I mean, I’m 90% veg for environmental reasons mostly. But every time we share this narrative that the effort needs to be on us while the true culprits are literally upping their consumption is fucking sick. Don’t guilt people for not doing 1% of what is needed while the people/corpos doing the other 99% are pushing this “personal responsibility” narrative and literally created the language to deflect blame. We should be way more upset and spend 20000x the effort shaming and shutting down those organizations.
It doesn’t matter if you put 2000x your effort into something if it has no effect. If you spend all your day shaming these corporations on lemmy that won’t do anything. So the question should be what actions can make an effect?
Protests don’t really do much. Electoral politics, at least here in the u.s. , are completely captured by these corporations and will never truly challenge them. I doubt what just happened in NYC is a valid tactic either. A revolution or even just a general strike is pretty much out of the picture right now.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them. The meat industry is burning the Amazon and emitting tons of methane, boycott them and eat less / no meat. The fossil fuel industry is lobbying congress to deny climate change while increasing production and emitting more every year, boycott them and buy less gas by driving less or taking public transit.
In this capitalist hellscape the only real choice we have is of consumption, and choosing what to consume and more importantly what not to consume is the only real way we can effect the system.
The best and only way to get at the mega corporations causing all the climate change is to boycott them.
Sorry to say this, but these boycotts rarely do anything. If enough people would boycott some company, or business practice to matter only a little bit, then there also would be enough people to effect politics to try to get better regulation in place, via electoralism, direct action of just getting actively involved in politics.
I absolutely agree with you. Meat is something that has a big impact on the climate and this is something that we as the consumers actively can control. If society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint. However, this is nothing that is possible without the government supporting this change.
society decides to buy less and instead higher quality meat the demand will go down and therefore the CO2 footprint
this isn’t causal
I may have articulated myself badly. What I mean is the following: If I decide to instead eat e. G. 1kg of low quality meat every week I am responsible (by eating meat) for an amount x of CO2 emissions. If I now switch to only 500g of higher quality meat the amount of CO2 emissions goes down to about 1/2x(I know this isn’t exactly true, due to the lost efficiency, but for bigger reductions its absolutely true, that the amount if CO2 you emitted goes down).
I wouldn’t worry much about the “I’m doing X more to offset you doing Y!” crowd. Probably a few act like that but firstly they’ll say it to everyone they don’t like (and one meat eater eating 2x meat can’t feasibly offset more than one vegan, so their impact is limited) and secondly most of them are just ragebaiting.
The same people post shit like “omg getting a Starbucks!!!” under videos calling for boycotts due to Gaza.
I’m definitely not worried about the people saying they’ll spite-eat more meat. I’m talking about us putting so much effort into shaming people for not going veg—so I’m talking about the opposite.
The blame isn’t at our feet. It’s not on us. That’s the companies literally pitting us against each other, baiting us into shaming other .00002% contributors to climate change while they, the true 99.99998% culprits, increase their output and greenwash their literal mass murder crimes.
Your numbers are way off here. (https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/research-report-carbon-inequality-era.pdf ) in 2025, the top 1% only accounted for 15% of global emissions. The rest are still generated by the general public. Sure, per person, the richest 1% have a disproportionally higher impact, but on a large scale, they dont matter that much.
Pushing this narrative takes the incentive of reducing your own impact away.