For the first situation, 3 h a day is a lot of time. I don’t think we should expect people to make such big sacrifices every day, at least if they work full time. People need leisure to stay healthy too. If it was 1h or 1:30h it would be reasonable to take the bike imo, but at 3h I’d cut them some slack. There are simply much more effective climate measures that we as a society should implement. They shouldn’t buy a new gas car if they can avoid it though.

For the second situation:

You want it so much, in fact, that not stopping there to buy a hamburger creates twice as much negative utility for you as biking instead of driving

But it also causes a lot more animal cruelty than the minuscule climate impact of one person commuting. Over the years, it would mean that many animals would have to endure an extremely miserable and painful life on factory farms with constant abuse and neglect, just to satisfy taste buds.

Compared to a warming of 0,00000000000000000001 °C or something like that, which has no measurable impact on any life on its own. Animal agriculture even has a larger climate impact than all cars on earth combined.

A more general analogy: By driving a car, you’ll do some miniscule harm to people and the environment. But if you’d knowingly chose to buy products that were produced in literal slavery conditions, and directly funded slavery that way, this would be a whole different ethical issue.

In reality, even if a person is addicted to burgers like a drug addict, they could easily buy plant-based burger patties that taste really similar to regular ones and make their own burgers. Vegan cheese isnt quite the same yet, but a little difference in taste certainly doesn’t justify torturing animals on factory farms. You still have essentially the same taste experience, especially after a small adjustment period.

In most countries, McDonalds even has plant based burgers available afaik.

If someone is literally starving and there’s only meat available, it can be argued that it would be vegan to eat it in that situation.

The definition from the vegan society is:

Veganism is a philosophy and 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; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Is climate change cruel to animals? It’s not intentional harm, but it causes suffering. People will weigh that differently based on the ethical framework (deontology - utilitarianism spectrum).

Going on vacation by plane arguably isn’t vegan from a utilitarian perspective. Deontologists might still see it as vegan.

If someone needs to drive a car and can’t afford an EV, it’s not practical to avoid fossil fuels in this case. So that would be vegan either way.

I think the “avoiding as far as possible and practicable” principle also makes a lot of sense for the use of fossil fuels by environmentalists.

I feel like lemmy.world is a bit shielded from tankies in general. I see some posts from lemmy.ml from time to time but rarely insane tankie posts. Engaging with political posts from there might not be the best idea indeed, maybe there should be warnings for those who are not aware lol

Welcome!

There are good Lemmy apps if you don’t have one yet. You can search “for Lemmy” to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.

but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?

You might want to block some keywords then, as there’s also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.

Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels were the only affordable energy sources that could meet the demand of industrialized countries. Until 5-10 years ago.

We’re now in a situation where most people can still pretend that climate change isn’t serious, and the fossil fuel lobby is stronger than ever. And yet over 90% of new electricity generation is already renewable, because it has simply become cheaper than coal and gas power in the last years.

As climate impacts worsen, the pressure to decarbonize will only get larger. The lobbies have been fighting tooth and nail against the energy transition for over 40 years, but they are rapidly loosing ground now in most countries.

It’s right to be alarmed about climate change, there will be serious long-term impacts, but it seems irrational to be completely fatalistic. Just comparing the battery prices and solar panel prices and ev market with 10 years ago reveals a truly massive shift. And this is just the beginning of the energy transition.

20 years ago you could have said “Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it’s absolutely futile.”

Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.

I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won’t have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.

Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.

The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That’s true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.

They just know people will buy the meat no matter how much the animals were abused so why would they bother? Even those who see themselves as animal lovers happily look the other way with every purchase. The industry has all the incentives to be exceptionally cruel so of course it is.

It is absurd, and complicit at this point. I think most people who are informed about what’s happening in Gaza would agree on this. But it’s not much of a topic in public discourse here and quite a few people still believe that the IDF is fighting against terrorists, so there’s not enough pressure against this. Especially amongst the conservatives.

I don’t think the official one is gonna be bad by any means. They will probably fix the biggest flaws with hindsight and modernize the graphics, and it will be a big improvement over the original if everything goes right.

But ultimately they had deadlines to meet and many more games in the pipeline, whilst the Skyblivion team can work on everything for as long as it takes, experiment much more and put as much detail and soul into everything as they want. I think that will make a difference, but both will be good games.

Skyblivion (the fan remake) will probably have much more attention to detail and will also release this year, after over 10 years of development. The dev log videos look amazing. I’d be very surprised if the official remake is as good.

The climate impact of the poorest is nothing compared to the pollution of rich countries anyways and the same is true for factory farming. The money will likely be used for much more environmentally destructive things now instead. There’s nothing positive in this from any progressive perspective.

And when it’s the only way to keep their family from starving, for example, people will consent in droves, securing supply.

I feel like if a child with a similar level of cognition as the cow harms other children, most people will say they have no moral agency yet, and will still see harvesting their leather as immoral.

There are two ways to resolve that inconsistency…

And the good thing is, when demand for (human) leather is higher than supply, people will just breed some more humans, keep them on farms, use their labor and sell their leather. With nothing going to waste, just the beautiful circle of life.

We’ve gotten quite efficient at doing that so there’s plenty opportunity to have more jobs, make a profit and to provide a product at an affordable price point, at the same time, all with human leather farms. Just have to compromise on welfare and sustainability step by step for more profit, but humans are already really great at ignoring such things when it’s advantageous to them, so most won’t ask any pesky questions anyways. We just have to normalize human leather (from factory farms) and everything will be great.

Crypto bros depend on more people speculating with their currency of choice to increase the market value. If they’re pissed, that’s a good sign.

I’m not happy when people die. But looking at the scale of institionalized cruelty in the American healthcare system, I can certainly understand the feeling of retribution that many Americans have when people who are responsible for the suffering and deaths of others, while getting rich from that, get the same fate. Especially when they or people they know have been denied coverage. Of course some people don’t just want to bend over, and a political solution is out of the question for the foreseeable future.

Cruel cultural traditions make (good) people support horrible acts. A tale as old as time.

Fortunately plant-based alternatives have been growing and improving quite fast for 10-20 years now, so I’m hopeful that even those who “could never give up meat” might stop supporting those hell holes. I was one of them, after all.

Kabecz have been charged with several offences, including killing or injuring animals; causing unnecessary suffering to an animal; failing to provide adequate medical attention for an animal when it is wounded or ill; inflicting upon an animal acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being.

Just inflict the same things on “farm animals” and it’s not only socially acceptable, but the average person will gladly buy the products, and therefore fund the abuse on factory farms.

We certainly have a looong way to go to become a decent society based on that metric.

Seems like they haven’t gained traction since the reddit exodus. I wonder how the other alternatives are doing. Lemmy has a decent amount of activity at least, although I still wish more people would use it.