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COP26 / Climate Action


Sphinx

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I’m not going to lie, I considered the Minor Annoyance thread for the wave of “Eat vegetables instead of meat, SAVE THE PLANET” adverts but this is as good a place as any.
 

If my moral compass hasn’t been swayed away from consuming animals bred in captivity for the purpose of eventually dying so I can consume them by the fact that… well, it sounds inherently evil, doesn’t it?? - then Stephen Fry telling me I need to eat chickpeas instead of chicken for the environment isn’t going to make a jot of difference. In the midst of a global pandemic I think it’s a bit shitty that adverts are being commissioned that will hurt farmers incomes because they rely on cows rather than lentils for a livelihood, on top of resenting being judged by my own telly for hurting the planet as well as innocent animals. It’s like living with a vegan that jumps out of the cupboard every 15 minutes and goes “Still eating meat? Fuck you, you’re an evil cunt.”

I was pretty happy with what I do to be environmentally conscious and still am, I’m not switching to salad, life’s miserable enough as it is. If what goes to landfill is still on the agenda then they could do with looking at the amount of excess packaging (still) that gets included with an absolute litany of non fragile and non perishable goods that are delivered, across multiple industries - tech, clothing and more. The delivery/courier industry could also do with massive improvement, it should be facilitated for more businesses to be able to offer specific dates of delivery when using courier services to deliver to reduce wasted attempts (especially couriers that also deliver Saturday as well as the week) to reduce petrol emissions from drivers making pointless journeys that then have to be repeated when people aren’t home. While I’m at it, as long as Johnson flies places within Britain instead of taking a train, I’m slightly reticent to think about my dinner choices in comparison re: wilful negligence to the environment.

Maybe it sounds selfish that I’m not prepared to cut back on Richmond sausages to help climate change. I know people will tell me there are plant based alternatives that “taste just as good” but New Coke failed for a reason, and I like what I like. Maybe I’m just a bad person but being preached to about how I’m hurting the environment if I don’t eat less meat is something I can do without. I have no doubt this post might not go over particularly well but sometimes its better than bottling it up.

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42 minutes ago, air_raid said:

I’m not going to lie, I considered the Minor Annoyance thread for the wave of “Eat vegetables instead of meat, SAVE THE PLANET” adverts but this is as good a place as any.
 

If my moral compass hasn’t been swayed away from consuming animals bred in captivity for the purpose of eventually dying so I can consume them by the fact that… well, it sounds inherently evil, doesn’t it?? - then Stephen Fry telling me I need to eat chickpeas instead of chicken for the environment isn’t going to make a jot of difference. In the midst of a global pandemic I think it’s a bit shitty that adverts are being commissioned that will hurt farmers incomes because they rely on cows rather than lentils for a livelihood, on top of resenting being judged by my own telly for hurting the planet as well as innocent animals. It’s like living with a vegan that jumps out of the cupboard every 15 minutes and goes “Still eating meat? Fuck you, you’re an evil cunt.”

I was pretty happy with what I do to be environmentally conscious and still am, I’m not switching to salad, life’s miserable enough as it is. If what goes to landfill is still on the agenda then they could do with looking at the amount of excess packaging (still) that gets included with an absolute litany of non fragile and non perishable goods that are delivered, across multiple industries - tech, clothing and more. The delivery/courier industry could also do with massive improvement, it should be facilitated for more businesses to be able to offer specific dates of delivery when using courier services to deliver to reduce wasted attempts (especially couriers that also deliver Saturday as well as the week) to reduce petrol emissions from drivers making pointless journeys that then have to be repeated when people aren’t home. While I’m at it, as long as Johnson flies places within Britain instead of taking a train, I’m slightly reticent to think about my dinner choices in comparison re: wilful negligence to the environment.

Maybe it sounds selfish that I’m not prepared to cut back on Richmond sausages to help climate change. I know people will tell me there are plant based alternatives that “taste just as good” but New Coke failed for a reason, and I like what I like. Maybe I’m just a bad person but being preached to about how I’m hurting the environment if I don’t eat less meat is something I can do without. I have no doubt this post might not go over particularly well but sometimes its better than bottling it up.

