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. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Socialism will not automatically create vegan world, it hasn’t done so anywhere socialism exists. However, it does swap from profits as the end-all, be-all of how society is organized, to one where humanity can better plan production and meet people’s needs. If capital is in the driver’s seat, then the meat industry will continue to perpetuate said brutality and environmental destruction unimpeded. If humanity is in the driver’s seat, then we can actually work against what would be assured in a profit driven model.
The swap to veganism will never be instant, but it will be largely impossible without human supremacy over capital.
That’s a pretty fair assessment, though it’s hard to imagine that being much less of an uphill battle. People still place a significant amount of their identity in what they eat. In the US at least, a culture of perceived personal freedoms still heavily prevails. Even though vegans are already relegated to trying to appeal to people to change their individual choices voluntarily, people still frequently accuse us of militancy and being tyrannical - even though we’ve virtually never even had real representation in government, aside from very small hard-won anti animal abuse laws that have resulted from extremely risky investigative operations.
Any governmental system that makes any attempts to shift us all in a more vegan direction would quite easily provoke significant backlash and possibly even the threat of overthrow.
Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, but it’s nearly impossible under capitalism. What would realistically happen is the state would heavily subsidize plant based food and develop economies of scale, and increase requirements on animal products for more “humane” treatment, until gradually animal products are phased out culturally. A top-down command for animal liberation would be commandist if the masses don’t want it, so raising political consiousness would be a key part of that struggle.
Under capitalism, it would be difficult, but well regulated markets should be able to manage limited resources. The problem is that the negative externalities of meat are not being adequately captured, and meat producers are abusing the general Commons without recompense. That needs to be fixed with taxes or regulations. Then the market can balance around the true cost of providing meat, which would be much higher.
edit: grammatical typo, finished a sentence
Well-regulated markets, under capitalism, just means comfortable monopoly. You can’t work against the system of voracious demand for profit within said system. You can’t just pray for taxes abd regulations, the only ones that get passed are ones in the interests of the largest capitalists.
I agree that capitalism (as distinguished from straight markets) is the problem, yeah. Especially the part where the accumulation of capital influences the future accumulation of capital via the political process and externalizes cost to the commons.
Markets only work to the extent that they capture all costs in some form. If something is cheaper than the actual cost to society, you end up with problems.
So if (for an impractical example) oil producers had to pay to capture and sequester all the CO2 and methane implied by their oil and gas extraction, as well as repair all the direct damage their wells do, etc, the market might sort itself out. The “true” cost of oil might be $1000/barrel, and society would adjust accordingly. Of course, the time between point A and point B would involve a lot of misery with our current society.
Sure, I can see that hypothetical, but we can’t get to that hypothetical in capitalism. Profit drives and steers the system, not humans.
Yeah, it’s a problem. Our society is only sustainable to the extent to which we capture externalities through regulation and taxes, and efforts to undermine that entire concept is infuriating.
It’s more that under capitalism, regulations and taxes only serve the bourgeoisie. It isn’t that the concept is being undermined, it’s that those are sold to the working class as a viable solution to avoid actually solving the problem.
That’s a good general direction. But all the more reason to push for those things now, and then.
Also, saying it’s impossible under capitalism somewhat doesn’t give the animal liberation movements the credit they deserve. It’s worth looking into the history of veganism. While there have been plenty of people and groups in virtually every culture who were either vegan-adjacent or somewhere in the same direction, the vegan movement is quite recent in the grand scheme of things. Any snapshot of where we’re at might make it seem like we’re small and insignificant, but the growth of the movement has been quite rapid when looking at the big picture.
We’re just still in the early stages. But even 10 years ago was way different. Far fewer plant-based options. Far less awareness of the horror of factory farms. A lot less visibility in general. Now it’s getting harder for people to ignore us.