YSK that apart from not having a car and voting, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat.

This is true, and also not usually well taken by most people, even the ones claiming to be pro environment.
Wait until this thread gets full of people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more - which they do indeed, but that absolutely does not negate the many studies we have that calculate a major impact if we simply dropped red meat.
Which is again quite obvious if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.
- The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
  I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.
  
  Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions
  We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
  […]
  If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
  
  Nope it because politicians need votes from farmers so they continue to give farmers corn subsidies cos they lose votes if they take away the subsidies they where given decades ago.
  In Australia most of our beef is grass fed. Not only is it cheaper (when u don't account for the reduced price of subsidised corn) but because much of Australia is so desert like it can only support grass and cattle are the only way to convert that grass to food and profit.
  
  Well, it's not "growing" per se, but we produce fertilizers which are "plant food", so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.
  
  we need to feed them corn and soybeans because people want lots and lots of meat, and that's the best way to get lots and lots of meat.
  that's.. kinda why people advocate for eating less meat, so that there won't be such a powerful incentive to turbomaximize meat yields to meet the huge demand..
  
  why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
  we don't. but we do grain finish most cattle, because it's faster.
- My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don't think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I'm keen for lab grown though.
  
  That's a very reasonable and effective individual strategy.
  We don't need everyone becoming a vegan - but we absolutely do need to stop denying the necessity of reducing meat consumption.
- How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It's obviously someone else's responsibility to change!
  
  i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an even more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.
  i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…
  it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.
- My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
  My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today's society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
  If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You'd think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they're the ones who want the subsidy the most.
  Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
  
  We should push for large institutional change, but don't ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren't also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change
  Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There's been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns
- I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.
  Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.
  
  If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.
  
  Same here. I only eat beef a few times a year as a treat both for health and environmental reasons. But coffee and chocolate so high up the list is more of a killer for me. I definitely enjoy a couple cups per day as well as at least one bite of dark chocolate. Probably should cut back now that I can't claim ignorance.
  
  I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.
- Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s
  REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
  Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.
  
  I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.
  They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.
  When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).
  
  I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.
  
  Fuck your gatekeeping and special pleading
  
  REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
  But they fly for a vacation?
- because companies pollute much more
  This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.
- See, OP is not saying we should "just drop red meat", and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.
- people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more
  What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
  But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that'll help a lot.
  
  That's what they are saying, yes. They are wrong.
- I'm one of those people, and I've brought the critical thinking required to prove it.
  U see the issue with those studies is that they are calculating methane output from the animals themselves and that's it. It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics and chemistry. Methane is CH4 and is a product of fermentation (which takes place in the gut of said animals). We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed so this carbon and hydrogen must come from somewhere in the animals diet (in this case grass). Now the grass must get those elements from somewhere and if u did heigh school chemistry u would know that the answer is photosynthesis (6CO2 + 6H2O + Light Energy -> C6H12O6 + 6O2).
  So what's happening is grass gets eaten by an animal. Most of that grass passes through unprocessed and is excreted as shit (a carbon sink contributing to the biomatter of the soil). A small fraction of that grass undergoes fermentation and a small fraction of that fermented carbon is byproduct methane. All that carbon originally came form the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. A majority of that atmospheric CO2 is sequestered in the cow shit by contributing to the soil biomatter. That's not even accounting for the additional plants that the cow shit helps to grow which are also carbon sinks.
  Now as an Aussie where 99% of our red meat is grass fed that's actually a net carbon negative activity. As for the dumbass yanks feeding livestock corn (due to politicians buying votes with corn subsidies) then u have a problem. But nobody is gonna acknowledge any of this they just gonna spend all day shouting at each other.
  
  The problem is not just the farts, the problem is the absolutely humongous amount of feed and space cattle needs. Most crops grown around the world are used to feed cattle, just like most farmland is used to grow cattle. That's what's polluting, producing so much green house gases, deforesting, etc.
  No matter how you turn it, red meat is an environmental catastrophe.
  
  Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.
  Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.
  But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don't have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.
  And let's also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It's not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They're more or less green deserts.
- if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.
  most people don't want to eat grass or soy cake. letting cows graze, and feeding soycake (the byproduct of soybean oil production) to pigs and poultry is a conservation of resources.
  
  most people don't want to eat grass or soy cake
  If only we mastered farming, allowing us to plant a wide variety of crops. But alas, we are left eating grass.
  
  It's worth noting that soybean meal is not a byproduct. When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal is still the driver of demand
  However, soybean meal is the main driving force for soybean oil production due to its significant amount of productivity and revenues
  [...]
  soybean meal and hulls contribute to over 60% of total revenues, with meal taking the largest portion of over 59% of total revenue
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010
  This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used
  Moreover, soybean meal is the driving force for the whole process [expelling oil from soy] because it provides over 70% of the total revenue for soy processing by expelling
  https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/9/5/87

My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
- No offspring club let's goo
  
  Where
- You know what would help even more? Eating other people's kids.
  
  And kicking people in the nuts 🤪
  
  Nah you got to start at the source, more efficient, eat the (future-) parents.
- That’s entire lives of (likely) red meat consumption! I also am never having kids, so I can have my occasional steak without feeling guilt.
  
  I hit a kid with my car once so now I can litter and stuff without guilt

Here's the perspective that helped me the most with this:
You don't have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.
Even cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact. Start by ordering a vegetarian option instead of meat every once in a while. Experiment and find veggie alternatives you actually like, there are tons of options now. I heard someone refer to this as "microdosing veganism", and it can really help make the change less exhausting.
Over time, you might even notice your tastes start to shift and vegan options become actually enjoyable instead of a "sacrifice".
- That's meee! ✋
  I still eat meat, but quite little, and quite rarely. There's the odd salami at home, or every few months some ham for carbonara when I get guests over, or something like that. But it's such a small percentage of what I consume now, I feel like I'm effectively vegetarian, anyways.
  And yeah for most things I use alternatives because it turns out they're often easier to handle. The Barista This Isn't Milk is nice because it foams more reliably than actual milk and lasts much longer which is important as a single household.
  
  Oh yeah, our house basically gave up on real milk once the alternatives got good. The shelf life alone was a huge driver.
  
  lasts much longer which is important as a single household
  This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don't need a fridge.
- what has helped me is just pivoting heavily to chicken, i used to basically just eat beef and pork, so simply eating a different kind of meat helped ease into eating non-meat meals as well.
  meat alternatives are of course great, but i also think soybeans (or similar) are very underrated, just raw green soybeans are astoundingly meat-like for being a straight up unprocessed vegetable. Great in salads.
- If you only understood the damage you were doing.
  Rather, I feel you fully understand the damage you are doing and are probably doing it deliberately
- cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact.
  i doubt it. many people have done that, and meat production grows year-over-year every year.

Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories

Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
- It’s a manner of perspective, Coca Cola is considered one of the largest polluters on the planet but that’s not because corporate Coca Cola is out there polluting for funsies it’s because they make a product that individuals purchase and then individuals improperly dispose of. Sure no one person can stop Coca Cola from polluting but isn’t the pollution caused by your individual purchase your own responsibility?
  
  No. Coke could make biodegradable packaging and choose not to because number go up. Next question.
- If everyone got together and did the individual action, it would become significant.
  But getting a big percentage of the population to come together and do something is the challenge.
  
  Economics will force something eventually... That'd how we ended up using plastics to wrap all of the food we eat 🤡
  
  if everyone got together
  And this is where it falls apart.
  
  it’s more than a challenge, it’s a fucking fantasy dude lmfao. people don’t wake up everyday and choose to do these things, they do these things out of necessity. even if individual action was effective in stemming climate change (it’s not), you have to acknowledge that people aren’t choosing where and how they get their food. you can’t blame someone for not being willing to sacrifice their own comfort or economic posture for a checks notes* infinitesimally small, improbable, and uncertain chance that their actions might help the environment, maybe, just a little bit. that’s fucking patently absurd to expect any rational agent to make that choice the way you are advocating.
  even in this weird victim-blaming mindset people advocating on this basis have, the corps are still at fault! it’s fucking doublespeak and brainwashing, i swear.
- Direct action has value... But people whine about beef when the best one is not not fly.
  
