How am I the one arguing in bad faith? You’re swapping one argument for another. The reason I quoted Naoza’s comment was so everyone could read what I was responded to, particularly the part that said “if everyone went vegan right now”.
So everything you just said is irrelevant. That’s not how our animal agriculture works right now.
You do realize we are not a hive mind collective, right? Other people’s arguments are not my arguments. I do hope that’s obvious to you. Here are some more words with emphasis.
See, I can speak asshole too.
Must be so difficult being the only reasonable person in the room.
So I found out that the US has banned Brazilian beef since 2017 due to health concerns. The other thing I found out is that China is transferring their Soy Demand from the US to the Brazil, mostly due our asshole President.
If there were major trade law that had to be passed to save the planet, I’d be completely onboard for that. This “Supply follows Demand” BS that pushed onto the individual consumer, I’m sort of done with.
Yep. And vegan food, thanks to the common use of Palm oil, has contributed to a huge amount of deforestation across Asia and south America, particularly in Thailand, Columbia, Indonesia, and Malaysia, clear-cutting huge amounts of land for farming Oil Palms, far larger than the current fires in the Amazon.
The world is a vastly complex, interconnected place. A disposable bic on your desk might contain the products of dozens of countries, in a pen that cost you twenty cents and you’d never think about for a second. The problem isn’t the product, it’s the system that produced it. The laws of economics, like supply following demand, might hold true in an econ classroom, but the world is rarely that neat. Regulation is needed, desperately, and while individual action is good - hey, it might not do much, but if we all do what we can, the world will just be that little bit better, that’s not nothing - but regulation is what we need to strive for, not just in the US, but around the world.
I don’t think there’s an issue per se with any “laws of economics” here; more so with political statements that masquerade as being based on economics.
Plenty of economists would agree that problems like this require government intervention, though there’s important questions about what kinds of government intervention are best here.
Well, really, there’s not, you’re right, but it’s a spherical cow problem - it gives a nice, neat answer in a situation simplified for the sake of a simple answer, but the real world is rarely so neat. There’s always more variables that influence the result, and it rarely lends itself to simple(and dare I say, slogan and social media friendly) solutions or understandings of the situation.
Of course, Economists know this - but the problem I’m alluding to isn’t economists, really.
I’ve been reading a couple economics-adjacent books lately, and I think a lot of actual economists ARE trying to put in the work. In the US at least, there’s just this old-guard GOP idea that “they are the party of economics” talking up Keynes like because he was successful in understanding and predicting what was happening in his own time, he understood that which came before and that must be some infallible law for all time. Most modern economists from not weird self-selecting conservative think tanks are some kind of post-Keynesian.
The GOP talking up Keynes really doesn’t sound like much of a thing to me; I think you might have misunderstood something.
Sorry, I’m just interjecting a bit, jumping in halfway into other people’s discussion.
(My brain may currently be 100% pre-occupied by WoW classic release.)
Mainstream GOP economic thought is usually either associated with the Chicago School (Milton Friedman) or the Austrian school (F.A. Hayek). Both of these schools of economic thought are traditionally thought of as in opposition to Keynesian economics.
In case it’s a source of confusion, ‘Post-Keynesian’ economics is still mostly Keynesian in spirit; it’s primarily a critique of some “spherical cow” issues in some major mainstream models (which are Keynes-inspired, though they are not Keynes’ models).
“Shit’s complicated” is a good slogan, though it doesn’t offer much by way of understanding or solution.
Though in this thread I’ve seen a bit too much rejection of things that fail to be a “solution”, even when those things weren’t put forward as a solution in the first place (or at least not as a solution to the specific problem in question).
Did I misunderstand your response? I read it as you defending Naoza’s claim that everyone switching to veganism would do “Literally Nothing to help”, by pointing out methods of animal agriculture that are (ecologically) better than veganism. It’s undeniable that everyone going vegan would massively decrease US agricultural GHG production. My example was an approximation of a very specific case, but I still think it’s a decent example of how inefficient most of our animal agriculture is. There are plenty of studies giving industry-wide numbers, and they’re not great.
If the argument is that veganism alone doesn’t solve climate change, then yeah,of course. No one thing, socialism included, will fix it.
@Churba do you have a source on veganism driving palm oil production? I took a quick look and found a couple articles tying it to reductions in trans fat consumption, but nothing tying it to veganism. Either way the vegan community has frequent discussions about it (5 posts on r/vegan in the past week) and many people consider it non-vegan. As for South America, the largest contributors are pastures and soy, with the soy primarily being for animal feed.
