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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • EE@kbin.socialtoGreen - An environmentalist community @lemmy.ml•Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint
    1·
    1 year ago

    You’re comparing apples to oranges. The Nature paper includes all associated emissions for the food (using “air-freighted asparagus” as an example) while the EPA explicitly excludes non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions and emissions from production and distribution of both the fuel and the car. On top of that you compare the most efficient car of 2022 in a mixed (city+highway) environment (yes you mentioned efficiency) to the upper limit of what the Nature paper estimates (if all additional energy expenditure was compensated by additional food intake), while the realistic estimate is 0.15 and 0.08kg CO2 per km for walking and cycling respectively.

    So there might well be a factor of 10 between cycling to the supermarket and taking your car in terms of GHG emissions. We just can’t tell from the sources you linked. And while it’s an edgy position to take “I’m just adding to the carbon problem for personal health and entertainment purposes” your claim might well convince people that moving away from a car based society would not have any impact on CO2 emissions. I also think you could make your point that rich people have a way outsized impact without all choices of normal people being exactly the same.

  • EE@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.ml•China youth unemployment hits high as recovery falters
    102·
    1 year ago

    The article you linked mentioned how that approval rating (for the central government - not the local ones) came to be for rural people: Censorship and propaganda combined with an attitude towards government similar to what you often see with religious people. If something good happens, the big guy far away did it. If something bad happens, it’s due to the corruption of men (in this case the corrupt local officials).

    Edit: From the article:

    “I think citizens often hear that the central government has introduced a raft of new policies, then get frustrated when they don’t always see the results of such policy proclamations, but they think it must be because of malfeasance or foot-dragging by the local government,” said Saich.

    Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”

    […] This dichotomy is highlighted by a 2017 Gallup poll, where 70 percent of U.S. respondents had a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in local government.

  • EE@kbin.socialtoGreen - An environmentalist community @lemmy.ml•Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint
    7·
    1 year ago

    It can guide policy decisions (e.g. “Is it more important to subsidize/mandate sustainable meat production or phase it out all together?”), can make voters think differently about topics, which in turn influences politics (in democracies) and can be a simple way to put into perspective the impact of millionaires and billionaires compared to average people.

    Also I’ve heard people justify flying a lot because the “carbon footprint” is made up by the fossil fuel industry, which in my eyes is the same argument as “My country only makes up X% of greenhouse emissions so we shouldn’t implement a carbon tax/invest in renewable energy/… until China/the US do”.