It’s kind of funny, having the calves slaughtered to get the milk that is naturally meant for them is considered vegetarian (as long as you personally don’t eat the veal).

If they’re kept on abusive factory farms, that’s still vegetarian.

When the dairy cows gets their throats slit because milk production drops below profitablity after ~5 years, the milk is still seen as vegetarian (as long as someone else buys the meat).

No matter how much death and suffering takes place at the farm, the milk is seen as vegetarian. But at rennet, that’s where they draw the line.

I agree that there’s no way around petrochemicals, and we’ll have to offset the emissions to reach net 0.

Gas heating has an alternative though. Heat pumps are already cheaper to run compared to gas heating, even without any carbon offsetting.

The pressure to reach net 0 is only gonna grow as the impacts of climate change get worse. To reach net 0 we’ll have to offset all significant emissions. When the offsets are priced in, using gas heaters becomes insanely expensive in comparison to heat pumps.

It’s just a matter of time until gas heating is essentially dead. It might be in 10 years or 20 years, but there’s no way around it.

But the majority of us loves our animals

And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.

I’d be very interested in the source for this…

America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html

The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.

Much worse for who?

My point is: if police were completely abolished, conservatives and the far right would feel very unsafe and immediately form militias that enforce their values. That would be much worse for everyone who doesn’t share their values, of course.

I get that in many countries, police is badly regulated and you might say that this wouldn’t actually change much, but I’d rather seek more accountability for police, compared to a complete abolishion, leaving a power vaccum that’ll be filled by right wing militias with zero accountability.

Divesting seems good to me though, much of the police is certainly overfunded (due to law and order populism) and does useless shit (like the war on drugs), while education, social workers and programs against poverty are severely underfunded. Changing this would surely help a lot with crime reduction and other issues.

Thanks for the links by the way, I will look more into them when I have more time to see if my concerns regarding abolishion are addressed.

So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.

We could tax greenhouse gas emissions to internalize the environmental cost.

If the beef burger would cost 2x more than the plant-based burger (which basically tastes the same but has 90% fewer emissions), most people would choose the plant-based one. That would massively reduce food related ghg emissions, and also create a huge incentive to develop better alternatives/lab meat.

So 0°F was defined as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (why in the world?). Originally, 90°F was set as human body temperature, which was later changed first to 96°F, and now it’s about 98.6°F.

Celsius is just: 0°C is the freezing temperature of water 100°C is the boiling temperature of water

Nobody uses a scale between -18 and 38. People in countries using Celsius just learned as a child that body temperature is 38°C, that’s all. -18°C has no special meaning to us.

At 0°C outside it’s freezing (32°F). 10°C is quite cool (50°F), you’ll need a jacket. 20°C is a comfortable temperature for me, if it’s sunny (68°F). 30°C is getting rather warm (86°F). 40°C is hell outside, or a bad fever (104°F). To boil water, heat it to 100°C (212°F).

I get that this seems confusing at first when you’re used to completely different orientation points, but for people who are used to C, it’s very intuitive.

The good ones tend to do something in-between, with a market based economy, but good regulations, solid welfare, and democracy. Scandinavian countries have the happiest populations in the world, maybe we should try to learn from them.

Unfortunately corporations get more power over time instead of less. They have an ever growing pile of money to buy media and politicians to push their interests, that’s probably the greatest challenge of democracy.

How is this anti western? Pretty much every country in the world is capitalist by now.

I got really fucking tired of being called fucking stupid for buying meat free alternatives.

Sorry that you met condescending assholes. Some people just have the urge to feel superior over others for absolutely silly reasons. The rise of meat alternatives is one of the few things that make me optimistic for the future, along with renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps. Factory farms are so much worse for the environment and animals, of course we should embrace alternatives to the worst option.

Prices also go down with more competition. There basically wasn’t any market for meat alternatives 10 years ago, now it’s growing quite fast. In 5 years, many of them will likely be cheaper than meat.

People live completely healthy without meat, so how is this relevant? Even if we were biologically adapted to hunting, that doesn’t make it ethical. Ducks are designed to rape, surely that doesn’t make rape ethical. Or does it in your view?

Raising animals for food is not incompatible with caring and making all humanly possible efforts to assure the animals live a good life.

People won’t ever stop buying from factory farms as long as it’s socially acceptable, or cheaper options with a close enough taste become available.

“Nearly 99 percent of farmed animals in the US are factory farmed. There are around 250,000 farms in the US. Every day, 23 million land animals are killed on these farms – around 266 every second”

https://animalequality.org/blog/2022/10/14/factory-farming-facts/

I don’t know a single meat eater that doesn’t eat factory farmed meat, including my former self. Do you really believe that people will suddenly start asking about living conditions in restaurants and supermarkets, pay a higher price, and boycot all factory farmed animal products? Speaking of romantizing. This seems like a complete fantasy to me. The vast majority will always buy the cheapest options they can find, no questions asked.

Defending the notion that systematic exploitation is fine, as long as you stab them “humanely” in the throat, provides the ideological basis for treating animals as products, reducing the cost by treating them as worst as possible. Like most people do right now.

As I see it, the only realistic way to end factory farming is if either plant-based meat alternatives or lab-grown meat are produced on a large scale to become price competitive. Which seems to be where things are going for many meat categories, although customer acceptance still has a long way to go.

Humans are animals as well. Just keep them as lifestock (e.g. on a cotton field or labor camp as we have done in the past), and killing them should be completely fine according to your logic. Who cares about the victims if we just declare them lifestock. Great ethics!

Unlike the other situations you mentioned I can point to a ludicrous amount of evidence that your body is made to sometimes eat animal proteins.

The experts would disagree.

It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/

And 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year. It’s a fucking bloodbath. So driving a car is similar to intentionally murdering people, of course. Don’t pretend you are innocent if you drive a car.

not eating meat has been scientifically proven to reduce your health due to protein starvation

Citation needed

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/

Now look at what humans do to cows, or even to other humans. We commit atrocities at a scale that no other species has ever achieved. According to your logic, humans deserve to be treated even worse than cows.