this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Whataboutism doesn't super duper help with the problem of meat.
Like just looking at land usage, 80% of agricultural land is used for live stock or growing food for live stock. While only 20% calories come from live stock.
It's just so inefficient use of water and land. Even if every billionaire vanished, we will run out of clean water and good land if population grows and meat consumption doesn't.
Sure, but maybe we could start quantifying the scale of flights to COP28 in terms of hamburgers consumed? I'm tired of the burden to correct for industrial sized pollution being placed on the backs of consumers. Yes. My eating almost no beef over the course of a year helps. I can cut out the 10-12 cheeseburgers I eat. Will my 12 cheeseburgers a year balance a single analyst flight to COP28?
The reason I say it's whataboutism, is because both need to be fixed unrelated to one another.
We need to get the upper class to stop being awful and we also need to get eating habits that are long term sustainable for an ever growing population with a shrinking supply of fresh water, which farming requires a massive share of.
I completely agree on that, and while I'm obviously being a bit snarky, the best pressure we could put on rich people and industries would be to frame this as "we're sacrificing so THEY can live large". So a "hamburger index" isn't necessarily out of order.
It's not "whataboutism" to frame the scale of each contributing aspect of addressing climate change. Cutting a single rich person's private jet flights by a flight a month will continue a LOT more than me cutting my remaining dozen cheeseburgers a year. I'm down to do that if the rich person also is willing to cut those flights though.
If "people are sacrificing their lives so I can be rich" would even remotely affect any one of their actions, we wouldnt be here discussing this. Sadly.