convince other people that reducing their meat consumption is silly and they might as well keep eating it as much as they want because grocery stores will stock it anyway and Elon Musk rides a jet.

You forgot number one: By far, the best thing you can do for the climate is not have children.

That's almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.

But for overall impact, there's one winner and it's bigger than everything else put together.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children

Capitalism hates this one weird trick.

Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there's very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.

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.

All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won't just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it's only 6% of our global annual emissions that we'd save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won't happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we're having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.

YSK you should stop guilting us peasants.
Everyone knows who's to blame.
Tired of this shit.

Do billionaires count as red meat? I am asking for a friend.

the graphic you posted comes from this article, which shows it is based on poore-nemecek 2018. i've detailed teh problems with this study in another top-level comment here, but, basically, it's not good science. i feel you're spreading misinformation.

I could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.

As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.

Edit: folks still don't get it. It's not a matter of apathy, it's pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone's doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.

The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That's on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You'd have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.

Not gonna happen. That's just one industry.

Everyone's not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It's idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.

Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.

Not loving that the exact source of the data in this graph is not clearly linked in the description.

or eat the wealthy is a better start

The prevalence of people telling everyone not to have kids in the context of our current culture is weird.

Alt-right: "Hey we're trying to have as many kids as possible so there's more of us, and less of you. Do us a favor and don't have kids."

Evidently a lot of people on the left: "Sounds good dude."

May I propose a reasonable alternative? If you don't want to have kids, cool, don't have kids. If you want to have kids, have the financial and social security to do so responsibly, and a partner who wants the same thing, then have kids (but also go vegan, ride a bike, and raise them to do the same).

Aka, you do you.

What about not having children?

The metric of per kg of product, while entirely fair, can be a bit misleading when it comes to making high impact decisions in your life. The switching to tea example is a good one to criticize because on this chart coffee is quite high up there, but I consume only 15g of coffee a day, compared to probably close to a kg of meat, egg, and dairy. Eliminating coffee would not be a high climate impact decision.

Roughly true, but you're eliding a very, very problematic activity into "travel": aviation.

Per kilometer, flying is pretty carbon intensive (about the same as driving - basically: the extra efficiency of being packed into a tin can is offset by exponentially higher wind resistance at high speed). The problem is that airplanes allow you to burn up massive distances really quickly.

A single transatlantic flight will blow a ~~2-ton~~1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That's 10-20% of an average European's annual footprint - or ~~100%~~ a very large chunk of a sustainable annual footprint. For anyone who flies more than once a year (i.e. likely a bunch of people here), cutting down on flying is likely to be the single biggest thing you can do for the climate.

I get that individuals aren't the problem impact wise but couldn't it be the case that if the majority of people life a more sustainable life it will be easier to create laws that put stop the real poluters bc people are in support of such regulations?! If the majority of people think the existence of billionaires is immoral, it will be easier to tax the rich...

How much less red meat to offset all the private jet that flew to Venice for bezos’ wedding?