Stop eating meat if you actually care. Stop eating beef and dairy.
Massive amounts of land are destroyed and used for cattle. It's insane. Same with water, among other things.
Going veg cuts the numbers a crazy amount. 40-75% in terms of various metrics.
Our lives are built on excess consumption. We live lives of kings. We refuse to give up the largest sources of our damage when it isn't actually that hard. The excuses are so lame.
People have been eating meat and dairy for thousands of years …. It’s not the problem
Good point if we’re blithely making the assumption pre-industrial agg is at all comparable to current dairy and meat industries…
What is the fundamental difference that you can somehow pin climate change on modern livestock
Also ruminants in general have existed for millions of years before thwn
I mean, the scale is totally different now
95% of all mammal biomass on earth is now humans and livestock
In absolute terms, mammal biomass has increased by about 10x compared to 100,000 years ago. ALL of that increase can be accounted for by humans and livestocks, because the biomass of wild mammals has fallen in that same time period
https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Not at the scale we do now. We have people eating beef and dairy 3x a day. Multiply that by 7 billion people. It isn't mathematically possible to support intense animal ag at that scale.
The amount of deforestation, water use, and pollution to scale like we are is not sustainable. This isn't a debate, the math simply does not work and there are mountains of evidence that contradict the "cattle are good for the environment" misinformation that society pushes.
Also, it is a gross myth that people all ate beef for thousands of years. The vast, vast majority of people ate beef only a few times a year, if at all in a year. Beef and those types of extremely resource intensive foods were generally reserved for the rich. That's why our modern society associates stuff like steak dinner with success. We eat it to celebrate. Beef was a very rare thing before massive industrialization of animal agriculture. Then it became an excess item that everyone could enjoy. You can find plenty of advertisements from the industrialization of ag that literally talk about how everyone can eat like kings and princes now. Beef for everyone!
The Colorado river drying up is largely in part to growing grass in arid environments to feed cattle. This is a problem.
Throughout history the vast, vast majority of people rarely ate beef and when they did it was much different than today. Generally old stuff in soups or whatnot. It was outside the budget of most people, if it was available at all in most of the world.
Nothing about our lives is historically comparible to our ancestors. This justification of "we've always eaten meat" is historically inaccurate and doesn't work nor does it make any sense.
This message was definitely not brought to you by the American Beef Council.
How would that stop El Nino?
climate change makes El Nino stronger
How much less flooding would there be right now without climate change?
General estimates are that El Niño is 30-60% more intense due to human caused climate change and will only get more intense.
We are adding energy to the system via our excessive consumption. The ocean sucks up a massive amount of that energy. Warm water expands, among other things(hurricanes).
probably as much flooding as during a typical pre-climate change El Nino.
Didn't you know? El Nino is terrified of vegans.