As horrible as those people are, it’s not like they’re just belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for fun. They’re fulfilling demand. That 40% wouldn’t disappear just by spreading ownership of the factories to more people. That’s not to say that individual action is the only thing that works. Regulations need to be put in place to curb emissions, incentives should reward producers for investing & transitioning to more sustainable practices, and yes, monopolies need to get split up.
But the fact remains that some products are just bad for the environment. As as long as people continue buying those products they’ll keep being produced. And when animal agriculture accounts for about as many emissions as the entire transportation industry, this seems like one of the easier steps to make.
The “my actions won’t end this problem so I don’t need to do anything” mentality never comes up in any other field (politeness, crimes, social change, voting). Yeah, choosing to never hold open doors for others wouldn’t noticeably affect the global rate, but I doubt you’d use that logic to justify being rude.
Thats because we all have been raised to be polite and hold doors open. We have also been raised to consume anything and everything to satisfy our greed because it is our right as rulers of earth. It is the standard and noone criticizes you for it, so why not keep that privilege? It is apparently very hard and takes a long time to get rid of this mentality in the whole population, especially since the most influential ones fight for keeping it.
As horrible as those people are, it’s not like they’re just belching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for fun. They’re fulfilling demand. That 40% wouldn’t disappear just by spreading ownership of the factories to more people. That’s not to say that individual action is the only thing that works. Regulations need to be put in place to curb emissions, incentives should reward producers for investing & transitioning to more sustainable practices, and yes, monopolies need to get split up.
But the fact remains that some products are just bad for the environment. As as long as people continue buying those products they’ll keep being produced. And when animal agriculture accounts for about as many emissions as the entire transportation industry, this seems like one of the easier steps to make.
The “my actions won’t end this problem so I don’t need to do anything” mentality never comes up in any other field (politeness, crimes, social change, voting). Yeah, choosing to never hold open doors for others wouldn’t noticeably affect the global rate, but I doubt you’d use that logic to justify being rude.
Thats because we all have been raised to be polite and hold doors open. We have also been raised to consume anything and everything to satisfy our greed because it is our right as rulers of earth. It is the standard and noone criticizes you for it, so why not keep that privilege? It is apparently very hard and takes a long time to get rid of this mentality in the whole population, especially since the most influential ones fight for keeping it.