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.
I mean, screw their economic calculus, if people stop flying they will go out of business. If people fly less, there will be fewer (and smaller) planes in the air. It’s not that complicated. I get that in practice most people can’t stop flying entirely but I’m exasperated by the leftist view that consumers are powerless because the global elites are using mind control to force us to fly to the Bahamas on holiday.
There is no “floor” to air travel, the same way there was no “floor” to passenger rail travel. Some of the most powerful and influential men in America fought tooth and nail to protect the railroad industry, but market forces (and, yes, to a lesser extent government policy, but mainly just people buying cars) eventually led to the near-collapse of the industry. Corporations can resist change but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.
They won’t. That’s the rub. We have played this game over the decades. Whenever the industry is on the verge of bankruptcy, the feds bail them out. When the profits are flowing, the executives/shareholders are free to cash out without concern for the future of the company, and the people who need to travel are never given any kind of alternative even as the process of flying becomes more expensive and emisserating.
The central arterial system for civilian and commercial rapid mass transit is enormously complicated. Just shouting “Don’t use planes!” doesn’t address logistical alternatives.
There is. I just linked to it. We had empty planes flying because airlines were not contractually permitted to run fewer flights without having their routes monopolized by their competitors.
They didn’t. They fought to consolidate the industry decades ago. But more recently they’ve turned it over to vulture capitalists to scrap for the real estate value. One of the biggest jokes of the modern era is how Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have fumbled the bag or straight up handed it off, so a handful of senior executives could reap a few enormous windfalls.
Freight rail has never been more profitable, in large part because the number of routes and the regulations on transport have hit rock bottom. Firms are charging record prices, paying minimal labor costs, deferring maintenance, flagrantly ignoring the law, and absolutely cleaning up in the free market.
They’re eating their own seed corn. And in the end, the system will fail. But when you’re an executive making tens of millions in compensation, with an eye towards retirement in years rather than decades, it’s Not Your Problem.
A knock-on consequence of this management style has been to hold up passenger rail (specifically, Amtrak, a federally owned company also plagued with underinvestment and technical debt), as points at which freight and passenger cars share lines are choked with traffic such that passengers can’t arrive in anything resembling a timely manner. THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT.
Civilians boxed into a failed mass transit system who are told “Just stop using the system” are not being provided with functional alternatives or support to leverage those alternatives.