Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
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The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.
Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Not scaling could be a feature and not a bug. It would raise the price of beef and thus lower demand.
To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)
For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production
The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.
[…]
The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.
Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it
Most of the UK and Ireland’s grass-fed cows and sheep are on land that might otherwise be temperate rainforest – arable crops tend to prefer drier conditions. However, even if there were no livestock grazing in the rainforest zone – and these areas were threatened by other crops instead – livestock would still pose an indirect threat due to their huge land footprint
[…]
Furthermore, most British grass-fed cows are still fed crops on top of their staple grass
A huge aspect of this is ranchers not cycling their land and allowing it to regrow native grasses properly, which does end up running into the land use problem again. But right now we’re very unoptimized with land regrowth and there’s a huge difference that can be made with just properly handling the land and to stop ranching in literal deserts.
Nope it because politicians need votes from farmers so they continue to give farmers corn subsidies cos they lose votes if they take away the subsidies they where given decades ago.
In Australia most of our beef is grass fed. Not only is it cheaper (when u don’t account for the reduced price of subsidised corn) but because much of Australia is so desert like it can only support grass and cattle are the only way to convert that grass to food and profit.
we need to feed them corn and soybeans because people want lots and lots of meat, and that’s the best way to get lots and lots of meat.
that’s… kinda why people advocate for eating less meat, so that there won’t be such a powerful incentive to turbomaximize meat yields to meet the huge demand…
My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don’t think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I’m keen for lab grown though.
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How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It’s obviously someone else’s responsibility to change!
My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.
Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
We should push for large institutional change, but don’t ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren’t also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change
Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There’s been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns
I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.
Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.
I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.
Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.
If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.
it wouldn’t be very scientific but it’d be nice to have a graph like this with co2equivalent per serving
Same here. I only eat beef a few times a year as a treat both for health and environmental reasons. But coffee and chocolate so high up the list is more of a killer for me. I definitely enjoy a couple cups per day as well as at least one bite of dark chocolate. Probably should cut back now that I can’t claim ignorance.
I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.
Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.
I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.
They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.
When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).
Fuck your gatekeeping and special pleading
I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
But they fly for a vacation?
because companies pollute much more
This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.
See, OP is not saying we should “just drop red meat”, and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.
people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more
What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that’ll help a lot.deleted by creator
I’m one of those people, and I’ve brought the critical thinking required to prove it.
U see the issue with those studies is that they are calculating methane output from the animals themselves and that’s it. It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics and chemistry. Methane is CH4 and is a product of fermentation (which takes place in the gut of said animals). We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed so this carbon and hydrogen must come from somewhere in the animals diet (in this case grass). Now the grass must get those elements from somewhere and if u did heigh school chemistry u would know that the answer is photosynthesis (6CO2 + 6H2O + Light Energy -> C6H12O6 + 6O2).
So what’s happening is grass gets eaten by an animal. Most of that grass passes through unprocessed and is excreted as shit (a carbon sink contributing to the biomatter of the soil). A small fraction of that grass undergoes fermentation and a small fraction of that fermented carbon is byproduct methane. All that carbon originally came form the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. A majority of that atmospheric CO2 is sequestered in the cow shit by contributing to the soil biomatter. That’s not even accounting for the additional plants that the cow shit helps to grow which are also carbon sinks.
Now as an Aussie where 99% of our red meat is grass fed that’s actually a net carbon negative activity. As for the dumbass yanks feeding livestock corn (due to politicians buying votes with corn subsidies) then u have a problem. But nobody is gonna acknowledge any of this they just gonna spend all day shouting at each other.
The problem is not just the farts, the problem is the absolutely humongous amount of feed and space cattle needs. Most crops grown around the world are used to feed cattle, just like most farmland is used to grow cattle. That’s what’s polluting, producing so much green house gases, deforesting, etc.
No matter how you turn it, red meat is an environmental catastrophe.
We are talking about carbon here not other environmental impacts. If u wanna talk about other environmental impacts I’m happy to discuss how bad monocrop agriculture is especially the ridiculous amount of pesticides getting into the water and fucking everything up.
Producing feed doesn’t make GHG producing feed is the systematised mass application of photosynthesis (turning atmospheric CO2 into sugar). Using more land isn’t an environmental problem unless ur doing mass deforestation which is happening in 3rd world nations not the west. So what ur actually saying is that 3rd world nations shouldn’t eat red meat cos its causing deforestation but ours is ok because it’s not.
