cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/88244
A new report examining more than a dozen of the Earth’s life-sustaining systems paints a pretty bleak picture. Published last week in BioScience, the seventh annual State of the Climate report shows how global warming is producing significant shifts in the planet’s overall health and destabilizing the climate as a whole.
Key climate indicators are going in the wrong direction: greenhouse gas emissions, sea-level rise, glacier thickness, ice mass, and more. These shifts should no longer be taken as warning signs about some distant future, the authors write; instead, they amount to a “diagnosis” of how climate change is impacting the planet today — and where things will go if human behavior doesn’t change quickly or sufficiently enough.
Concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, stemming primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, hit record highs this year. Meanwhile, glacier thickness and Greenland ice mass are at record lows. Things are also not looking good for the Earth’s energy imbalance, a measure of how much energy the planet absorbs from the sun versus how much of that energy exits the atmosphere. This measure has been rising, a sign of how the planet, essentially, is heating up.
Of the 16 climate indicators examined by the authors, seven — or 44 percent — are at record extremes. The paper also discusses worrisome feedback loops, or how existing warming might be further accelerated by phenomena like wildfires or permafrost melting that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and are themselves made more likely by climate change.
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But the authors also wanted to delve into how human activities like agriculture, transportation, and energy usage — in other words, things within our control — contribute to climate change. Changes within our food system, in particular, present some of the easiest opportunities for individuals to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane.
That’s because some animals raised for human consumption — such as cattle, sheep, and goats — emit methane as part of their digestive process. These animals are called ruminants, and in 2024, there were more ruminant livestocks than at any other point since the 1960s, according to the study. Per capita meat production also hit a record high in 2024.
These two figures reflect “important pressures from the global food system,” said William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and one of the report’s lead authors. They point to meat’s growing role in our global diet, as well as the environmental cost of that shift. Ripple says they looked at ruminant livestock populations because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas; it only stays in the atmosphere for roughly 10 years, but it is 28 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. There is a silver lining to that, though: For these same reasons, reducing methane emissions is an effective tool to curb warming in the short term.
One way of doing that, clearly, is producing and eating less meat. “I think this is an important opportunity for climate action that sometimes gets overlooked,” said Ripple. “Shifting toward more plant-based diets, especially in countries with high meat consumption, could make a meaningful difference.”
Raising cattle for human consumption is also one of the main drivers of deforestation, which contributes to warming by eliminating carbon sinks. Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who studies the relationship between agriculture and the climate, noted that “we can’t solve climate change unless we stop” such clearing of carbon-rich habitats, “and we probably cannot stop that unless the world’s wealthy eat less meat, and particularly less beef.” (Searchinger was not involved in the report.)
He added, “Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.”
Ripple and his co-authors also point out that such high levels of meat production create a wildly inefficient agricultural system, since cattle need so much land to graze and farmers are compelled to dedicate land to grow crops like corn and soy that ultimately go to feed cattle. That land could be used instead to grow carbon-sinking ecosystems or food that feeds people directly.
“At a time when climate change is threatening food security, we can hardly afford a food system that uses so much of its productive capacity inefficiently,” said Ripple.
The bottom line, he said, is that there is no way to address global warming without also making changes to what we eat and how it’s produced. “Our growing demand for meat is putting enormous pressure on the climate, land, and water at a time when all three are already under stress,” he said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The planet’s vital signs are getting worse. One of the easiest fixes is your diet. on Oct 23, 2026.
From Grist via This RSS Feed.
Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.
Wait, is the average american eating 3 burgers a week? We’re not beating the allegations lmao.
Are they including breakfast hamburgers in that? No way it’s only 3.
Sure, we’ve had breakfast burgers, but what about second breakfast burgers?
There’s no way they’re counting sliders. Maybe a full plate of them as one hamburger, but not like when you’re driving to get your breakfast hamburger and need to stop on the way to get a slider to hold you over. And then when you’re driving home and get another slider to stay full until lunch, that doesn’t count. Getting a second breakfast burger while you’re getting the post-breakfast slider doesn’t count as a second burger either because you’re still digesting the first breakfast hamburger. It all becomes one hard ambergris ball in your stomach.
Double-patty burgers is also a possibility.
This has to be some kind of psyop to convince people who aren’t vegan with high carbon footprints they are doing enough and nothing should fundamentally change.
No, the median is eating more than three. They have to balance the mean. Modally the number is probably closer to six
For the median to be more than the mean of 3, you’d need either very few people eating more than 4 (short right tail), or some people to be eating negative burgers (long left tail).
hamburger equivalent units. It’s like how seppos count distance in walks from the carpark to costco
More shifting the blame to the end consumer.
A typical billionaire emits the same carbon footprint in 90 minutes as the average person does in a year.
That is their individual footprint, and doesn’t include the pollution from their businesses.
One of the easiest things we can do is to get rid of all of the billionaires.
