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.
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.
You keep focusing on capitalism, but I’m working a little more generally than that. Any system that has markets would have the same issue, even anarchist ones. There has to be some feedback mechanism to reduce negative externalities on the commons. A centrally planned economy would struggle with it, as well as a fully distributed one.
We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We can do a lot of good with well thought-through taxes and regulations, and while it may not be ideal, it gets us toward a better world, a more sustainable world. We live in a highly dynamic system, and perfection is likely impossible and must take into account human irrationality.
I’m focusing on capitalism because we can’t let the progress we can imagine be the enemy of the progress we can actually achieve in the real world. Just like going up to Elon Musk and asking him nicely to not be a Nazi isn’t a viable solution to systemic issues, so too is trying to use regulations against the system they are meant to solidify and protect. Socialism is necessary because without it, we can’t get these well thought-through taxes and regulations to begin with, we are utterly at the mercy of profits.
Well, we’re having different discussions then. Good luck.