311
Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
311 points (90.6% liked)
News
23268 readers
3718 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You know what would really help? More so then cutting actual food intake?
How about halfing the number of golf courses? Stop using grass and let more natural plants for lawns, stop the use of private planes and also just kill or reduce the Cruise ship industry to a miniscule amount. Plus other shit rich people use that has a disproportionate huge carbon footprint. Find it funny that I never see the news --or rich, holier than thou morons-- pushing for this. Nah, they go after our food. Rich people do not care, they can eventually make beef the price of caviar per weight? Because fuck you and all of us. Why? Well they do not care. They can always pay. Easily.
For example: Bill Gates is the largest farm land owner in the USA now, he and his buddies and his rich clients will all get all the natural milk, beef, pork, chickens, lambs, veal they can eat. You? Eat lentils and maybe crickets or give his lab grown biomilq, to your kids or eat his lab meat, like a good and compliant serf. Don't think, just comply and consume. 'Cause I am sure he ain't touching the stuff himself or is his family. He is not going to be the long term guinea pig. I wouldn't either.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/biomilq-artificial-breast-milk
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-backed-lab-grown-195311408.html
Carbon footprint of food production in the USA is 9% of total. Beef is about 3% of total. So 9 for both beef and crops.
Just the cruise ship industry, for example, is about 3.3% of the world's total carbon footprint. Let's kill that. Also private jet use. They can fly Business class, if they are not hypocrites.
I couldn't help but think there's no way luxury cruise ships is 3% of global carbon emissions
Was this your source? https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/maritime-sustainability
It says "cruise ships and other maritime vessels" which isn't cleared up anywhere in the article. You have to remember that if this includes container ships it's fully expected, we all buy shit from across the world all the time.
This article says the shipping industry is 3%: https://sinay.ai/en/how-much-does-the-shipping-industry-contribute-to-global-co2-emissions/
So either greenmatch is intentionally rage baiting everyone or they both emit 3% each, sus.
I really hate misinformation. It's very easy to rally and hate on the rich but it would be very funny to me if that 3% you said to "get rid of" means you would have to completey change your consumer habits and not only just affect "the rich"
But yes regardless don't mistake my comment for defending luxury cruise ships.
I mean, we can do all of those things and reduce our meat intake. They're not mutually exclusive. How about we encourage people to do everything they can, rather than gate-keeping solutions?
Considering every 100 pounds you add to your vehicle you reduce fuel economy by 2%, I wonder how much less CO2 we'd produce if everyone got to a healthy BMI.
Eating meat is not your religion. Why do you feel so offended?
At least for me these articles are a bit annoying since it seems that businesses world wide give a shit about the consequences of their actions but news outlets decided to pin the issue on the consumer.
Don't get me wrong. I think consumers are at least partially in charge when it comes to decisions about their consuming behavior. And reducing the meat intake is something that is not too hard and can improve the health for some people. But propagating this as the solution to our climate problem and on top not looking into the effect of lower income on nutrition / eating behavior makes me angry. The article just briefly mentions that the government has no success in influencing the prices through taxes.
At least here in Germany meat is so unbelievably cheap that it's very understandable people got used to eating it on a daily base. And it's hard to change this without businesses like supermarkets supporting this with price changes (meat up vegetables down) and an increase in minimal income since environmentally friendly food is currently more expensive than "garbage food".
I mean, to be fair, this isn't proposed as the solution to climate, but rather part of the solution. Your points about income and meat prices are totally valid, but they're things that we as citizens can pressure our governments to adopt as part of the encouragement of a reduced meat diet.
A crazy amount of the EU budget goes towards subsidizing farming. Enough of that goes towards the meat industry. It's not supermarkets that enable this to be cheap. It's loads of things. Huge subsidies, regulations enabling intense farming, governments giving subsidies in various ways, then there's also a bit about supermarkets.
Yeah, let's f stop those subsidies for instance. I don't see why taxes should be used to destroy the environment in such a clearcut way.
The type of golf course matters. Where I live, a lot of golf courses are public, packed with big trees, surrounded by bushland, act as a green space and native animal refuge among the suburbs, some of them protect wetlands, and are local government owned. While they do use up a lot of water, its still probably less tgan if it was all just paved with suburban housing and their shit lawns. And all the trees would be gone.
We need a total shift. All those things are things we should do too. It's no doubt that rich people produce more emissions.
But you're just trying to avoid shouldering any responsibility yourself for something were all responsible for.
This is something you can do, right now, to decrease your carbon footprint.
Btw, if you're living in the west with constant access to Internet, and got a free education...you almost certainly are one of those rich people.
Personal carbon credits would make it very easy to solve all of that.