How can you tell someone’s not vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. :hail-seitan:
The concept of carbon footprint is literally an invention by the fossil industry to shift the blame to the consumer. Veganism is good and moral, but the person you’re replying to is correcting the warped framing of this issue.
A- no one mentioned vegans
B- Straw man
C- general experience is that vegans are the evangelists
D-Veganism is not a choice for many. There are places where it is not possible to choose to be vegan due to lack of options. Don’t shame people for their lifestyle when you have no insight into their lives
C- general experience is that vegans are the evangelists
As someone who’s been at least vegetarian for a couple decades most people become immediately defensive when they see no meat on your plate, prepare to be inundated with a litany of comments, questions and shitty jokes that have been repeated ad nauseam
D-Veganism
Throwing “Oh these people in conditions that are in no way similar to my own means you shouldn’t try to convince anyone” is just generally lazy, most vegetarians/vegans are lower income.
https://mercyforanimals.org/blog/gallup-poll-americans-making-less-than-30k/
i think it’s reversed in-person and online, with the caveat that hegemonic dieters will mention eating a cheeseburger in passing and nobody cares. we’re also not forced to create social friction the way someone with any restriction is (including allergies or religious practices)
Before I had my copper issues/a house who refuse to go vegetarian I was doing my best to go vegetarian. And fucking hell. As soon as I mentioned it for whatever reason I get some fucking excuse. Like I don’t want your life story just please serve something other then steak.
Hell, I still avoid red meat cause I learned it reaks havoc on my gut and people will still not listen to me, and now my body hates it even more. Had a steak cause stupid family thing and they never take shit into consideration and I learned real fast just go hungry and deal with the auto immune shakes. Better then that AND horrible stomach cramps and being in the bathroom all night.
If I weren’t vegan I’d have a really snappy line here about you taking the bait instantly, lmao, stay mad bloodmouth
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“I hate the Nazis but it’s really important that I uncritically parrot their talking points so I don’t look too mean”
Militancy is good, actually. Challenge yourself to make others uncomfortable with their own acculturation to cruelty.
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“You are all cowards, I am putting my fingers in my ears because you advance an ethical position that I also purport to support but in a way that might make a hypothetical person who is already comfortable drinking blood feel bad.”
Log off, plant-based.
A- no one mentioned vegans
Yes they did. To imply that veganism is not relevant to the topic of not eating meat as a significant way to reduce the causal factors of climate change, is just vapid and disingenuous.
B- Straw man
Ad hominem! Tu quoque! No true Scotsman! See, I can uselessly say the names of logical fallacies that have no bearing on the conversation at hand too.
C- general experience is that vegans are the evangelists
Lol, whose “general” experience? The far right (fascist) carnists who start frothing and twitching when they are confronted with the fact that vegans exist? The meat eating libs who can’t stand the cognitive dissonance they experience and the mental gymnastics they have to perform in order to patch together a justification for their regressive behavior that aligns them with CHUDs? My experience is that vegans calmly existing is constantly but falsely equated with “evangelism” purely because meat eaters can’t reconcile the fact they value their treats over… well, literally everything including the literal world itself.
D-Veganism is not a choice for many. There are places where it is not possible to choose to be vegan due to lack of options. Don’t shame people for their lifestyle when you have no insight into their lives
Oh Fuck Off with that twisted bullshit, you disingenuous shitstain. Your other “aeguments” are worth an eye roll, but this one is so rank, it should be called out for the sheer slime that it is, trying to use “progressive values” against people who actually do something to benefit the world, including benefitting people who live in precarity.
I live in precarity. I am a disabled person who has been homeless and relied on dumpster diving to get food to live on. I still rely on food stamps (which is getting whittled away by the same people who grant billions of dollars in subsidies to factory farm owners so that they can keep their death machine and climate change-causing operations afloat). Yet I’ve been vegan for over 25 years. Literally no one would begrudge a starving person for getting whatever food they can, but that starving person is not you and it’s not 99.9% of every carnist out there refusing to give up their murder-treats. Using people who have no access to treats in order to justify your own deeply problematic treat consumption is supremely disgusting and cowardly.
Carnists try not to let their ego get in the way of accepting the reality at hand that veganism is true and good: impossible.
One of the easiest things we can do is to get rid of all of the billionaires.
That’s not easy though. In fact it is one of the most difficult challenges we face. We absolutely do need to get rid of all the billionaires but if it ever happens, it will take a tremendous amount of organizing, work, and will inevitably cost many of us our lives. However, simply not eating murdered animal is something you can literally do right now without lifting a finger. It truly s easy, and it absolutely is something everyone should do by default. While organizing and carrying out a revolution that finally wipes out the billionaire class will be one of the greatest hurdles (and greatest achievments) that humanity will ever face.
The fact that changes in individual consumption alone won’t bring about a revolution capable of dismantling the system that drives climate change perpetuates mass murder of sentient life, that doesn’t mean that people refusing to eat meat en masse won’t make a huge difference. It already has made a significant impact on factory farming, though there’s still a long way to go.
And it’s certainly no excuse not to go vegan.
