I hear the narrative that people shouldn't protest in this way but I have taken to asking what is the alternative? If you are silent, your discontent will go unnoticed. The real problem is that we are having to do this at all. As far as I'm concerned, these people are genuine heroes, fighting against a lobby masquerading as a government. A damn shame
The argument is thus : you need a lot of people on board to effect change in a democracy. The protests are not winning popular support - in fact the opposite. The public are distressed, and actually turn against the cause.
They've definitely done large water buys, but California has a lot of specific water rights under the first-one-to-use-it-has-priority rules. That's why there's a huge amount of alfalfa grown in the Imperial Valley
Bluntly banning Megayachts seems excessively interventionalist when you could instead ban the fossil fuel engines they use and ban the emissions. Make them pass a smog test that’s no more lenient than a car. Why not effectively force them to be wind and solar powered and thus force them to blow their money on advancing green energy? If that kills the megayacht business anyway, well then fair enough.
This is why I fucking hate the do your part bullshit.
Corporations and wealthy don't have the same pressure or responsibility, but it's us as consumers who have to put all the extra work and thought into changing our routines and habits (not to mention how much more it could cost)
This is just a "feel bad" story rather than an actionable policy suggestion since, as the author acknowledges, regulating these yachts is going to be rather difficult because they can just sail somewhere else. Plenty of countries will welcome them in return for the economic activity associated with being a haven for the super-rich.
Indeed it has always been worth fighting for every 0.1ºC, and round numbers of degrees were always arbitrary political targets. Remember also that as well as the peak temperature,
The rate of warming also matters - especially for ecosystems to migrate and agriculture to adapt
The integral of warming also matters - especially for ice melt and sea-level rise
Other issues matter - models paths strictly below 1.5C mostly achieve this with BECCS, competing for land with biodiversity and food production.
Many scientists have long concluded privately that the world will at least temporarily miss that target.
Yes, that's true, if you define it strictly. I've left the default in my model (which doesn't include BECCS) at 1.75ºC for years now. Earlier, the default was 2ºC, and it/I was the first to analyse that probabilistically (2003), indeed maybe this helped in pushing the shift to 2ºC from x50ppm concentration targets we had before that.
Don't get me wrong - I was wearing those "1.5 to stay alive" badges in COPs 15 years ago, before it was common policy, and contributed to the 1.5C conference leading to the IPCC report. However I observed that China never agreed to this - it was very hard to get them to agree <2ºC, and nor did India - despite being urged to do so by all its smaller neighbours. Without those two on board we had little hope.
Staying well below 2ºC is different - they all agreed to that, and their actions are plausibly approaching consistency with that (that doesn't apply, of course to the arabian-gulf petro-states, nor to russia). However 2ºC probably won't save the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice, without which bye-bye to Shanghai, Tianjin, Mumbai, Kolkata, etc.. So I guess we'll all keep trying, but increasing numbers will have to relocate - I consider (pending how this COP goes) whether to shift to analyse such migration, rather than continue with detail on mitigation policy.
Whataboutism doesn't super duper help with the problem of meat.
Like just looking at land usage, 80% of agricultural land is used for live stock or growing food for live stock. While only 20% calories come from live stock.
It's just so inefficient use of water and land. Even if every billionaire vanished, we will run out of clean water and good land if population grows and meat consumption doesn't.
My recommendation is learn to love lentils. Replace the beef in your spag bol with them. So good and so much cheaper. Also beans, there are so many good things you can do with them.
Lentils r amazing, although they severely lack protein. Plus, they alone do not have all 9 required amino acids. To get them, u need to consume lentils AND beans.
The daily RDA for me is around 56 grams of protein. If I had to meet this demand via lentils and beans alone, then I would need to consume around 460 grams of lentils and beans DAILY. Yeah... Imagine the AMOUNT of gases after that lol.
HOWEVER, there still is a solution that I found. Say hello to "TVP", ie., "Texturised Vegetable Protein". This basically concentrates all this protein, while having all 9 required amino acids. To meet my RDA, I would need to consume just 120 grams.
I still do have lentils and beans sometimes. However, TVP is still always present in some form.
@UraniumBlazer@Nonameuser678 56 grams of protein from all sources. There is protein in almost everything you eat, and it combines to reach that goal. You don't have to get all 56 grams from just lentils and beans
Also, it's rice or some other grain you want to pair with lentils to achieve a complete protein, not beans -- beans are legumes, and most legumes have a similar amino acid profile
Meat got expensive AF for me and my family. I'm actually surprised how easy it was to switch.
A lot of vegetarian alternatives are now catering towards former meat eaters, so the taste lines up better. And I also found a secret weapon. Asian mock meats is really really good.
Once in a while, I treat the family to those beyond meats, which taste pretty real. But they're also expensive so...
Some people unfortunately do not have access to good vegan options. That being said, people can reduce their consumption of red meat significantly and make an impact.
vegan options? like produce, grains, and legumes? are you in a food desert yourself?
the "vegan options" you're referring to are at the supermarket, and they are the cheapest items in there.
I have plenty of friends who are vegans. I also have a few who tried it and failed because it’s not a switch you just turn off.
Giving the advice “just go vegan” is bad advice and counterproductive. There should be research into what it means and how to eat healthy vegan meals. You don’t just turn off the meat, which is what a lot of people assume they should do.
As a matter of fact I’d give the advice “go vegetarian, keep the milk eggs and fish, and if you like it and want to go further look into replacing those with some good vegan options.” It should be a process. Unless you start buying Soylent (the product not the movie), but that’s disgusting.