Their is the feed and livestock transportation emissions cost and that’s about the only good argument u got. Except that problem is an electric vehicle problem not a red meat problem. And if ur gonna use the argument of its an additional carbon cost that u don’t pay for just eating plants then why don’t u go live in a grass hut cos the additional carbon cost of concrete is unnecessary.
Not to mention that grass fed cattle don’t have this problem. So eating grass fed or going hunting also solves the problem.
Where do you think most of the world’s red meat is coming from? Brazil is one of the top producers and exporters of red meat, deforestation is ravaging the Amazon.
3rd world countries are not eating red meat, we are. The link between rich countries and meat consumption has been established for a long time now.Most cattle eat soy, not grass, that’s also a myth. Simply because soy is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot more abundant and easier to grow than grass. Also, grass is only slightly better than feed, but it generates more GEG overall because of digestion.
We need soy, so we need monocultures of soy, and that’s catastrophic, just like you said.
Transport is actually not that big of a problem with red meat. Land usage and the actual cattle are. They’re the top source of GEG emissions from agriculture.
You were talking about thermodynamics earlier. Red meat is incredibly inefficient converting resources to usable calories. 1kg of beef requires 25kg of feed.
You’re also using a lot of straw men in your arguments, living in a grass hut instead of a concrete building, or electric vehicles for cattle transportation?
You can enjoy red meat but you can’t argue in good faith that it’s not completely awful for the environment at pretty much every level.
A few sources to support my claims:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/23/americas/brazil-beef-amazon-rainforest-fire-intl/
Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.
Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.
But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don’t have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.
And let’s also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It’s not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They’re more or less green deserts.
My single greatest contribution for the climate is not having children.
You know what would help even more? Eating other people’s kids.
And kicking people in the nuts 🤪
Nah you got to start at the source, more efficient, eat the (future-) parents.
I know a few guys and gals that drink straight from the spigot, so to speak.
Here’s the perspective that helped me the most with this:
You don’t have to quit meat (sorry for the pun) cold turkey.
Even cutting your meat consumption by half can have a significant impact. Start by ordering a vegetarian option instead of meat every once in a while. Experiment and find veggie alternatives you actually like, there are tons of options now. I heard someone refer to this as “microdosing veganism”, and it can really help make the change less exhausting.
Over time, you might even notice your tastes start to shift and vegan options become actually enjoyable instead of a “sacrifice”.
That’s meee! ✋
I still eat meat, but quite little, and quite rarely. There’s the odd salami at home, or every few months some ham for carbonara when I get guests over, or something like that. But it’s such a small percentage of what I consume now, I feel like I’m effectively vegetarian, anyways.
And yeah for most things I use alternatives because it turns out they’re often easier to handle. The Barista This Isn’t Milk is nice because it foams more reliably than actual milk and lasts much longer which is important as a single household.
Oh yeah, our house basically gave up on real milk once the alternatives got good. The shelf life alone was a huge driver.
lasts much longer which is important as a single household
This is an often-overlooked argument for veganism. If you plan carefully, you literally don’t need a fridge.
what has helped me is just pivoting heavily to chicken, i used to basically just eat beef and pork, so simply eating a different kind of meat helped ease into eating non-meat meals as well.
meat alternatives are of course great, but i also think soybeans (or similar) are very underrated, just raw green soybeans are astoundingly meat-like for being a straight up unprocessed vegetable. Great in salads.
If you only understood the damage you were doing.
Rather, I feel you fully understand the damage you are doing and are probably doing it deliberately
I suspect l’ll regret engaging with this, but… what?
Sure, but like ~8 companies produce like 75% of the pollution. Their biggest con was shifting the responsibility to individuals to change their habits instead of forcing them to clean up their factories
perfect is the enemy of good.
I wish vegans and vegetarians would be a bit more willing to promote this viewpoint. It’s insane how many otherwise normal people will refuse a single meat-free meal for no reason other than identity politics.
You forgot number one: By far, the best thing you can do for the climate is not have children.
People will look at an image like this, read that 80% of deforestation in the Amazon happens for cattle, and go “I’m powerless, Exxon is bad” and continue to not only eat meat 5x a day but also actively try to convince other people that reducing their meat consumption is silly and they might as well keep eating it as much as they want because grocery stores will stock it anyway and Elon Musk rides a jet.
Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
It’s a manner of perspective, Coca Cola is considered one of the largest polluters on the planet but that’s not because corporate Coca Cola is out there polluting for funsies it’s because they make a product that individuals purchase and then individuals improperly dispose of. Sure no one person can stop Coca Cola from polluting but isn’t the pollution caused by your individual purchase your own responsibility?