  300m cows slaughtered a year at 500lb of beef per cow and 22lb of co2 per lb of beef is 1.65B tons of co2e a year from cows. Global aviation makes up 920m tons of co2 from flying
- Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
  I do agree that real change takes political power. You need things like tax breaks for people who use public transit, congestion pricing, taxing airports more, banning ads for SUVs, requiring electronic devices to be repairable, etc... These actions would be far more efficient than any individual action. Sure.
  But political power isn't enough. Look at what just happened in Canada.
  Justin Trudeau banned oil tankers off the coast of British Columbia and he tried to ban single use plastics. He faced outraged reactions.
  Some angry politicians were publically taunting him on social media and sued his government :
  https://www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/article/we-will-continue-to-push-back-alberta-to-continue-single-use-plastics-ban-fight-with-federal-government/
  A guy literally campaigned on defending plastics and slashing the (tiny) tax on carbon.
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-scrap-plastics-ban-1.7514037
  See what happened? The guy was the Prime Minister. He tried some small changes. He faced brutal political backlash. Why? His people weren't ready.
  Change starts with individuals. Only when you reach a critical mass of individuals can you start trying to push for policy changes.
  
  Policy wise this is about it but daddy don't like it

Not having a kid eclipses all of these by orders of magnitude.
- I haven't had hundreds of kids. I'm a climate savior.
  
  you got rookie numbers. i could have had tens of thousands.
- As a middle aged dude who is unlikely to have kids at this point, I'm curious about the numbers if you have some some suggested sources to peruse
  
  Chart, Wynes et al. 2017
- i regard all antinatalism as ecofascism. i'm not asking you to change my mind, i'm letting you know you might be participating in a eugenics campaign.
  
  Only a small subset of people who don't have kids are antinatalists.
  Antinatalism is not eugenics.
  Environmentalism is the opposite of fascism, actually. When you stick up for the environment, you're with the good guys.
  
  How is it eugenics if it has nothing to do with a parent’s genetic make up? Like if they said “meat eaters shouldn’t have kids” you could try and make an argument for eugenics but for nobody to have a kid or for everyone equally to have less children how is that eugenics?
  
  That's one pair of philosophies that creep me out both ways. Both the anti natalists and pro natalists.
  Deciding for yourself is one thing, imposing your choice on others is maddening.
  I don't know if the comment quite raises to the level of anti natalist though. Maybe it's grading on a curve of reading some more hard core anti natalists, but that comment felt tame and felt like they wouldn't necessarily object to a couple having one child or even two, being somewhat below the replacement level..
  
  What a fantastically apt username

perfect is the enemy of good.
I wish vegans and vegetarians would be a bit more willing to promote this viewpoint. It’s insane how many otherwise normal people will refuse a single meat-free meal for no reason other than identity politics.

People will look at an image like this, read that 80% of deforestation in the Amazon happens for cattle, and go “I’m powerless, Exxon is bad” and continue to not only eat meat 5x a day but also actively try to convince other people that reducing their meat consumption is silly and they might as well keep eating it as much as they want because grocery stores will stock it anyway and Elon Musk rides a jet.

You forgot number one: By far, the best thing you can do for the climate is not have children.

That's almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.
But for overall impact, there's one winner and it's bigger than everything else put together.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Capitalism hates this one weird trick.

Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there's very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
- One thing I never see brought up about the factory farm systems, maybe cause it is a bit of a distraction from animal rights, is that hypothetically these systems are turnkey human genocide infrastructure. It is infrastructure for a sort of perpetual animal, uh... regenocide? afterall.
  Seems outlandish and unthinkable, maybe. But then again, all bets are off with the current administration in the US.
  
  Given the amount of perpetual torture these very-likely-to-be-sentient creatures go through, it's certainly worse than any genocide in history has ever been. Even if you only think that animals are capable of 5% of the suffering of humans.

All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won't just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it's only 6% of our global annual emissions that we'd save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won't happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we're having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.

