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://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

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. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.

  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
    2·
    16 hours ago

    Sure, I can see that hypothetical, but we can’t get to that hypothetical in capitalism. Profit drives and steers the system, not humans.

    • Rob Bos@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      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.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
        2·
        15 hours ago

        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.

        • Rob Bos@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          15 hours ago

          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.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
            2·
            14 hours ago

            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.

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
                2·
                14 hours ago

                I really don’t think we are. You propose we push for change within the system, as it’s better to have a tweaked current system than a non-tweaked current system. My point is that the reason the current system lacks those popular and necessary tweaks is because its built to resist anything that risks lowering profits, so our strategy should focus on changing to a system that allows us to make those tweaks in the first place.

                You may not agree with me, but I don’t think we are having different discussions.