Are fossil fuels vegan?
from SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 09 Sep 20:50
https://piefed.world/post/455419
from SatansMaggotyCumFart@piefed.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 09 Sep 20:50
https://piefed.world/post/455419
#nostupidquestions
threaded - newest
That’s a crude joke
Coal is made from plants.
Oil is made from plankton and algae.
Natural gas is made from microorganisms.
I believe all three have a small chance of also being made from an animal. But I wasn’t able to verify that part.
A large part of plankton consists of animals like crustaceans and jellyfish (zooplankton). Though IDK if that was also true back when the current oil deposits were formed.
I mean, even if they do contain animal, does it matter? Are vegans not allowed to pick up old buffalo skulls from the ground from buffalo which died of natural causes?
No, they release harmful gases into the air which harm animals.
If you mean carbon dioxide, then I hate to tell you, but you make that as well. You existing isn’t vegan.
For millions of years oxygen was a toxic and corrosive pollutant building up.
Yeah and it was a mass extinction because of plants. Vegans want to save us from this fate by eating them all!
Doing gods work
Did I ever say it was?
But they are also an animal. So they can’t kill themselves, since that also wouldn’t be vegan.
So do I.
They’re pretty much all made of plant matter, but that’s irrelevant. What makes it vegan or not is whether you cause harm to the fauna by using it and creating demand for it.
So is it?
depends on the person, their motivation, environment, and lifestyle choices i guess. you could argue either way.
No it should be a binary thing either yes or no.
why? its not like veganism is a mandated institution, it’s merely a set of moral guidelines and perspectives.
edit: what do you think, is it vegan?
Because saying “it depends on the individual” doesnt give us an interesting conversation.
if op cared about conversation there are many ways to go about that, asking what kind of perspective leads to an intertwining (or lack thereof) of veganism and a boycott of the fossil fuels industry, or op could have replied to my question in the edit explaining where the post idea came from and their own views on how the two things relate.
unfortunately, i think the cum fart just wanted an excuse to ‘call out’ vegans in this post they made a hour or two after this one.
The definition from the vegan society is:
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.
Wouldn’t this mean that if someone derives a sufficient number of utils from eating meat (enough that not eating it would be “impractical”), then eating meat is vegan?
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.
No, I mean like…
Suppose where you live and where you work are fixed. You can drive and murder animals via climate change. Or you can ride your bike. But driving takes 30 min, and riding your bike takes 2 h. There is nothing dangerous or otherwise bad about riding your bike - it just takes an extra 3 h out of your day that you’d rather spend playing video games. As per the above definition, you can murder animals via climate change because it is “impractical” (ie, unpleasant because you are impatient) to ride your bike, and still call yourself a vegan.
Now, a new scenario. Suppose you are avoiding driving and are riding your bike 2h each way to get to work. But on the way to and from work, you pass a McD’s. Every time you pass it, your mouth waters. You are hungry. You really like the taste of their animal products. And the taste of a quarter pounder with cheese fills you with memories of a happy childhood. 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 - ie, is twice as inconvenient to avoid eating a hamburger. Given this scenario and the above definition, eating hamburgers is vegan if you like them enough.
it’s utilitarian, but not vegan
Why wouldn’t it be vegan?
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
Right. This is the part I’m curious about. If someone enjoys consuming animal products to such a degree that not consuming them is impractical, don’t they then have a claim to being vegan?
no. utilitarianism isn’t the basis of the vegan philosophy, and utility does not impact practicability
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:
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.
Nobody is addicted to all beef patty. The addiction comes from the stuff around the hamburger patty, the sauces, the buns, the french fries. That drives carbohydrate spikes, driving insulin spikes, driving carbohydrate Lows, driving hunger. It is a pernicious addiction cycle, but the meat is not doing it it’s everything else around it.
No processed foods, true vegans eat crude oil and raw uranium for their daily calorie intake
Yes. No animal was intentionally harmed or killed to be turned into oil. This puts it in the same category as foraged deer antlers or cicada wings, or I guess compost where you found a squirrel carcass and added it to the pile.
