• witness@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Unfortunately no, animal agriculture (& really therefore all agriculture, since most food grown on earth currently goes to feeding livestock) actually is the main culprit for greenhouse gas emissions. The oil & transport cartels are the reason theres too many cars, and the parking lots heat up entire cities by 20+ degrees. It’s a big part of it. Planes, and water shipping have impacts too. But yea, in a literal way agriculture is indeed the main driver of climate change.

      • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Sure the US military is the largest contributing entity, but agriculture is the largest sector. Especially considering that it’s responsible for 40% of methane released, and as it’s more potent if methane emissions stopped happening today climate change would be a lot slower.

    • Jonathan12345@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Then why did climate change only start around after the industrial revolution, when humans started mass-burning fossil fuels like coil and oil?

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Because that was also the same time that people started massive industrial scale farming. A big driver of the industrial revolution was trying to maximise food production so that the workers in the cities wouldn’t starve. We see a shift between 90% of the population being farmers, down to less than 10% in a few generations, but with food production massively increasing during that time, not decreasing. Due to the increased industrialization of agriculture.

        It isn’t that fossil fuels aren’t responsible for most of it (not quite sure where this person gets their information from). I’ve heard that the agricultural industry amounts for about 1/3 greenhouse gases emitted. It’s just the one people tend to talk about it the least, because you can design cities to not need everyone to own a car, but you can’t design people to not need food.

    • comvedml@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Haha… Agriculture has been there for thousands of years. Indian and Chinese are doing farming for many many years and the climate crisis started only with the advent of cars and petrochemical transport systems, along with the green house gases produced by industries.

      • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        That’s because it’s not agriculture in general that is a leading factor in climate change, but capitalist agriculture. In no other system would animal agriculture at this massive scale be incentivized or would it be so easy to ignore environmental externalities. In the same way that burning things for fuel isn’t the problem, but capitalist exploitation of fossil fuels.