Climate change: the vegan perspective is the only perspective.

we have this old saying in english a man with a hammer goes around looking at every problem as if it's a nail i have never once in my life heard a critique of vegans and veganism and the relationship between vegans and the climate change movement vegans and ecology that took this line it would be a useful and insightful criticism to say well what your problem is as a vegan is that you're already committed to animal rights you're already committed to this ethical concern about the torture and suffering of animals and you know you're going around with a hammer seeing every problem as a nail so you think veganism is the solution to climate change you think it's a solution to the ecological problems on a global scale on a local scale and you know really it's kind of fundamentally irrelevant that's a great criticism completely false completely wrong we have a whole lot of people who are committed to anti-capitalism that's the hammer that's the hammer they're carrying they're just gonna blame everything on the capitalist system and they can't see veganism as the solution they can't see veganism as addressing climate change because they have to blame capitalism consumerism individualism they use a whole lot of code words and it all just boils down to crypto communism it's the same [ __ ] from these people again and again and it really hasn't changed in a hundred years really you know we've got people who are committed to an ocean of spiritualism spirituality say oh you know it's the crass materialism of our kind and it's it's it's a spiritual crisis that if only people could shed their commitment to a modern materialistic scientific worldview and instead take on this particular ideology they believe in whether that's some hippie notion of mother earth or theological notion and i know extinction rebellion trades in all of these delusions and more there is a very important sense in which there are many different hammers being held in the hands of ecologists being held in the hands of people who say that there are saviors who say that they're going to take on climate change all right and fundamentally they're banging away at the wrong nail i'm gonna read you a comment i just left on the youtube channel of my my competition there extinction rebellion and i'm giving you the link in the description i would encourage you to go over and and give me the old thumbs up and you can add your own comment agreeing with me or disagree with me or chit chatting with other people this is what i said i managed to succinctly sum up eight years of critique on this youtube channel eight years of constructive criticism setting up the nature of the problem setting up the nature of the solution quote roger hallam's method one doesn't work two never has worked and three he presents it on the basis of lies and half truths about history remember when he used the protests in hong kong as a positive example by which i mean an example of how his method works remember when he used the arab spring as a positive example ukraine belarus myanmar every single one of his examples supporting quote unquote disruption as a method proves to be factitious if you don't know that word factit doesn't mean that it's a fact it means that he is manipulating he is making up things in order to present his case he is crafting with his hands he is presenting with artifice things that are perhaps not entirely false but most definitely are not entirely true very few people in the audience realize that he's lying and lying to himself when he talks about gandhi martin luther king etc but he is extinction rebellion is a political movement built on a lie and it refuses to acknowledge or promote the one non-disruptive solution that actually works veganism i hear a whole lot of talk from these same people these same crypto communist people pseudo spiritual people i hear a whole lot of talk about eurocentrism you're a whole lot of complaining about privileging the views of wealthy white people hey hey hey hey some of my best friends are wealthy white people that that really gets are you saying are you saying the perspective of someone is wrong just because they're wealthy it's a slippery slope here i'm half joking but i'm deadly serious okay if you ever heard someone walk up to a restaurant say i refuse to eat in this establishment it's run by wealthy white people i refuse to eat this wealthy me come on all right aside from shaming a whole lot of people including me for being wealthy white people all right what if we took seriously the question of the eurocentric bias in this discourse what if we took seriously the perspective of a country like cambodia or sri lanka cambodia is poor sri lanka is bankrupt there's a difference you can be wealthy but bankrupt there is a model of how to address climate change being demonstrated right now by one province of australia one there's one province in australia that is going on celebrating the fact that they've set up a power grid with a new type of battery and they've integrated solar and wind power and all the latest technologies they're tremendously proud and they're saying that they have a working model to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions reduce their impact on the climate it costs billions of dollars it costs money cambodia doesn't have it costs money sri lanka can't spend and if you scale it up from one province in australia to a whole country the size of china a whole country the size of india there are all kinds of negative knock-on consequences i'm not saying it makes no difference at all what i'm saying to you is when you run the numbers when you do the math the positives when compared and contrasted to a 100 vegan diet they're less impressive and the negatives the disadvantages are more onerous they're more scary all right fewer advantages and more disadvantages but if you can do it if you are in one of these white wealthy western countries and you've got the billions of dollars to burn i am not morally opposed to solar panels no no no no knock yourselves out and you can do the math and you can see how much of a rounding error worth of a difference you'll make in the next 20 years with those solar panels or with reducing the number of flights taken for tourism all these ridiculous proposals where the numbers just don't pencil a back of the napkin calculation won't back up these strategies all right oh but i thought we were such harsh critics of the white wealthy eurocentric point of view why don't you tell me what cambodia can do and what sri lanka can do now why don't you tell me what the poverty-stricken countries of africa and south america can do now and within the next 20 years the answer the only answer the only approach to ecology that can make the difference we need globally now is veganism period