That will be a NO for me. Beef, bison, and eggs are my favorite.
The premise that food production is causing climate change is wrong. The ship Indiana Harbor, 1,000 ft long, delivers coal from Superior to a power plant near Detroit 2 times a week. It hauls 6 train loads of coal at one time. That power plant receives 3-4 shipments a week. Just one plant...but, cows are the problem...LOL!
There are bigger issues that should be taken care of for sure, but the current food industry is a mess, especially the meat industry.
I personally don't think completely stopping eating meat makes sense, but surely there are steps between 300gr of meat everyday (avg us consumption) and no meat at all. Especially considering the amount of low quality ultra processed junk most people eat.
People bitch about not being able to have an impact on pollution all the time but stopping eating meat is probably the next best thing you can do after selling your car. And you're right in a way, it's not an excuse to give a free pass to other things.
If we're talking individual contributions, here's a few easy ones: buy new equipment less often, paint roofs and walls white/silver/reflective, use gravity fed heating systems (more up to house builders), if you have a garden grow edible plants, maybe have a chicken coop, use a bicycle for short trips.
And yet, one trip on a yacht equals dozens of families doing the above. So people say, why should I suffer if those people don't?
> So people say, why should I suffer if those people don't?
Depends on your moral compass I guess. If you think "suffering" is eating less meat and reducing your car/plane travels I have bad news for you though.
The more people engaged in these behaviors the better. Do you want to wait until the elite tell you to stop destroying the world (pro tip it's not going to happen as long as it's profitable) or do you want to tell the elite what to do ? The latter is only going to happen if a non negligible portion of the population decide to take action. And yes, it's going to be painful, we'll have to stop some of our habits, adapt others, &c. It'll just be paying the cost of living unsustainably for the last few decades.
Made worse by the Supermarkets, who still insist on "nicely shaped" produce and farmers then have to landfill the "ugly" produce. One UK Supermarket is proudly advertising its "Wonky Veg" initiative, but then the idiots are then wrapping them up in apparently non-recyclable plastic. These people are IDIOTS and do not represent me as a consumer.
And the energy produced by the plant goes where and does what? Are you sure it's not related to food production?
For example, the Haber-Bosch process burns natural gas (3 percent of the world's production) and releases loads of carbon (3 percent of the world's carbon emissions). That process is used to produce ammonia, which goes into fertilizer production, which is used to fertilize fields to produce crops. As a result, more than half of the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed using the Haber-Bosch process. And that process, by releasing CO2, does definitely contribute to climate change.
if you only look at primary source you're correct. But if you assign pollution by end product then food production is the worst. Fertilizer production and food supply chains are part of food production imho.
A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are. Meat production and fossil energy are 2 large causes of GHG emissions, and so we must significantly reduce both. There's no debate to be had about this, it's just facts and numbers.
The point is not to make people for eating meat, just like it's not to make people guilty for lighting and heating their homes with coal-powered electricity. It's just to live sustainably. Let's not deny the facts because we don't like to hear them.
Is eating less beef a decrease in life comfort? Yes, it certainly is. It's still much, much better than living in a +2°C hotter world, in which getting any food at all will become challenging.
> A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are
The problem here is that would require an enormous international agreement. I do not see the political will for this in the largest polluters (US, China) and corruption would be a major problem in large parts of the world.
Doing this on anything less than a global scale would lead to unintended side effects where importing from country A get cheaper because A does not tax GHG emissions, just replacing the emissions.
You could theoretically fix this at the border with tarifs, but determining how much emissions a particular product caused becomes real hard real quick.
Easy enough patch: require full (GHG, ecosystem impact) documentation of production process. This would also push some business in country as that's skip the tariff and make the documentation requirements easier.
Reductionism just doesn't work as long as constant growth is a requirement of our economic systems. It just doesn't go hand in hand. We will also never use less energy than we are using today, so we better improve energy production.
Doesn't mean we should skip engineering energy efficient devices. That is just an additional requirement.
You, and I, all of us, in fact, will have to change our lifestyles in order to preserve the habitability of our planet for us and our children. Our current culture is unsustainable.
Pointing at coal in this context is whataboutism at its finest. Yes, coal has to go. But so does beef. Than has been clear for decades now, it's not news.
The premise that food production is causing climate change is wrong. The ship Indiana Harbor, 1,000 ft long, delivers coal from Superior to a power plant near Detroit 2 times a week. It hauls 6 train loads of coal at one time. That power plant receives 3-4 shipments a week. Just one plant...but, cows are the problem...LOL!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTWLbO9GgCc