Morning Piers. I mean… not even sure where you start with a post like that. But if you’re not willing to do anything to help, then I don’t know what you’re expecting to hear. 
 

I thought vegan and vegetarians were weirdos. How could you not eat meat? I’d eat meat for 2 meals a day at least. But I couldn’t carry on watching documentaries on the environment without willing to do something about it to help. I gave myself a month, it’s almost 5 years now, and my wife and daughter have done the same, without my encouragement.

As for the New Coke argument, Coke has changed, more then once since then and people get over it. But forget that example, it’s an odd take. Because one thing didn’t work 40 years ago, that means nothing can replace things. Go and try a greggs vegan sausage roll, infact try the meat free Richmond sausages. Some meat alternatives are better then others. But there are foods I’d never eaten before going vegetarian like chickpeas, sweet potatoes  and lentils which I now love. 
 

If you don’t understand climate change and don’t want to make changes, I kind of get it, but to know how bad something is and not want to change is just lazy. Even having a meatless Monday each week is better then nothing.

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1 hour ago, air_raid said:

I think it’s a bit shitty that adverts are being commissioned that will hurt farmers incomes because they rely on cows rather than lentils for a livelihood,

As a rapist said, they can simply train for another job. 

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I'm still a meat eater, I find it very difficult to change routines & habits and have a lot of weird texture issues but I'm aware it's something I should work to be better at and have been reducing the amount I eat even if I haven't yet managed to cut it out entirely.

But the answer to anyone's livelihood being changed by consumer trends isn't to continue consuming regardless of effect, in a just society it would be a strong social safety net that ensures consumer changes don't permanently ruin someone's life. I understand it's not the world we live in but I'd rather spend time pushing for that than railing against change.

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I'm not going to decry any meat eaters. I think it's too big a part of who we are and is something that needs to continue to change over time. Keep having the conversation, keep running the ads that annoy raider so much, keep making the alternatives genuinely attractive. Meat, and fish, are huge industry and will probably die out one day but right now, they're huge for a lot of people and countries and it needs balance. IMO anyway.

Who I will jump on are the proud as punch dinosaurs who feel the need to jump into everything to tell the world they ain't for changing. Not accusing raider of that, he's just contributed to a topic that asked the question. But when a chippy advertises tofu fish for instance, you get tons of people either slagging it or announcing "I'll still be eating fish thank you very much" or worse, some who will suggest they're not eating there because of it. They still serve fish, dickhead. Do what you want and let others get on with what they want. These gammon are way worse than vegans. The dirt worst though are the ones who think they've found some massive gotcha. "Still fried in beef dripping though, eh?" Who the fuck is frying in beef dripping anyway? Fucking idiots.

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the "hurting farmers' income" point is a bit disingenuous, and I say that as someone from a farming background. Most farmers make considerably (sometimes more than 10x) as much from subsidies as from agriculture, or else make so much of their income from subsidies that they wouldn't be sustainable without them. I don't know how this does/will work outside of the EU, but historically those subsidies have been determined based on the amount of land owned rather than the amount of food produced.

Personally, I think not eating meat is the one thing we can do as individuals that might have an actual meaningful effect, as if enough people do it, it will continue to reshape the agriculture industry - which is in desperate need of reform anyway - and do away with a considerable amount of needless food waste in the process. But then I also recognise that I came to that decision having already not eating meat for different reasons for at least a decade, so I'm prepared to consider that it may be a case of finding post-hoc justification for my prior choices.

1 minute ago, tiger_rick said:

Who I will jump on are the proud as punch dinosaurs who feel the need to jump into everything to tell the world they ain't for changing. Not accusing raider of that, he's just contributed to a topic that asked the question. But when a chippy advertises tofu fish for instance, you get tons of people either slagging it or announcing "I'll still be eating fish thank you very much" or worse, some who will suggest they're not eating there because of it. They still serve fish, dickhead. Do what you want and let others get on with what they want. These gammon are way worse than vegans. The dirt worst though are the ones who think they've found some massive gotcha. "Still fried in beef dripping though, eh?" Who the fuck is frying in beef dripping anyway? Fucking idiots.