Consuming meat doesn't automatically make you have a balanced and nutrituous diet. If you cared about that, you should inform yourself even if your not vegan.
Oh no, I'm so sorry for your poor friends. It must have been so hard to not abuse animals. I understand, not abusing animals is hard. When I stopped beating my dog with a rolled up newspaper every day, I was so depressed. I'm sure your friends are going through the exact same thing as me now that they aren't paying for companies to put animals in cages and kill them.
yea. but the people doing the caging and killing are paid before that meat ever lands in a supermarket or restaurant. and they're usually paid by the people who own the facility.
No, we just established that's true. The farmers and slaughterers are paid by the grocery store, which is paid by the meat eaters. That's where the money to abuse and kill animals comes from. If you don't think they get their money from meat eaters, where do you think it comes from?
Do you mean to say that grocery stores are spending money from vegan sales on meat orders to subsidize an area of the business that isn't making them any money?
I'm saying grocery stores don't keep a pile of money segregated that only-comes-from-and-is-only-spent-on vegan food. when the 4th of July rolls around, they stock up on hotdogs with whatever money is on hand.
I'm also saying your policy of not giving money to grocery stores just isn't workable for most people.
But you get to influence which decisions are profitable. When you pay them money in exchange for dead animals, you create incentive for them to arrange for there to be more dead animals
Okay, let's say there's a serial arsonist who's been burning down houses in your neighbourhood. Now he's on GoFundMe asking for money to buy more gasoline. I like burned down houses, so I give him money with the knowledge he will use it to burn down your house.
Do I share any responsibility for what happened to your house?
I went vegan on a random Thursday a few years ago after learning about the ethical reality here, that harming animals for pleasure or convenience is unjustified.
It didn't happen all in one day (the learning that is), but I didn't do any meal planning. Didn't even order vegan food before I decided to go vegan. Next time I went to the store I only bought vegan things. Since then anytime I have the ability to buy vegan goods, I do (which has been 100% of the time because I live in the west in the 21st century).
If you're homeless in the middle of Palestine being bombed relentlessly by a genocidal state, yeah I'm not going to complain about you eating eggs that were given to you from a homeless shelter. If you're rich enough to drive to the store and buy groceries yourself in the U.S or Europe, you have no excuse.
cost, convenience, and culture are the three reasons im not actively vegan. i drink soylent and huel. i do (a lot of ) my own baking. i have lots of vegan friends.
but nothing quite hits the convenience/cost equilibrium like 2/$1 gas station hot dogs. 500 hot calories available 24 hours a day literally on my way anywhere to do anything.
and i'm a community organizer. part of that is meeting people where they are. if i refuse to eat what they're eating, it sets me apart. so i can't very well turn down culturally relevant foods like burgers or hotdogs or whatever is at the picnic.
these aren't excuses. they're reasons. to overcome them, you've got to beat gas station hotdogs on cost and convenience, and convince my region to go vegan. i'm not spending my time on that.
I understand the reasons why people aren't vegan. I also understand the reason why slaughterhouse workers have far higher rates of violence (domestic and non-domestic). I understand why people do terrible things, people aren't born evil. Even Nazis weren't born with some disposition to be evil. It's not like literally millions of Germans just had some natural predisposition to be unbelievably evil and that went away once they lost WW2.
These are learned behaviors. I understand the reasons. They're still not an excuse. You're failing to do what you need to do, and just because I understand why you're failing doesn't mean you're not failing.
Maybe you don't care, maybe you like animal abuse, maybe you know you're doing something wrong and see yourself as a failure. No matter your own views, the mass torture/genocide is still happening, and you're supporting it. Hopefully one day you grow enough as a person to stop.
It is torture there's no argument there. Genocide is always a weird one, people argue that what's happening to Palestinians isn't genocide etc.
There are definitions of genocide that it fits, and there are ones that it won't. If you think systemic mass killing for pleasure doesn't fall under the definition of genocide, cool. It's still systemic mass killing for pleasure.
I've talked to literal fascists on the Internet who said the same thing, that my arguing with them "made them look into it" and they ended up "hating trans/Jews/Muslims more".
Just because you have an inability to correctly process information doesn't make it my fault you're going to continue being a piece of shit.
Beef is the biggest mass consumed culprit. I think mutten might be worse, but it isn't eaten nearly as much.
My point is, if you struggle to reduce meat consumption, just reducing beef consumption would make a big difference. Next time you are out, get a chicken sandwich instead of a burger. It's that simple.
Next time you are out, get a chicken sandwich instead of a burger. It's that simple.
I wish it was that simple, but it isn't. If consumers replace chicken with beef, chicken will get more expensive and beef will get less expensive. Maybe some factory farmers and slaughterhouses will change species and ranchers will hire a PR firm to start a "eat more beef" add campaign. A new equilibrium will be reached with no significant impact on animal welfare or the climate, because the meat industry is well aware that consumer preferences shift over time and is happy to accommodate those shifts as long as consumers keep eating meat.
What sends a message is vegetarianism or veganism. And, to a lesser extent, buying your meat from a local cooperative or raising your own. Taking money out of the pockets of the factory farm industry as a whole saves animals and sends a message. Just eating less beef doesn't.
It isn't about sending a message, it is about reducing GHG emissions.
As far as prices, maybe. I don't know the ins and outs of raising animals for food. I don't think meat prices are entirely supply and demand due to different costs in raising different animals.
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