The concept of carbon footprint is literally an invention by the fossil industry to shift the blame to the consumer. Veganism is good and moral, but the person you’re replying to is correcting the warped framing of this issue.
The person you’re defending was not correct in the way in which they were correcting that warped framing, they said some true things but were also compounding the problems by including a bad argument used as a way to disparage veganism and the necessity of nonhuman animal liberation. QC is right in their criticism and wasn’t even talking about the carbon footprint concept. The person you’re defending quickly went full fash after that first comment and got justifiably banned as a result. Do we really want to hold up the fallacious arguments of a person like that just because they got part of it right? I sure as fuck don’t.
What is the bad part of his comment? I agree that we he said after is bad but the original comment I see nothing wrong with.
It also misses the how and why. There’s Tyson and JBS, the breeding and genetics industry, death squads in the Amazon, farmers growing corn and soy to fatten cows, etc. Specifically on that last one, in the US they’re some of the laziest most subsidized kulaks imaginable, screwing immigrant labor to destroy the environment with monoculture so burger cheaper. These are deeply entrenched interests who own a substantial share of the government. Their only enemy in that government are neoliberals undercutting them with Argentine cattle (Milei regime provides its citizens with donkey)
Is the answer really to tell Americans eat less burger while everything stays the same? What if burger is a pressure valve on discontent, something both consumer and capitalist can enjoy? A Democrat will just say to you “don’t be an asshole” when you tell them how fucked burger is, and a republican will tell you “don’t be a pussy.”
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i’ve always figured it’s easier to pass legislation that restricts companies than to corral a bunch of individuals into making a lifestyle change that has no structural support.
Those are the same thing. The legislation that writes the murder industry out of existence necessarily creates the structural support. Convincing the legislature in league with enormously moneyed flesh lobby to do that is harder than not eating animals and doing a little industrial sabotage on your day off.
Yes not being vegan should be illegal.
Yeah, technically easy, not exactly practical or legal. Nor even a moral solution.
I disagree, it is absolutely a moral good to
One of the easiest things we can do is to get rid of all of the billionaires.
I think a better critique might be “it would be better for the article to mention policy along with environmental impact statistics”. Which it /KINDA/ does but only through what the quotes are saying imo.
Given that the org’s CEO wrote an article called “Biden schools Trump on climate” (and there’s other stuff from the org they’ve published that are in that vein) I would be /pleasently/ surprised to see that correction made. But yeah I’m also struggling to see how toppling global capitalism is an easier premise to pitch versus getting people to eat less borger in this particular context. It’s not like the numbers they give are wrong either.
I sympathize with what you’re saying overall though.
Can it be the case that the economics is a double edged system and to make a more impactful change both parts of the equation can be transformed? Can it be the case that consumer behaviour drives future businesses‘ behaviour and vice versa?
I liked the Digger’s dialogue in the Europarliament in this respect, highly recommend it
It’s never been a better time to go vegan.
Well, tbh a better time to have gone vegan would have been however many years ago a person was first able to comprehend that meat = animal. But I hear what you mean and fully agree that NOW is infinitely better than later, or worse yet, never.
It’s especially bad how many carbists on hexbear remained that way after all the vegan arguments. So many people just don’t care. I kind of hate the idea that some people will go vegan for any reason other than animals. Feels like they’ll always be one bad day away from eating animals again.
Climate Stalin says you’re going to eat tofu or you’re going to starve, you’re free to choose.
The planet’s dyin’, Cloud
You gotta stop getting pepperoni on your &^#$# ‘pizza’, Cloud!
btwGoing vegan / making personal choices is good and can help both you and your marginal impact on the planet’s habitability.
But we should not accept framings like these that describe this as a “fix” and aren’t placing primary blame on global capitalism. That is responsible for the vast, vast, vast majority of this situation, including what diets people adopt, and focusing on individual choice and blame is a longstanding PR approach by capital to divert attentiona nd convert their collective harma into individual choices and blame it I everyone else.
The “budget” burger patties that you can buy in any grocery store are already at least 45% TVP, and people buy plenty of these. The plant-sourced part of it is better quality than the animal-sourced part of it.
At this point, you could probably switch out all the rest and no one would complain. It’s just a burger that looks like a burger and cooks like a burger and tastes like a burger, only a select few social jingoist warriors are going to care whether an animal was actually slaughtered to produce it.
Price signals and marketing would do a whole lot of the work. And if you were to accurately price in all the externalities involved in meat, just the economics of it would phase most of the practice out.
Honestly, I prefer Beyond burgers to beef burgers at this point. A good burger from a non-fast food restaurant can be better, but fast food loses hands down. I just wish they were cheaper.
Also, it’s amazing how much worse beef is for the environment (water use and carbon emissions) than even other meat. Sure, it would be great if everyone went vegan, but even just dropping beef would have a huge impact.
CW: meat, nsfw
Could you please add a content warning for meat, and check the post nsfw due to the meat in the article thumbnail.
Done
Thank you