What bother's me about these sorts of posts is they don't give people a consumption goal. Blindly telling everyone to consume less isn't exactly fair. Say, for example, there's person A who consumes 1 unit of red meat per month, and person B who consumes 100 units of red meat per month. If you say to everyone "consume 1 unit of red meat less per month", well, now person A consumes 0 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 99 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Say, you tell everyone "halve your consumption of red meat per month", well, now person A consumes 0.5 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 50 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Now, say, you tell everyone "you should try to eat at most 2 units of meat per month", well now person A may happily stay at 1 unit knowing that they're already below the target maximum, they may choose to decrease of their own accord, or they may feel validated to increase to 2 units of red meat per month, and person B will feel pressured to dramatically, and (importantly, imo) proportionally, reduce their consumption. Blindly saying that everyone should reduce their consumption in such an even manner disproportionately imparts blame, as there are likely those who are much more in need of reduction than others. It may even be that a very small minority of very large consumers are responsible for the majority of the overall consumption, so the "average" person may not even need to change their diet much, if at all, in order to meet a target maximum.

YSK you should stop guilting us peasants.
Everyone knows who's to blame.
Tired of this shit.

Do billionaires count as red meat? I am asking for a friend.

Not loving that the exact source of the data in this graph is not clearly linked in the description.

the graphic you posted comes from this article, which shows it is based on poore-nemecek 2018. i've detailed teh problems with this study in another top-level comment here, but, basically, it's not good science. i feel you're spreading misinformation.
- I wouldn’t call this “detailing the problems.” You wrote a few paragraphs and possibly listed a few.
  How much of cattle feed is cottonseed? In the US only or worldwide? What are alternatives? Would they be better or worse?
  
  poore-nemecek is conducting scientific malpractice by combining LCA studies as they have. the problem with behrens, admittedly, is more of a feeling of misgiving, and I don't know if there is any study that properly accounts for reclaimed agricultural water, or of that's even a reasonable thing to do when your end product is a simple statistic like land use, water use, or ghge.
  I think the best thing to do is probably look at inefficiencies in any specific operation and help them improve, but that doesn't give simplistic answers like telling 8 billion people to eat more or less of something.
- Oooo a “teh” in the wild—a rare site in the mobile internet age! (I’m not being mean, I’m just remarking the rarity!)
- The ballpark numbers seem well in line with similar studies I have seen elsewhere. So while I don't doubt there might be minor flaws in this particular source material, the point still stands.
  We shouldn't nitpick too much about stuff that's generally trying very hard to get facts right while the right or making up shit left, right and center and call fact-checking a limitation of their free speech.
  Suggestion: point out flaws but also confirm that it's definitely not just made up and probably largely correct
- Red meat is a staple of right wing peoples identity since a lot of them are cattle farmers and merica. So a study like this, posted to Lemmy is just great.
  
  I think it's more related to hypermasculinity and meat. Eg grilling steaks. The whole bacon craze with men. Those Burger King commercials with all the meat and the girls licking ranch. Hungry Man frozen dinners with the meat as the biggest and most important thing.The fact that they call their dicks their meat or sausage (does look like sausage so I get). The weightlifting bros and high protein diets that are usually meat. Keto and men and Joe Rogan. The Atkins diet being marketed to men. I was just doing a back and forth with a guy on Lemmy who insisted the only food you need to eat is meat because it has all the vitamins you need (it does not, or at least, muscle meat does not and he didn't seem into eating organ meat like heart and liver).
  But yeah it's also probably related to "Beef, it's what's for dinner" stuff too.
  I just think it's the masculinity thing because a lot of rightwing men have to hide any bit of femininity they can, and most people are a mix of masculine and feminine traits normally so it causes rightwing men to overcompensate to hide it.
  
  a study like this, posted to Lemmy is just
  circle jerking

I could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.
As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.
Edit: folks still don't get it. It's not a matter of apathy, it's pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone's doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.
The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That's on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You'd have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.
Not gonna happen. That's just one industry.
Everyone's not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It's idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.
Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.

or eat the wealthy is a better start

The metric of per kg of product, while entirely fair, can be a bit misleading when it comes to making high impact decisions in your life. The switching to tea example is a good one to criticize because on this chart coffee is quite high up there, but I consume only 15g of coffee a day, compared to probably close to a kg of meat, egg, and dairy. Eliminating coffee would not be a high climate impact decision.