No. Coke could make biodegradable packaging and choose not to because number go up. Next question.
And people could not purchase non biodegradable products
Direct action has value… But people whine about beef when the best one is not not fly.
300m cows slaughtered a year at 500lb of beef per cow and 22lb of co2 per lb of beef is 1.65B tons of co2e a year from cows. Global aviation makes up 920m tons of co2 from flying
Thank you
Operative word you. Individual action was a deliberate red herring constructed by the FF industry propaganda machines half a fucking century ago, because they knew who the actual significant contributors to the problem were.
I do agree that real change takes political power. You need things like tax breaks for people who use public transit, congestion pricing, taxing airports more, banning ads for SUVs, requiring electronic devices to be repairable, etc… These actions would be far more efficient than any individual action. Sure.
But political power isn’t enough. Look at what just happened in Canada.
Justin Trudeau banned oil tankers off the coast of British Columbia and he tried to ban single use plastics. He faced outraged reactions.
Some angry politicians were publically taunting him on social media and sued his government :
A guy literally campaigned on defending plastics and slashing the (tiny) tax on carbon.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-scrap-plastics-ban-1.7514037
See what happened? The guy was the Prime Minister. He tried some small changes. He faced brutal political backlash. Why? His people weren’t ready.
Change starts with individuals. Only when you reach a critical mass of individuals can you start trying to push for policy changes.
Policy wise this is about it but daddy don’t like it
Not having a kid eclipses all of these by orders of magnitude.
I haven’t had hundreds of kids. I’m a climate savior.
As a middle aged dude who is unlikely to have kids at this point, I’m curious about the numbers if you have some some suggested sources to peruse
That’s almost certainly the biggest dietary change you can make.
But for overall impact, there’s one winner and it’s bigger than everything else put together.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Capitalism hates this one weird trick.
Ontop of that, factory farming is a lovecraftian horror that floods the universe with terrible agony. And there’s very good reason to believe that the suffering of animals is as real and awful as yours or mine.
One thing I never see brought up about the factory farm systems, maybe cause it is a bit of a distraction from animal rights, is that hypothetically these systems are turnkey human genocide infrastructure. It is infrastructure for a sort of perpetual animal, uh… regenocide? afterall.
Seems outlandish and unthinkable, maybe. But then again, all bets are off with the current administration in the US.
Given the amount of perpetual torture these very-likely-to-be-sentient creatures go through, it’s certainly worse than any genocide in history has ever been. Even if you only think that animals are capable of 5% of the suffering of humans.
Agreed. It’s depressing that everyone who continues relying on animal products and exploitation have so many psychological barriers put up to even facing and contemplating the other animal atrocities openly. It becomes more heart-wrenching the more you think about it.
Okay so I must be in the minority, but I don’t feel any particular pathos for these billions of slaughtered animals. Seeing myriads of baby chicks ground into dust doesn’t really move me in the slightest. Just understanding that the farm industry causes intense, agonizing, slow deaths for billions if not trillions of creatures every year is enough for me to understand its morally imperative to not consume the vast majority of animal products. Bentham’s Bulldog has been quite moving for me.
Yesterday I decided to stop buying honey after reading his article about how honey plausibly causes orders of magnitude more suffering than everything else. I’m also vegetarian, and I have replaced most of the dairy in my diet with plant-based alternatives. I still haven’t eliminated cheese and eggs from my diet though. For cheese it’s because I don’t think there’s good evidence the cheese I buy causes any agony in particular, but eggs is the next step for me.
What bother’s me about these sorts of posts is they don’t give people a consumption goal. Blindly telling everyone to consume less isn’t exactly fair. Say, for example, there’s person A who consumes 1 unit of red meat per month, and person B who consumes 100 units of red meat per month. If you say to everyone “consume 1 unit of red meat less per month”, well, now person A consumes 0 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 99 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Say, you tell everyone “halve your consumption of red meat per month”, well, now person A consumes 0.5 units of red meat per month, and person B consumes 50 units of red meat per month. Is that fair? Now, say, you tell everyone “you should try to eat at most 2 units of meat per month”, well now person A may happily stay at 1 unit knowing that they’re already below the target maximum, they may choose to decrease of their own accord, or they may feel validated to increase to 2 units of red meat per month, and person B will feel pressured to dramatically, and (importantly, imo) proportionally, reduce their consumption. Blindly saying that everyone should reduce their consumption in such an even manner disproportionately imparts blame, as there are likely those who are much more in need of reduction than others. It may even be that a very small minority of very large consumers are responsible for the majority of the overall consumption, so the “average” person may not even need to change their diet much, if at all, in order to meet a target maximum.
