All 10 of the largest U.S. meat and dairy companies have lobbied against environmental and climate policies, resisting climate regulations, including rules on greenhouse gases and emissions reporting. This is according to a study by New York University, which examined the political influence of the 10 largest meat and dairy companies in the United States.
I mean, we all know the memes, but there has to be like a nuanced take take on why this is the case, right? Is it literally the case that they just don’t give a goddamn about climate change and they’re just going to get theirs while they can and to hell with everything else? Because it’s going to be awful hard to keep your cows fed when climate change starts fucking up their feed crops, and we’re pretty much there right now, as far as I understand it.
The entire system relies on infinite growth in a finite world, trying to find logic in it is futile, never mind ethics…
Yup, that’s my understanding. They probably aren’t full on deniers, they know it’s real, they just don’t want to do the hard work and take the pay cuts that will progress us forward into the future.
Capitalism will kill us all unless we reject it whole-cloth.
I mean, you’re probably right, but this sent me down a mental spiral that ended with “Oh boy, I can’t wait for my monthly US Communist Party ration of furry inflation porn.”
I don’t even like it, but I guess I could learn to live with it if it means stopping climate change.
It’s really simple, that second sentence is what it is. Hard to believe, but when you create a system that puts profits above everything else in the world, that’s what they’re going to do.
It’s that they need to justify their existence to the capitalist machine. Making changes to account for climate change means lowered profits. It means diversifying, it may even mean shutting down the business entirely.
It’s not just about direct profit, of course. Lots of jobs depend on them staying in business, and even if they just change their business model a bit, many of those jobs disappear. And as most people are encouraged to have a monolithic skill set instead of being more diversified, all those people are suddenly back to square one. Needing to learn a completely new trade just to live.
That’s, of course, just a small part, but it’s one that ensures that people turn out to vote against government reps who campaign on change and climate acceptance.