I was just last night watching an episode of Frankie Boyle's New World Order where Kiri Pritchard-McClean brought up exactly that sort of person, who thankfully I seem to encounter less and less these days (likely a combination of vegetarianism and veganism becoming far more common, and me being in metropolitan liberal elite country now), that will constantly try and find insane hypotheticals like, "what if your child was dying and all you could feed them was meat?" or "what if you were stuck on a desert island with nothing to eat but Spam?", as if that by conceding to either of those points they're somehow catching you eat. I worked with someone - at a fucking conservation charity, of all places - who used to say, "yeah, but if people stopped eating meat, they'd have to kill all the cows, wouldn't they? How could you support that?". What do you think they're doing to all the cows at the moment, mate?

The people who are the first to jump into the comment section to bang on about bacon and how much meat they'll continue eating to own the libs or whatever are also the people who'll tell endless jokes about how vegans never shut up about being vegans, without a shred of irony.

 

One last thing, though, which is that a lot of the companies making meat-free food are still massive corporations, so "go meat free to save the planet" is a marketing strategy to sell more sausages as much as it's anything else, the same way more and more have changed their wording from "Vegan" to "Plant-Based" to try and avoid the preachy connotations of "Vegan". No ethical consumption under capitalism, not even meat free consumption.

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The climate change issue is so disheartening. I didn't care ten years ago, but in the last decade I have cut meat to pretty much once a week. I've got the household really good at recycling and we are getting better at not wasting food (always room for improvement with this though). My wife signed up to some eco things, I don't know exactly what it is to be honest but we get dishwasher tablets and all kinds of things through the post now. I've trained myself to just use my metal bottle rather than keep buying plastic ones. The list goes on

So we are making all this effort from an individual point of view, and then you look at emissions from factories and flights etc and think what's the point? Its a fart in a hurricane. 

I read somewhere that ONE transatlantic flight emits more emissions that the entire F1 season including all practice sessions and qualifying. I am well aware transporting the cars around the world causes a hell of a lot of emissions! But an interesting fact nonetheless. 

The culture comes from the top down so we need the people at the top to make big, drastic decisions to tackle this. Hopefully this will then filter down to us mere mortals and push us to keep doing more.

I'll keep trying, and keep learning. For example I didn't even click that keeping an old car running is better for the environment than building a new one but that makes complete sense, and something I will bear in mind in the future.

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another thing I just remembered from Frankie Boyle's show was George Monbiot talking about how plastics companies in the US in the '50s invented the concept of the "litterbug" and campaigned against littering as a way to blame the consumer, rather than the producers, for the amount of plastic waste they were creating.

Again, it all comes down to governments and major corporations pushing individual responsibility when that's a drop in the ocean compared to what they're doing. It's one of the reasons Extinction Rebellion piss me off - there's so much performative, guilt-assuaging bullshit; how does camping on Blackheath at the height of summer and painting kids' faces while you fly your logo on a flag even substantially "raise awareness", let alone put any pressure on BP to cut their carbon emissions, or the fishing industry to use less plastic in the ocean?

We know which companies are the worst offenders at this. Any climate activism that isn't specifically targeted at them, at pressuring banks and advertising agencies to divest funding from them, and at governments to either penalise them or invest in alternatives, is an abject waste of time.

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47 minutes ago, waters44 said:

I read somewhere that ONE transatlantic flight emits more emissions that the entire F1 season including all practice sessions and qualifying. I am well aware transporting the cars around the world causes a hell of a lot of emissions! But an interesting fact nonetheless. 

That’s only a fact if you cherry pick which bits you want. The US Grand Prix involved a hell of a lot of transatlantic flights. Even if every race was held at the same track, you have to factor in how those in attendance got there etc. 

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