The prevalence of people telling everyone not to have kids in the context of our current culture is weird.
Alt-right: "Hey we're trying to have as many kids as possible so there's more of us, and less of you. Do us a favor and don't have kids."
Evidently a lot of people on the left: "Sounds good dude."
May I propose a reasonable alternative? If you don't want to have kids, cool, don't have kids. If you want to have kids, have the financial and social security to do so responsibly, and a partner who wants the same thing, then have kids (but also go vegan, ride a bike, and raise them to do the same).
Aka, you do you.

What about not having children?

True. Though maybe also activism until manufacturers are held accountable for their production methods and clean up costs. I do my share but I'm tired of being told it's on me. It's on corporate greed. Instead of spending on lobbying to avoid any changes to the status quo, they could spend much less coming up with different cleaner methods of production.
- It's fundamentally inefficient. The claims of "green" meat production are greenwashing from the industry. The industry would love for you to believe there is a way that they could clean it up. It takes growing tons of crops just for most of that energy to be lost by the creatures moving around, digesting, etc.
  Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
  https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
  Nor is something like grass-fed production a solution when that has even higher emissions due to higher rates of methane production from cows. It also is even higher land demand
  We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
  […]
  If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
- This is a poor argument which will be repeated through out this thread because it doesn't take into account the product.. Meat consumption can not be 'cleaned up' or 'held accountable' unless you are growing or purchasing meat from a direct source. You can change your habit in that sense. But when you purchase a fast food meal or even a Sysco steak at a fine dinning establishment you are supporting the established CAFOs that make the statistics in the post. Not corporate greed.

Roughly true, but you're eliding a very, very problematic activity into "travel": aviation.
Per kilometer, flying is pretty carbon intensive (about the same as driving - basically: the extra efficiency of being packed into a tin can is offset by exponentially higher wind resistance at high speed). The problem is that airplanes allow you to burn up massive distances really quickly.
A single transatlantic flight will blow a ~~2-ton~~1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That's 10-20% of an average European's annual footprint - or ~~100%~~ a very large chunk of a sustainable annual footprint. For anyone who flies more than once a year (i.e. likely a bunch of people here), cutting down on flying is likely to be the single biggest thing you can do for the climate.
- People always conveneintly leave out flying. Flying is one of the single worst things you can do.
  
  Any time I bring this up on fedi... It get down voted into oblivion...
  Tourism esp tourism that requires air travel is cancer but the normie who loves the environment will have a melt down when this is suggested
  
  i feel like flying is something you either do fairly regularly, or you haven't even considered setting foot on a plane for 10 years.
  
  I find it really hard to give up, personally. If I didn’t fly I would basically never see my family.
- Tonnes of CO2e, averages:
  
  1.60 a roundtrip transatlantic flight 2.40 one year car use 58.60 one year for every child you have
  Chart, Wynes et al. 2017
  
  That's helpful. These estimates do tend to vary a bit depending on assumptions (type of plane or car, what occupancy etc). The 2t I quoted was slightly high. My point was that there's no other way to emit 1 tonne in 6 hours.

How much less red meat to offset all the private jet that flew to Venice for bezos’ wedding?

I get that individuals aren't the problem impact wise but couldn't it be the case that if the majority of people life a more sustainable life it will be easier to create laws that put stop the real poluters bc people are in support of such regulations?! If the majority of people think the existence of billionaires is immoral, it will be easier to tax the rich...

Sure. Imma keep using my jet though.

Also not having kids. Strange how that one is left out.
- Considering this is about food that humans eat it makes sense that they don't include children on this chart.
  Unless you're living in a candy house in the middle of the woods, then yeah, you have a point.
  
  Well the post tile says "other than not having a car and voting" which are also not about food.
  I get the linked article is about food, but OP worded the post in such a way that it's just factually incorrect
  
  The title mentions not owning a car and voting, that’s not in the chart either.
  You can drive 12 hummers powered by crude oil and eat steak every day at not have even a fraction of the impact of just one child. Having one less child results in a ecological-footprint reduction equivalent to 58.6 tonnes of CO2 a year. By contrast, living car-free saves 2.4 tonnes a year, eating a plant-based diet saves 0.82 tonnes a year.
  Not reproducing is the single most impactful thing you can do for the environment by a huge margin.
  
