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. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
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-ton1-ton hole in your personal carbon footprint. That’s 10-20% of an average European’s annual footprint - or100%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.Tonnes of CO2e, averages:
1.60 a roundtrip transatlantic flight 2.40 one year car use 58.60 one year for every child you haveChart, 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.
People always conveneintly leave out flying. Flying is one of the single worst things you can do.
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.
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 find it really hard to give up, personally. If I didn’t fly I would basically never see my family.