climate change is caused by activities of large corporations but your solution
is regular people
changing diet? it's like suggesting people start driving 2 cylinder cars with AC off while fleet of largest ship companies create more co2 than all cars combined.
you want to stop climate change? do the following:
-stop cutting down forests.
-stop drilling in arctic
-stop oil spills
-stop overfishing
list goes on and all of these things are done by large corporations with approval of governments. leave regular people alone, the capitalist system has strangled them enough already.
Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
201–210 of 577 posts
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
A challenge that I could see with convincing people to adopt a more plant based diet is that there is a carbon cost associated with shipping food across the country, but in many parts of the US a plant based diet might be much less appetizing if it is restricted to local crops. For example, much of the country wouldn't have access to citrus fruits, bananas, pineapples, or avocados. Maybe a solution would be to tax fo…
Na, that's a red herring. We can reduce our meat consumption and not replace it with anything. Americans are over consuming food, we can definitely reduce meat intake without needing to replace it with foods shipped in from out of county. Also, most of the US population is around the coasts. Shipping a bit of food inland to the people there isn't that big of an impact.
> Americans are over consuming food
Overconsumption is generally less than 10% of their caloric needs, so they can't just drop a large source of nutrition.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#203I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible. This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.
Whenever I worry about someone bioengineering a plague for humans to save the planet, the pragmatist in me realizes they could just do the same against cows and only end up being remembered as half evil.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#204Almost all conventional/industrial agriculture (plant or animal based) is unsustainable due to the external inputs required (70% from fossil fuels for growing corn! [1]), soil depletion incurred [2], and just plain shipping things around. [3] The alternative is local regenerative agriculture [4], which the Rodale Institute [5] and a recent Quantis (non-peer reviewed) studies [6] point to being potentially carbon net…
Local agriculture won't feed 7 billion people and even worst went the method you are proposing is GMO, fertilizer and pesticide free.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make much higher welfare standards for farm animals a requirement - making meat much more expensive, reducing consumption. Sounds like a win win to me.
And if you don't want to wait for the government to require this you can already start today. Buy only locally farmed organic meat. Don't go to fast food places or restaurants that don't specifically declare that their meat is organic and local.
> Buy only locally farmed organic meat.
No. Don't buy meat. Buy beans. Buy tofu. Hell, buy Beyond Burgers. We don't need meat. It's bad for the planet, bad for your health and it goes without saying, bad for the animals.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#206If everyone stopped traveling for fun, that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more.
You’re not going to guilt people into changing their behavior.
A carbon tax fixes this.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no need to go from one extreme to the other. This is about eating "less" meat. People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited. This is still the case in poor countries. In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing. We now eat too much meat, and also co…
A challenge that I could see with convincing people to adopt a more plant based diet is that there is a carbon cost associated with shipping food across the country, but in many parts of the US a plant based diet might be much less appetizing if it is restricted to local crops. For example, much of the country wouldn't have access to citrus fruits, bananas, pineapples, or avocados. Maybe a solution would be to tax fo…
Well, solution would be to tax carbon, not the specific field. I don't see the reason and disagree to accept meat tax without banana tax. Carbon footprint should be taken into account the same way fuel cost is taken.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no need to go from one extreme to the other. This is about eating "less" meat. People do not traditionally eat that much meat because meat used to be expensive and its supply limited. This is still the case in poor countries. In developed countries, people started to eat more and more meat as they got richer because we naturally like meat and because of clever marketing. We now eat too much meat, and also co…
My grandmother told me that before the second world war for a typical peasant family in Belarus the meat meant a single chicken 2-4 times in a month for the whole family. Only on big celebrations few times in a year people could afford to slaughter a pig or a caw. Even eggs were considered expensive. Milk was more available as most families had a cow. The real staple food was potato and bread. In cities meat was more…
I think we should be pointing to science - which to date it hasn't been adequately done relating to diet, to see what diet is optimal, and how that varies per group whether that's by blood type, DNA/ancestral data, or other - while taking in the particular sensitivities of each individual as part of the research vs. making the reference points based on a structure of scarcity of what was available based on what people could afford; also having an idea of a person's current health state, how healthy their GI tract is and overall system needs to be taken into account as to how they may or may not respond to different diets - including not limited to how we're only just beginning to understand how gut bacteria and within the whole GI tract can strongly impact outcome.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if you don't want to wait for the government to require this you can already start today. Buy only locally farmed organic meat. Don't go to fast food places or restaurants that don't specifically declare that their meat is organic and local.
> Buy only locally farmed organic meat. No. Don't buy meat. Buy beans. Buy tofu. Hell, buy Beyond Burgers. We don't need meat. It's bad for the planet, bad for your health and it goes without saying, bad for the animals.
A Beyond Burger is not exactly good for your health but I would agree with buying items other than meat is better.
Re: Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Na, that's a red herring. We can reduce our meat consumption and not replace it with anything. Americans are over consuming food, we can definitely reduce meat intake without needing to replace it with foods shipped in from out of county. Also, most of the US population is around the coasts. Shipping a bit of food inland to the people there isn't that big of an impact.
> Americans are over consuming food Overconsumption is generally less than 10% of their caloric needs, so they can't just drop a large source of nutrition.
Apparently, Americans throw away the equivalent of a third of the calories they consume, and interestingly a lot of fruits and veg. [1]
Reducing waste would dramatically help the environment.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/18/american...