Woke Progressives: Actually, We Should Curb Meat Eating To Fight Climate Change

Is the War on Beef really a nothingburger?

Woke progressives already want the power to determine what words you can say on the internet, whether you can hold a professional class job in this country based on your political and cultural views and whether you can attend prestigious universities or serve in the military or law enforcement. As we saw last night, they now want the power to determine who can fly on planes in the United States.

PMCs have already created a whole byzantine structure of little rules around what they call “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” in academia and the corporate world and force their workers to jump through hoops which are even more ridiculous and tyrannical than the court etiquette of Ancien Régime France. In those days, a servant didn’t have to navigate 20,000 different genders and combinations of pronouns in order to avoid “misgendering” someone who can claim to be offended and summon a mob to cancel you. These days we have the internet which means you are being constantly monitored and have to watch what you say in public throughout your entire life because all it takes is one comment to destroy your career.

These people have a far more perverse “authoritarian” mentality than we do. We only want to defend and conserve the traditional social order. In contrast, these people want to construct a police state to control and micromanage thoughts and words. These same totalitarian busybody mentality that wants to police your innermost thoughts to detect and destroy various -isms and -phobias going on inside your own mind also wants to determine other things like, say, the sort of food that you should be able to afford to eat or how you should heat your home or the size of your home or the vehicle that you happen to drive.

If you don’t think these people are going there with “Let Them Eat Beyond Burgers,” you haven’t been paying much attention to the opposition. The slippery slope is very real.

Truthout:

“These right-wing claims are ridiculous on their face, but the University of Michigan study that Kudlow and others took out of context is real climate science. After all, scientists say the global food supply chain is responsible for 26 percent of climate-warming emissions. While not connected White House climate policy, the study adds to a large body of research showing that reducing meat consumption — and, perhaps more importantly, reducing factory farming and mass beef production that destroys lush ecosystems in places like the Amazon — is essential for addressing the climate emergency. The study also models how a shift toward plant-based diets would drastically reduce climate-warming emissions in the United States. …

Again, these scenarios are completely theoretical; they are models of what the future could look like if we eat less meat and animal products. Of course, what the actual future will look like is completely dependent on the decisions that we humans make. To achieve a 50 percent reduction in animal product consumption, or to replace 90 percent of the beef we currently consume with plant-based alternatives such as soy protein and vegan meat alternatives, would require substantial changes to agriculture and the food delivery system.

Since there is clearly no government plan to mandate Impossible Burgers, changing the food system will require changes in consumer demand. In short, a large chunk of the population would have to choose to eat less meat. …

After looking at the climate data, grilling Brussels sprouts or asparagus instead of ground beef and hotdogs might sound pretty tasty. You’ll need some protein as well, and while there’s plenty of meatless burgers to choose from nowadays, there’s nothing quite like marinating some old-fashioned grilled barbecue tofu. Who knows, your insides and the Earth might thank you.”

The Guardian:

“Factchecking all this is largely futile, of course: the people who get het up about an imaginary war on burgers tend to not let reality get in the way of their feelings. …

Ultimately, however, it is not just the right that has an unhealthy obsession with meat. Global meat consumption keeps rising: the amount of meat consumed per person nearly doubled in the past 50 years. “Plant-based” eating may have become fashionable, yet the world is on track to consume more meat in 2021 than ever before. That is a problem because the meat industry has a huge carbon footprint. While banning people from eating animal products obviously isn’t feasible, we desperately need to find ways to reduce global meat consumption. Food for thought while you enjoy a plant-based beer, anyway.”

Axios:

“Epicurious will no longer publish beef recipes in what is being called a “pro-planet” shift, the popular digital food magazine has announced.

Driving the news: The Condé Nast-owned publication’s Maggie Hoffman and David Tamarkin wrote in a post Monday that the decision was “solely about sustainability, about not giving airtime to one of the world’s worst climate offenders.”

The Epicurious article noted that nearly nearly 15% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide come from livestock and 61% of those emissions “can be traced back to beef.”

Our thought bubble, via Axios’ Bryan Walsh:Epicurious’ move comes as beef becomes the latest front in an ongoing culture war.

Per-capita beef consumption in the U.S. has fallen in recent years, with poultry taking up the slack and new plant-based meat products, like Beyond Meat’s new 3.0 burger, rising in popularity.”

The Verge:

“There already are plenty of people who abstain from meat for environmental, cultural, or personal reasons. And if someone does want to reduce their individual carbon footprint, there’s evidence that cutting down on meat is one of the most effective ways to do that. The best way to support people who do want to eat less meat might be to ensure they have access to the foods they actually want. Again, choosing what you eat is easier said than done when you don’t have fresh foods or culturally specific ingredients nearby.

There are even more disparities to consider when it comes to food and the climate crisis. Not everyone is equally responsible for the problem. Researchers have found that the typical diet of white Americans had higher per capita greenhouse gas emissions compared to that of Black and Latinx Americans. …”

Technology Review:

“Bill Gates made headlines earlier this year for saying that “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef” in an interview with MIT Technology Review about the release of his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Although he recognized the political difficulty of telling Americans they can’t eat any more red meat, Gates said he sees real potential in plant-based alternatives from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. …

Eating less meat, particularly beef and lamb, is certainly a change that many people can make to cut their carbon footprints. But we must not lay our hopes on the prospect of billions of people putting down their forks at once. Rather, we should use all the tools at our disposal. That means supporting dietary changes, alternative proteins, low-impact livestock, and other approaches to reduce the downsides of meat production and give us more sustainable options for what to eat.”

Come on.

It is clear what the actual position is here.

These people like Bill Gates and Nanny Bloomberg want to reduce beef consumption in order to reduce carbon emissions to fight climate change. They want to undermine industrial animal agriculture in order to do so. They really do have a problem with you eating a steak or a hamburger. There are too many working class and middle class people eating meat and that has got to change.

Here’s a short list of things that these people might find offensive at my house:

• Living in a low density rural area as far away as possible from White college-educated, upper middle class urban shitlibs
• Living in a Southern state with our own state and local police which they do not control
• Guns, obviously, which have to go
• Confederate flags and memorabilia which are “hate symbols”
• Being a married cisgendered White Christian Southern male and thus an oppressor of BIPOC people who are held down by systematic racism
• Gas guzzling vehicles which emit carbon
• Probably at least a hundred books which contain offensive ideas
• Laptops, tablets and smartphones which have access to social media apps which are potential conduits for “misinformation” and “hate speech” or the expression of a different point of view
• Encrypted apps which facilitate communicate with likeminded people outside of the view of creepy hall monitors and “extremism” experts
• In the refrigerator and freezer, there would be red meat in there
• Gas and electricity are not expensive enough in my area
• A house that sits on land which was ceded by the Creek Indians in the 1830s and is thus a legacy of “white supremacy” and Anglo-Saxon settler-colonialism
• The -isms and -phobias which are lodged inside my own mind
• Words which might come out of my mouth on my own property
• Jokes about these people on my website

These things are all problematic in our new progressive era.

The War On Beef isn’t a culture war nothingburger. It has been clear where they are going with this for several years now.