You could argue that animals are harmed by the process of extracting and burning fossil fuels, and thus it’s not vegan. But this isn’t very convincing to me, since that’s a secondary effect and not necessary to the process of consuming fossil fuels. (Or at least not necessary in the same way that killing chickens is necessary in order to make chicken sandwiches, for example.) And if you start worrying about a big web of consequences of your actions, then it seems like you’re mostly just adding stress to your life without actually making the world a better place.
Same argument could be used for Eggs and Milk then, those are not considered vegan, but in the end the animal does not get hurt.
Cows need to be impregnated by introducing an arm in their anus and holding their cervix so they can introduce a rod with semen in their uterus.
Male cows and chickens are useless to the industry so they usually get killed soon after birth.
Chickens usually are kept in cages the size of an A4 paper, cows also usually are very badly treated in order to be milked. Check out 3minutes.wtf so you can see that even what the industry calls the “best animal treatment” is still very inhumane.
But what about self farmed eggs?
It’s not uncommon for people in rural areas to have chicken around. Those chicken are taken care of, and roam around big spaces. Those chicken will also lay eggs on their own without any harm done to them. Most harm done is denying fertilization that would be similar to denying of reproduction to pet dogs or cats.
Situations happening in industrial farming are not universal. Specifically about the egg thing I go out of my way to buy eggs that are classified in a way that prove that the chicken are not in that conditions of living their whole life in a small cage.
Males are still killed at 1 day old.
Domesticated chickens were bred to lay about 1 egg a day when their wild counterpart lay about 1 egg per month. That’s a huge toll on their body.
You seem to care and go out of your way to avoid needless suffering. Fortunately it’s easy to stop supporting animal exploitation.
I only buy eggs from a local farmer and they have their chicken run around in a rather large arrea
Isn’t this just vegetarianism at that point
Bees aren’t intentionally harmed or killed to make honey but it isn’t vegan.
This isn’t entirely true. Sometimes queen bees have their wings cur off to insure they stay in the beehive, and thus make the beehive produce honey. Also, the queens can then often be discarded/killed at the end of the season. So no harm being done in the production of honey is not always the case.
I feel like there should be an option to certify honey as being vegan if no harm is done to the bees in the process though.
Honey isn’t vegan because it is an animal product, and veganism seeks to avoid animal exploitation and cruelty. I think any form of taking honey from bees would be considered exploitive but that’s just my view/opinion.
There’s a fair bit of nuance around the topic of whether honey should be vegan or not, since honeybees also overproduce, and that is its own problem. Like with sheep’s wool.
Although crude oil has the additional complication where it’s an incidental post-death product, like fertiliser, and from that viewpoint, it would be about as ethical.
I mean I think bees are harmed in the production of honey, it’s just that most people don’t care about bee welfare. Commercially they’re bred by crushing the male to extract semen, and any operation above hobby scale will clip the wings of the queen so that the hive can’t escape.
Then you necessarily need to replace their ideal food source with something that is nutritionally much worse for them (basically sugar water), and then hope that they survive on that long enough to make more honey for us to take.
So if a vegan has a pet chicken and treats it well, can the vegan eat the eggs?
Imo “backyard eggs” are really small potatoes, especially when like 98% of eggs globally come from factory farms. But even in that case, egg-laying hens are basically bred to suffer. They lay an egg every 1-2 days, compared to like once a month in the wild, which takes a huge amount of energy and nutrients. And we’ve bred them to produce eggs too big for their bodies, so that even when they’re treated really well, the vast majority of hens have bone fractures.
That’s why animal sanctuaries will usually either feed the eggs back to the hens, or give them medication to stop them from laying at all.
Of course, this is on top of the fact that 100% of egg-laying hen breeders, everywhere, kill the males shortly after birth because they can’t lay eggs. See this for more information.
I had a “pet” chicken when I was younger. One day we woke up and cockle-doodle-doo. It was a boy. I came home from school and he was gone.
Rip.
‘Eggs are really small potatoes?’ Got it. Off to make some potato salad.
Gelato isn’t vegan?!
… Chicken isn’t ~vegan~?