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.
Veganism is good, necessary even, but more than voting we need to actually overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism. Profit will destroy the planet unless we take control of the reigns from capital.
Yeah plants, the only thing that creates Oxygen
On a planet where 95-99% of people consume animal products, and still heavily participate in the systems of animal captivity, brutality, and exploitation; can you explain how overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with socialism is going to make a vegan world happen?
Socialism will not automatically create vegan world, it hasn’t done so anywhere socialism exists. However, it does swap from profits as the end-all, be-all of how society is organized, to one where humanity can better plan production and meet people’s needs. If capital is in the driver’s seat, then the meat industry will continue to perpetuate said brutality and environmental destruction unimpeded. If humanity is in the driver’s seat, then we can actually work against what would be assured in a profit driven model.
The swap to veganism will never be instant, but it will be largely impossible without human supremacy over capital.
That’s a pretty fair assessment, though it’s hard to imagine that being much less of an uphill battle. People still place a significant amount of their identity in what they eat. In the US at least, a culture of perceived personal freedoms still heavily prevails. Even though vegans are already relegated to trying to appeal to people to change their individual choices voluntarily, people still frequently accuse us of militancy and being tyrannical - even though we’ve virtually never even had real representation in government, aside from very small hard-won anti animal abuse laws that have resulted from extremely risky investigative operations.
Any governmental system that makes any attempts to shift us all in a more vegan direction would quite easily provoke significant backlash and possibly even the threat of overthrow.
Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, but it’s nearly impossible under capitalism. What would realistically happen is the state would heavily subsidize plant based food and develop economies of scale, and increase requirements on animal products for more “humane” treatment, until gradually animal products are phased out culturally. A top-down command for animal liberation would be commandist if the masses don’t want it, so raising political consiousness would be a key part of that struggle.