In this case, it is absolutely the product, not just the system, because there is no system that can sustainably produce animal products at the rate that people are consuming them. Your (I’m talking generally; I don’t know what you personally eat) diet will need to change at some point, so you might as well start now. Otherwise capitalism is an excuse.
As discussed earlier, economic factors make it difficult or impossible for a number of people to go vegan. Outside of food deserts, I argue that number is much smaller than people think (queue Naoza and “Purity Politics”).
Long-term, absolutely banning (my preference) or massively reducing and regulating animal agriculture is the only way to go.
Really? Fascinating! Now explain how communities around the world for thousands of years farmed livestock sustainably, even en masse and feeding large communities, and it was only once big agrobusiness and agricultural centralisation came along that it truly started fucking the planet and leading to things like clear-cutting and burning forests to pasture land on an industrial scale became common.
My mistake for not consulting your preferred communities. Though I must admit, people making up a new definition as it suits them and then suggesting people aren’t true vegans for not meeting it, that really does sound very reddit.
Look harder. It’s commonly used in the processing of food, particularly vegan food, as everything from cooking oil to an emulsifier in ice-cream. It’s in everything from Biscuits to cheese to vegan ready-meals, to bath products and makeup. It’s common in non-vegan food too, but less so - there are cheaper emulsifiers that aren’t as vegan friendly, but if you’re making vegan products at scale, Palm oil is pretty much the cheapest you’ll get, especially if you’re making a “Natural” product. On top of that, it’s not always listed as Palm Oil, it can be listed as anything from Vegetable oil, to Stearic Acid, Glyceryl, Sodium Lauryl Lactylate, and more.
Of course, it’s not solely vegan products, vegan products are merely an extremely large contributor(since, taken together, it’s an extremely large if not the largest market for it) but I also never said it was solely that, and I’m afraid if you want citations for things I never said, you’ll have to find someone that isn’t me.
It’s easy to blame agribusiness, but the main reason pre-industrial societies didn’t fuck the planet the way we do now is that they really didn’t have the ability to.
Cheap energy, mostly from fossil fuels, is the core reason modern agriculture works the way it does.
It is. And big Agribusiness is only a symptom, not a cause.
Me: *buys tomato *
Also me: *goes to the bad place *
Since this has circled back to veganism and the food system, I wanted to throw someone I’ve found as a good resource to listen to: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww
Both her twitter feed/rants and the podcast she runs talk about the food system, and the myth of “small family farms.” She’s not advocating for or against veganism, not really, but she’s making a number of arguments from a place of expertise that I hope have widened my own viewpoint. There’s a lot of things American/Western agriculture does that are stupid and self-destructive, and some of it is myths we’ve been told intentionally.
And what definition are you working with, exactly? You’re aware that it doesn’t mean “plant-based diet” and hasn’t since 1951, right? The Vegan Society, founded by the guy who invented the term, currently defines it as “… a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.” Deforestation for the production of palm oil is cruel to the animals that live that, bringing it under the purview of veganism. Whether it is or isn’t vegan is a complicated issue that requires comparing palm oil to alternatives, which require more land to produce, and the determining availability for products that don’t use it.
That said, I’ve literally never seen palm oil brought up as an attack by another vegan, only by disingenuous non-vegans. The reason it’s discussed so much (and discussed everywhere, seriously have you ever typed “palm oil vegan” into Google?) is because it’s a community that gives a shit and is actually trying.
I’m still finding literally nothing even asserting that vegans use more palm oil than non-vegans. Literally nothing. What I am finding is page after page of various vegan groups discussing whether or not vegans should use it. Still weird that you never saw those. If you have a source, post it and we can talk but until then I’m going to assume you’re talking directly out of your ass.
Fuck off with that, I’m asking for citations for things you clearly said. “And vegan food, thanks to the common use of Palm oil, has contributed to a huge amount of deforestation across Asia and south America, particularly in Thailand, Columbia, Indonesia, and Malaysia”. Show that vegans consume more palm oil than non-vegans.
What worked for a couple hundred million people doesn’t work for 7 billion, especially with huge increases in per capita meat consumption in places like rural China.
For the most part, vegan means something like “not using or containing animal products”, because that’s the broadly accepted usage. It doesn’t matter what the guy who invented the word says it means now, because that’s not how words work.
You could still reasonably say that using palm oil goes against vegan philosophy, though, so I guess it’s not unreasonable to say it falls under the purview of “veganism” qua the philosophy.