  Oh ho, I see, I didn't realize children aren't human and they don't eat. My bad.
- Well the actual best thing you can do is kill as many people as you can and then yourself.
  
  Watched the news in say, the last three years? The end of growth means people revert to type: impulsive, savage animals killing each other over tribal allegiances and god myths. I don't need to do a thing.
- It's horrible advice though if you wish your woldview to pass onto the next generations. Statistically, the people not caring so much about things like climate change are having kids.
- Noooooo! You must breed little consumers!

Not disagreeing that meat is bad for the environment, but I think not having kids is probably way above cutting out meat.

Veganism is good, necessary even, but more than voting we need to actually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Profit will destroy the planet unless we take control of the reigns from capital.

Yeah let us do the microscopic differences while some industry totally ignores it...

i’ve replaced beef in my diet with kangaroo for exactly this reason… it’s not the same, but it’s great in its own right and contains a load of iron. makes cutting beef out much easier
bonus: roo populations have to be managed otherwise in modern australia they tend to multiply uncontrolled and it’s a problem, so it’s either eat the meat or waste it… roo meat isn’t farmed

Cute.
I'd be more interested in adding private and commercial airliners, long-haul trucks and tanker ships to the list for comparison.

You are right of course, but „per kg product“ is not a fair comparison when it comes to how the population is fed. Cheese (3000-4000kcal/kg) vs. milk (500. kcal/kg) is the best example for that.
- Meat alternatives are often scored on how environment friendly they are per gram of protein, same with milk alternatives. Though i suppose better per kg of product, you'd still miss important data if you'd only consider proteins.

You can't survive around here (eastern Kentucky) without owning your own car. The nearest Walmart to me is a half hour drive at 60mph and we don't have taxis in any of the towns around me. That's 7 hours of walking, each way. No buses or trains either. The closest store of any kind to me is a Dollar General and is about 2 hours each way if I walk.

Not eating red meat is so fucking easy now. If I can be an old man who went to school uphill in the snow both ways for a second, I dropped meat 20ish years ago in the US deep south, and holy fuck talk about an impossible diet. Even the vegetables had meat in them, and that is not a joke.
This is obviously going to depend on your area and how much of a food desert you’re in, but I’ve never seen so much access to so many kinds of meat replacements in average grocery stores and not just bougie upscale places. Tofu, tempeh, fake meat everything! Which isn’t even a big part of my diet, but I love having the option when I want something new.
- Ten years ago I got caught by surprise bacon in frigging Pennsylvania. I'd done the "make a vegetarian meal out of sides" thing while visiting my parents.
  The restaurant named all the cheeses in 5-cheese macaroni and cheese but didn't mention that bacon was also mixed in. My mom parent-pressured me to not send it back and I ate it, suffering the gastrointestinal consequences later.

The single best thing you can do for the climate is not existing. The next best thing is not having kids. The lifetime of consumption of a person is out of the equation without that person. Until we figure out how to live sustainably on this earth, overpopulation is a real problem.
Edit: To be clear, I want you to still exist with us in this world. Especially since I don't believe in any kind of afterlife. I'm just stating a tough truth with no clear action statement, besides maybe figuring put how to live truly carbon-neutral. Some things are just a catch-22.

Are bilionairs white meat?

question, how come beef is so cheap it's it takes so much resources?
if it's just subsidies, then we should get rid of them

Also it's morally the right thing to do if you have the choice.

I personally don't eat red meat, and I agree it's worse for climate change, but I've heard the argument that meat from larger animals is more ethical, because to get the same amount of meat from smaller animals means a much larger number of them have to die, and I'm not sure how to weigh that against the climate, assuming that someone isn't going to give up meat entirely.
- That doesn't add up at all because cattle ranches are notoriously known for pretty low quality of life environments if they arent pasture raised or free range
  Then again that basically goes for all farm animals that aren't considered free range, but it's a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.
  
