It's a bit warm/ wet/ cold outside

[The Legendary Shark]

What usually happens is:

1: I post a video or article.
2: You don't watch or read it.
3: You denounce it anyway.
4: You denounce me for posting it.
5: Rinse and repeat.

The perceived 'Chum-and-Switch' you complain of probably happens at stage 3, when I end up debating the nonsense you think is in the link you won't look at. For example, it would be like me refusing to read the BBC article you linked to because it's the BBC and therefore must be wrong so I'll argue about that instead, straw manning, or that Mark Poynting, the article's author, is a (insert nonsensical label here) and therefore biased, unreliable and not worth reading, ad hominem, and argue about his shortcomings instead. The "chum," as you put it, is the video, the "switch" is when some people turn up to not watch it and then go off on one.

[Hawkmumbler]

If you want to add a fallacy to your arsenal, Mark, try 'Unwarranted Assumption".
It seems to be one you're quite familiar with deploying, as per above.

I watched the video. Hell I recall watching it when it originally aired, circa 2017/18 I believe. I would have to check. It does naught to dispel any qualms expressed above about her rational, nor address her financial conflict of interest as a Trump campaign employee.

Gah! I fell for the chum again, back to the hidden messages folder with you.

[IndigoPrime]

I think it's quite something that we've just lived through an entire year above the temperature rise that was considered where we should aim to max out at, while emissions continue to rise and fuck-all is being done by any country of note, and we're still wondering if this is a thing at all.

Weather events are becoming more extreme. Average temperatures are terrifying. We're now talking about maybe keeping temps down to an average of 2.5–3° above now, if we're lucky. And those are temperatures that will knacker food supplies and cause the displacement of many millions of people.

What's most galling is we have the technology to arrest the problems now. But rather than mandate that technology, countries are doubling down on eking out the last of the fossil fuels and banking on tech that doesn't yet exist to save us all. It's going to be a bit of a fucking shock when there are mass ongoing food shortages and carbon capture turns out to be a flying car, when the biggest polluters in the world could so easily have switched to solar, wind, tidal, more public transport and TVs, more green spaces, etc.

[The Legendary Shark]

I'll give you that it's a warranted assumption in that I posted the video on my own channel to exclusively link here, so I know how many views it's had and when.

[The Legendary Shark]

...and we're still wondering if this is a thing at all.

Just to be clear, I'm not. Climate change is a thing, and a big thing, but it's not the only thing. As you said earlier, it's a holistic problem, of which I believe climate change is just a part. I do not dispute that. 

I dispute the validity of the political and corporate solutions, and the validity of the political and corporate arguments in their favour. For example, the Dutch government tried to introduce green measures that involved buying out and shutting down livestock farms. Farming in many countries faces similar threats. If climate change is going to disrupt food supplies, what sense is there in actively shutting down farming to help the climate? We can't eat wind. 

And yes, I am aware of cow farts and nitrogen - but is the answer really "no livestock farming"? Can't we start with something a little less destructive, like maybe "cleaner livestock farming"? 

[IndigoPrime]

Given how massively damaging cows are on a worldwide basis, and the sheer amount of forest destroyed every day for areas for grazing, "eat less meat" (and especially "eat less beef") has understandably become a central pillar of climate shift thinking. There are arguments to be made about how best to support farmers and livelihoods. But I don't see any pushback bar from the usual GoP-style figures that "less beef" is anything but a good thing.

[Jim_Campbell]

Given how massively damaging cows are on a worldwide basis, and the sheer amount of forest destroyed every day for areas for grazing

Not to mention the vast amounts of human-edible food that goes into feeding them every year.

[Barrington Boots]

Whilst we're bashing the cattle industry, it's also completely inhumane with animals being subjected to extreme stress, pain, forced impregnation, mutilation, enduring lives of extreme misery and then a brutal death. 

It's not a popular view but everyone should eat less meat and especially beef. The benefits would be huge.

If the images widely available of this sort of treatment endured by various animals isn't enough to change peoples minds then I don't know what is, but I'll die on this hill.

[The Legendary Shark]

My point isn't that the livestock industry should be either preserved as-is or eradicated completely. It is an industry with problems, of course it is, but those problems do not justify the political actions of the Dutch government to eradicate farming and rural economies. That's an extremist action. And sure, one day it might be feasible for everyone to eat factory produced munce but, until all that research, development, testing, cost, energy, and infrastructure can be realised and phased-in, it's much more convenient, natural, and simple to just grow a cow.

Too many political solutions these days rely on fearmongering and end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Barrington Boots]

That's just not true though? There's plenty of other things people can eat. Intensive meat farming is hugely damaging to the environment and hugely immoral, and it needs to go.

In the Netherlands the stuff the government is focusing in are giant cattle farms, not little Farmer Barleymow Ladybird book operations where a bloke has a small herd in a field. Also the farmers there, as far as I'm aware, are signing up to sell their farms off to be closed down. These aren't compulsory purchase orders. That's very far from eradicating farming and rural communities.

[IndigoPrime]

There was a report Wired commented on a couple of years back. Dropping beef intake to 80% of what it is now would drop deforestation rates by 50%. But we're now at the point where even small behavioural shifts are being slammed as extreme left-wing behaviour (etc) by the usual suspects with agendas.

It's also sobering to read the biomass estimates that people have started working on, and seeing how battle alone account for over a third of mammal biomass, and livestock overall for close to two thirds. Wild mammals? 4%. And yet even making UK farms slightly more hospitable to endangered wildlife (along with using land in a mixed fashion, eg for solar) met with pushback from, again, all the usual suspects.

[JayzusB.Christ]

met with pushback from, again, all the usual suspects.

This is what breaks my heart, and baffles me.  That wanting to expediating the destruction of our species among all the other ones we're detroying, versus not wanting to, are seen as two sides of a political divide, and that the former has anything close to as much validity as the latter.  That they're seen as opposing opinions, rather than observable facts versus bullshit, is a genuine mystery to me.

[Lorenzo]

Did somebody mention he Netherlands? I live there    The Dutch government isn't trying to "eradicate farming and rural communities". The problem isn't even directly related to reducing the amount of meat people eat. Farmers in or near nature reserves are being encouraged (or forced) to downscale or close due to the amount of NOx and NH3 they deposit on the land, which is slowly killing off all the plants. There is major resistance to this as the farmers don't believe the science (!) and don't believe they should be the only ones to take action.

[IndigoPrime]

That sounds a bit like what's painfully slowly starting to happen around the Mar Menor, which was more or less made sterile by farming runoff. Although there are still arguments there regarding a solution and what to do about farming (which is a LOT of what happens in that area).

[Funt Solo]

I was surprised to learn that the less efficient the animal-rearing farms are, the worse it is for the climate. This went against my sort of casual-liberal assumptions. Like, when buying dairy, eggs or meat I was opting to buy organic, free-range, grass-fed produce. The idea in my mind was that it was kinder to the animals because they live a better life. Here's the point, though: using land for animal-rearing is bad because of the deforestation, or the nature-clearing, or the water-usage, or the food needs. So, the more organic, free-range and grass-fed the rearing is, the worse it is in terms of impacting the climate.

Solution: we just need to stop eating (land-grown) meat. (Fish have the potential of being a sustainable supply of protein - but of course humanity is over-fishing breeding grounds and so fucking it up. Easter Island, here we go!)