All you fuckers act like your individual choice to not eat meat or have kids won’t just have another eat up the same resources or have kids in your stead. We need smart people to have ethical kids and we need extreme systematic political change for any real affect whatsoever. Even if the ENTIRE WORLD dropped red meat, while still a good chunk, it’s only 6% of our global annual emissions that we’d save. The top 3 sectors for emissions are energy transportation and general industry which makes up about 75% of global emissions, at about 25% each. The individual choices not mattering as much as political systematic change is huge, and that won’t happen if the Trumpers are having most of the kids and we’re having stupid divisive arguments about what our individual food choices should be.
It’s enough to make it difficult to keep to 2C climate targets on its own. Its not something we should ignore - especially since much of it comes in methane emissions which means reduction in it can be felt quicker and reduce chance of hitting feedback loops. We must tackle all sources
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
That’s also on top of other environmental issues that it contributes to besides just climate change. Land usage, water usage, waste runoff
Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
And pesticide and fertilizer usage is lower
Thus, shifting from animal to plant sources of protein can substantially reduce fertilizer requirements, even with maximal use of animal manure
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
The diet containing more animal products required an additional 10 252 litres of water, 9910 kJ of energy, 186 g of fertilizer and 6 g of pesticides per week in comparison to the diet containing less animal products
Emissions are just a piece of it. There’s land use, consequences of this land use, etc, which involve changes in rain patterns, soil acidification, and so forth.
I agree that systemic change is important, too, but 6% of global emissions attributable to a single factor is HUGE. Plus, it’s not one or the other. Changes by individuals supports change at a systemic level.
From a selfish perspective, why should the entire populace be forced to give up small luxuries in their increasingly difficult lives just so that a handful of large corporations don’t have to make any changes?
Why isn’t it that these large corporations should be forced to change, thus removing the need for everyone getting rid of their small luxuries?
Just seems ridiculous that the message is “everyone should give up their creature comforts and live as simply and tediously as possible so that billionaires don’t have to change”.
Just seems ridiculous that the message is “everyone should give up their creature comforts and live as simply and tediously as possible so that billionaires don’t have to change”.
I never said that. On the contrary: All of it will have to change if life on this planet is supposed to remain livable, and it’s gonna involve quite a bit more than giving up red meat. I also think that having broad public support for that change, built on many individuals who choose to implement it, will make it easier to impose the same demands (e.g., through policy) on corporations and the wealthy. Given that billionaires are not exactly known for being selfless, waiting for them to do the right thing seems like a losing strategy to me.
Changes by individuals supports change at a systemic level.
I’m interpreting that as changes by individuals supports changes by corporations and it’s making zero sense.
I used “systemic” with regards to policy. I don’t think corporations change much by themselves without a strong monetary incentive (e.g., shifts in customer preferences) or external pressure (e.g., policy). Changes in individuals are helpful for both of these.
You have anger problems as well as responsibility problems.
Exactly.
I could devote all my time to recycling, reducing carbon emissions, not driving, voting, not eating red meat, including forcing everyone i know to do the same - and the net result would be an iota of a drop in the ocean of change. i.e. nothing.
As others have said, until there is a global shift on how the world operates and the major oil companies, cruise lines, and airlines all shut down, nothing you or i can do will matter.
Edit: folks still don’t get it. It’s not a matter of apathy, it’s pragmatism. You will never, ever convince enough people to make a significant change relative to the big consumers. You will be dealing with the people who literally pollute and consume out of spite, and/or principle, or ignorance. For every thing you do, someone’s doing the opposite. We failed the planet a long time ago though lack of education and giving too many greedy people power. The world is too large and the snowball is over the hill.
The amount of fuel used by the cruise industry in about 1 minute, on average, is more fuel than you or I or any normal person would consume in their entire lifetime, by a lot. That’s on the low end. They consume 500,000 to 1.5 mil gallons an hour. The average person uses maybe 20 to 50k gallons their entire lives. You’d have to convince millions and millions of people to stop driving completely for 40 years to offset that. Tens of millions probably.
Not gonna happen. That’s just one industry.
Everyone’s not gonna just stop flying. Or stop driving. Or stop eating meat. It’s idealistic and impossible and frankly imaginary, no matter how much it may be necessary.
Why waste your time and energy doing things that will do nothing? Focus your efforts elsewhere. Policy change probably has the best chance of helping. But then I point back to the people actively and purposely thwarting any attempts at curbing consumption, and these people are billionaires etc. And at least in the USA, running the country.
