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://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
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.
I have family members that are meat eaters, but they are often surprised how good some alternatives are nowadays when I give them new stuff to try. It’s true that some aren’t good, though. It really depends on the product. Most people haven’t tried the good ones in my experience, or don’t have them available in their region yet.
The official statistics here in Germany are that plant-based sales increased by about 15% year-on-year, and more than doubled over the last 5 years alone. It’s certainly catching on here.
While ‘convert everyone to vegetarians’ may be a desirable resolution for you, it’s not realistic. And certainly not achievable in the timeframe needed to reduce climate change impacts.
Not saying those efforts can’t be done in parallel, but subsidizing vat grown meat is necessary as well.
Imo it’s just really easy to switch stuff like burgers, nuggets, chicken wings, chicken breast etc. over to a (good) plant-based equivalent, I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything by doing that. It would already remove a lot of environmental destruction and animal suffering without people going fully vegetarian or vegan.
Yes, I agree with that and I’ll be happy when it gets affordable.
Maybe “easy” for an individual to switch. Quite another thing to shift an entire culture and society to vegetarianism. And completely unrealistic for the short term.