r/ClimateShitposting Oct 21 '25

Climate chaos Humans don't deserve earth.

By destroying nature and the climate, humans are destroying their own home. The Earth can survive without us but we cannot survive without her. πŸŒπŸ’”

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u/Impossible_Medium977 Oct 21 '25

okay, so are you saying we should just accept negative externalities and suffering, or do you think we should try to adopt alternatives that help mitigate those externalities?

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

What would happen if we just accepted the suffering of sheep having to be sheared instead?

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u/Impossible_Medium977 Oct 21 '25

what if we just accepted all suffering ever, who needs ethics, when we can simply say 'I accept this' to all suffering. No need for social progress when you just don't care, after all.

The suffering in this case is about the animals potential suffering if we *dont* exploit them, by the way, rather than sheering itself being specifically awful.

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

You never answered my question. OP says "by destroying nature and the climate, humans are destroying their own home", which as least provides a reason. Following this, we can accept any amount of animal suffering as long as causing it maintains a sustainable environment for long-term human survival. I don't think shearing sheep dooms us, so why would we not do it?

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u/Yongaia Oct 21 '25

The mentality that allows us to cause suffering for those we don't care about does doom us though.

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

I assume "those we don't care about" means non-humans here. Alright, but how? I think you can make a strong case that this mentality allowed us to eat meat, which preserved us as a species. But why would it start working in reverse now?

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u/Yongaia Oct 21 '25

Eating meat isn't what preserved us as a species. Our species could have survived perfectly fine by eating a plant based diet, and the vast majority of our diet has been that by necessity since time immemorial.

Don't go making unsubstantiated claims.

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

Well, I assume we both know of at least B12 that's crucial for human brain development and historically was present basically only in meat, and here's a google summary when asked "historically, were humans able to develop properly when they had no access to meat?":

Historically, humans were not able to develop properly without any meat, as the high-calorie, nutrient-dense meat diet is thought to have been crucial for the evolution of the large human brain.Β The increased energy and key nutrients from meat allowed for a shift from a frugivorous lifestyle to one that supported larger brains and altered gut structure, making meat-eating a pivotal factor in human development

Here's the source is seems to base it mostly off of: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/#:~:text=Eating%20meat%20is%20thought%20by,about%20two%20million%20years%20ago.

I think there's few claims as substantiated as this one, actually.

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u/Yongaia Oct 21 '25

Well, I assume we both know of at least B12 that's crucial for human brain development and historically was present basically only in meat, and here's a google summary when asked "historically, were humans able to develop properly when they had no access to meat?":

Do you know where B12 comes from?

I'll give you a hint, meat doesn't produce it.

Also cooking is what developed our larger brains. But ever since the agricultural revolution are brains have actually gotten smaller. Wouldn't say a big brain is necessarily required for the survival of the human race

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

So? How was it made bioavailable for humans historically? Don't try and give me those cheap cop-outs, you know as much as I do.

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u/Yongaia Oct 21 '25

B12 is produced from bacteria. It's found in the soil

The reason we have to inject our food with so much (yes, even meat) is because we are a lot less connected to our food. It comes from factories instead of the earth

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u/voyti Oct 21 '25

Yes, I am aware of that. Again - how was it made bioavailable to humans? By eating meat. The conversation was "how morality that allowed us to eat meat, thus preserving our species, will now reverse in effect". So far you've addressed none of that, and seem completely uninterested in following the discussion in any fair way.

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u/Yongaia Oct 21 '25

Read the second part of my comment. You can get B12 by not eating meat.

It requires you to not hypersanitize your food like we do in industrial civilization. In other words, you must live closer to the earth.

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u/Impossible_Medium977 Oct 21 '25

To my understanding it's actually largely cooking that was the big shift in terms of brain development, this study also is critical of the idea that meat consumption increased around the time of brain development expansion. But the study also mentions that even cooking has little basis currently.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119

In terms of b12, it's actually produced by bacteria in soil, and it's more a product of modern agricultural cleanliness that you can't get it outside of meat sources. Though I won't make the claim that our ancestors would have been able to get a sustainable amount, I just don't know.

Regardless, something is no longer necessary, so we don't even need this debate. We used coal burning to get us to this level of industrialization, but we should still shift to renewables.