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.

  • kadup@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    This is true, and also not usually well taken by most people, even the ones claiming to be pro environment.

    Wait until this thread gets full of people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more - which they do indeed, but that absolutely does not negate the many studies we have that calculate a major impact if we simply dropped red meat.

    Which is again quite obvious if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.

    • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      because companies pollute much more

      This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them

      I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions

        We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

        […]

        If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

        https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

          • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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            3 days ago

            To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)

            For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production

            The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.

            […]

            The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.

            https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806

            Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it

            Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint

            […]

            Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass

            https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014

        • Sl00k@programming.dev
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          3 days ago

          A huge aspect of this is ranchers not cycling their land and allowing it to regrow native grasses properly, which does end up running into the land use problem again. But right now we’re very unoptimized with land regrowth and there’s a huge difference that can be made with just properly handling the land and to stop ranching in literal deserts.

    • iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don’t think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I’m keen for lab grown though.

      • kadup@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        That’s a very reasonable and effective individual strategy.

        We don’t need everyone becoming a vegan - but we absolutely do need to stop denying the necessity of reducing meat consumption.

    • Feyd@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It’s obviously someone else’s responsibility to change!

    • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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      My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.

      My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.

      If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.

      Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.

      • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        We should push for large institutional change, but don’t ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren’t also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change

        Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There’s been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns

        • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.

          Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.

    • Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.

      Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.

      • artifex@lemmy.zip
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        3 days ago

        If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.

      • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world
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        I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.

    • humble_boatsman@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s

      REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT

      Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.

      • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 days ago

        I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.

        They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.

        When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).

      • Auli@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.

    • 0x0@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more

      What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
      But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that’ll help a lot.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      See, OP is not saying we should “just drop red meat”, and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.