https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector gives a good breakdown of the worlds C02 production. Electricity and basic household use combined with transport are 73% of the problem. Livestock is 5.8%.
If every person on the planet installed Solar panels and completely removed their grid electricity and gas usage and replaced their car with an electric vehicle and didn’t use planes we could address 10.9% + 11.9% + 1.9% = 24.7% of all CO2 production. If we all gave up all meat then we could raise that to 30.5%. Its less than that however because only 60% of personal transit is actually passenger vehicles, not all aviation is people, some tiny amount of emissions for cement is going to be personal etc etc. That is the grand total that we have control over with personal replacement and some consumer choice and some of that livestock would go into other protein sources. The rest is all businesses and building and waste management that if we stopped using would no longer be developed nations and that we have no control over how its powered. Its fair to say business is responsible for reducing emissions of at least 70% of the problem.
I would also argue that there is no particular reason for consumers to be responsible for electricity CO2 production either when CO2 free alternatives exist, we might have the option to buy solar, wind and batteries but the grid is a better place to fix that in the same model so I think we could argue reasonable its even less we are directly responsible for. All of this is consumption for us and the economy, no people means no CO2 production but any CO2 we don’t directly emit (a car is direct as is a gas cooker or a wood burner) isn’t our fault its the business that burnt it to deliver that service/energy and we don’t get to control it so we can’t be held responsible for it.
The entire goal is to transition our lifestyles into something sustainable not to go back to there being 10,000 of us living like cavemen.
The meat, dairy, egg, etc. industry represents around 14.5% of global emissions[1] - not 5% - when you include the emissions from things like growing feed and that’s something we can only reduce a little bit with changes to industry practices. That is large enough that we can’t really afford to ignore it.
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector gives a good breakdown of the worlds C02 production. Electricity and basic household use combined with transport are 73% of the problem. Livestock is 5.8%.
If every person on the planet installed Solar panels and completely removed their grid electricity and gas usage and replaced their car with an electric vehicle and didn’t use planes we could address 10.9% + 11.9% + 1.9% = 24.7% of all CO2 production. If we all gave up all meat then we could raise that to 30.5%. Its less than that however because only 60% of personal transit is actually passenger vehicles, not all aviation is people, some tiny amount of emissions for cement is going to be personal etc etc. That is the grand total that we have control over with personal replacement and some consumer choice and some of that livestock would go into other protein sources. The rest is all businesses and building and waste management that if we stopped using would no longer be developed nations and that we have no control over how its powered. Its fair to say business is responsible for reducing emissions of at least 70% of the problem.
I would also argue that there is no particular reason for consumers to be responsible for electricity CO2 production either when CO2 free alternatives exist, we might have the option to buy solar, wind and batteries but the grid is a better place to fix that in the same model so I think we could argue reasonable its even less we are directly responsible for. All of this is consumption for us and the economy, no people means no CO2 production but any CO2 we don’t directly emit (a car is direct as is a gas cooker or a wood burner) isn’t our fault its the business that burnt it to deliver that service/energy and we don’t get to control it so we can’t be held responsible for it.
The entire goal is to transition our lifestyles into something sustainable not to go back to there being 10,000 of us living like cavemen.
Animal agriculture isn’t just direct livestock emissions.
It’s land use, fertiliser, cropland, transport, electricity and water. All told about a fifth to a quarter of emissions.
The meat, dairy, egg, etc. industry represents around 14.5% of global emissions[1] - not 5% - when you include the emissions from things like growing feed and that’s something we can only reduce a little bit with changes to industry practices. That is large enough that we can’t really afford to ignore it.
[1] https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357