  The solution for meat eaters is something like a farm co-op where you can literally drive by your food and see how it is. We used to buy half a cow from a local farmer and his cows were in nice fields etc.
  
  but it’s a lot easier to have free range chickens than it is to have cows doing the same.
  I don't know about that, it's pretty difficult to keep (what I would consider) genuinely free range chickens because of predators and various other factors (the need to keep them away from wild birds because of bird flu comes to mind), and the commercial definition of free range doesn't necessarily guarantee a good quality of life. There's also how meat chickens are mostly all a specific type of crossbreed that is perpetually hungry, prone to cannibalism and health problems, and not meant to live longer than a few months.
  But even if you could say that the average chicken raised for meat is better off than the average cow raised for meat, there's still how you need vastly more of them for the same amount of meat, so if their lives are still a net negative and you're weighing it by sum of individual experiences, it could be considered worse from a utilitarian perspective because of the numbers.
- That's like saying "it's more ethical if Nazis killed only adults, because they take up more space than kids in a gas chamber."
  The needless suffering and killing of any animal is horrifically unethical, and if we can, we should actively stop participating in it.
  There are a ton of mental gymnastics used to justify the consumption of animals. Almost none apply to modern civilization.
- Plants are great and sidestep this quandary entirely.
  
  Sure, but this is more addressed to the people who do not intend to go vegan, but are considering replacing the red meat in their diet with other meat for ethical reasons.

Until Exxon and BP are no longer in business and global shipping transitions to zero emissions, there is nothing an individual human can do that will have an impact in any way on global climate. They problem is systemic, not individual

Save the planet! Eat Deez Nutz!

I've been the bane of chickens all my life...

Accounting for emissions per kilogram isn't that fair, can we account for emissions per 1000 kilocalorie? Or emissions per protein?

The most important takeaway for the target group:
“If you’re trying to reduce your carbon footprint, eat less beef,” Rose advises. “You don’t have to give it up entirely, but cutting back or making substitutions can make a significant impact.”
Any fewer beef meals you have helps. We're also just talking beef here. If you choose pork, chicken, fish, or even game meat over beef you're helping the climate.
- It's also important to consider that not only isn't this about quitting entirely, it's also specifically about beef (or other comparable meat). White meats in particular are still not good for the environment, but already like an order of magnitude better.
  It's just that beef in particular - also a type of meat that is frankly not even that good if I'm being honest, we're all just used to considering it the best 🤷 - is absolutely horrible for the environment.
- Any fewer beef meals you have helps.
  i don't think that's true, if meat production continues to grow.
  
  i don’t think that’s true, if meat production continues to grow.
  If people are eating fewer beef meals, where is the beef production growth coming from in your theoretical?

We need significant subsidies invested into vat grown meat. But now Big Ag is getting it banned in every state it can. Texas and Florida have already banned it.

Taking planes, another big CO2 contributor. The sky is full of planes burning fuel.

We could really use a movement to get more people to try adding beans, peas, and tofu to their grocery list. I wasn't able to stick to not eating meat, but sticking to eating less meat by adding alternatives to my grocery list turned out to be quite easy.

Not having kids is a whole order of magnitude more impactful. Or even just having one kid instead of 2 or 3+.

For me, this wasn't too hard. Cheese on the other hand..that will be a challenge
- Coffee and Dark Chocolate are pretty danced high on the list, too.
  
  Sure, but it's normalized to kgs of product. With two lattes a day, 2kg of coffee lasts me more than 2 months. 2kgs per person of beef would last many households less than a week.
  If you were to normalize to average daily consumption, coffee and chocolate would be significantly lower ranked. It's ok to keep some indulgences while focusing on higher impact reductions.

Yes, that is great on an individual level.
But the best thing to do overall for our environment and climate is supporting protest movements, especially those employing nonviolent civil disobedience. Per pound/dollar/euro, they reduce emissions the most. But if you can, attend events in person.
This should not neglect that we need both individual and system change and they depend on each other. You should reduce your meat consumption and advocate for a world where everyone reduces meat consumption (and even become vegan or at least vegetarian).

I've got a special trick where I can make pretty much the entire internet rage at me. Check it out:
I'm vegetarian.

You don't have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.