This upsets me

I wonder if the author is being intentionally misleading or is actually that ignorant.
 
I implore you to understand it's all projection. People who wantonly drink water from plastic bottles and eat "grass fed beef" claim to care about global warming. In an abstract way I suppose they do, they just don't want to take personal responsibility and just whine about corporations. Any vegetables they see as using more water they will accuse desperately in an attempt to try to say all agriculture is equally bad.

My FAVORITE liberal argument is that welfare recipients should have equal access to beef because equal rights. It's tied only with "well I'll keep wasting water and using paper towels because EXXON is the real oppressor."

Between becoming vegan and studying environmental science I've started to think the mass deaths of most Westerners probably isn't a terrible thing at all. Too bad I care about animals and the poor and the innocent.

I have heard world renowned environmental journalists speak live. It's exactly as bad or worse than everyone thinks and personal responsibility is the ONLY way. Vegan diets beat meat diets on every scale.

People acting like there's still such a thing as sustainable meat or that "we have time, we will just teach the children" should probably be forced into early retirement.
 
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This article in today's NYT really gets my goat:

Raising My Child in a Doomed World

To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart [eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free and have one fewer child] would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. Indeed, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide.

...

The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world

So, carry on with our largest contributions to the problem and "live ethically"? WTF does that mean? Practice mindfulness while driving our kids to the steak house?

Apparently my lifestyle isn't good enough for the author, and I'm a hypocrite for not killing myself.
 
This article in today's NYT really gets my goat:

Raising My Child in a Doomed World



...



So, carry on with our largest contributions to the problem and "live ethically"? WTF does that mean? Practice mindfulness while driving our kids to the steak house?

Apparently my lifestyle isn't good enough for the author, and I'm a hypocrite for not killing myself.

I think the article quoted here and the one in the original post highlights a certain dishonesty and laziness from people unwilling to make changes to their lives. Drive the bar so high that it's nearly impossible to achieve, then use it as an excuse to do or change absolutely nothing.

Both articles also work from a premise of "top down" or organizing a course of action from some central body or authority, to be implemented everywhere, and then speculating on the problems of that (often implementing lies or half truths like veganism means "intensive agriculture" or wood burning for heat is just as harmful as animal agriculture insofar as green house gas emissions are concerned). How about just letting individuals do what they can? Let them farm their land and produce as they see fit.

It sounds intellectual, but it's not. They are lazy man's arguments and excuses akin to someone saying to a smoker "You eat healthy? What for?? You smoke!!" as if I should take to mean that it wouldn't really matter if I swallowed gasoline for breakfast in between cigarettes in place of food.
 
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