Unpopular Opinion

I would if there weren't 100 better places to start first.

Also, it's probably too late to make enough difference short of rewriting how modern civilization works.

refraining from downvoting because this is an actual unpopular opinion (it is incredibly stupid, good job)

Upvoted, because this is an incredibly unpopular opinion.

resisting the urge to down vote after seeing the community

Most pet food is made from the unwanted scraps/guts left over from processing human food. There are not additional pet food farms - they’re the same farms. Where will the guts go if pets don’t eat it? Cheaper fast food, probably, i.e. more fast food, or waste.

I don’t know that this would reduce anything - just move resources around and probably have other effects that you and I aren’t imagining.

Cats and dogs do require meat to live, unlike humans. Reducing the meat industry will drive up pet food prices, and that may reduce pet ownership. But we better fucking make sure pets are spayed and neutered - doubly so if that ever happens.

I've got zero kids and two dogs. The carbon footprint definitely tips in favor of my dogs.

I'm not driving the dogs to school and soccer practice every day, sitting in traffic, nor buying them new clothes every year. I don't feel the need to buy a small bus-sized SUV to give my King Kong sized baby room to play.

We have semi trucks burning diesel to bring baby food, diapers, cribs, etc to all parts of the world. We devote some of the best produce to make baby food and create a shit load of plastic waste with bottles and other assorted baby paraphernalia. Don't even get me started on disposable diapers.

I say keep the pets, ban the kids. That'll definitely address climate change within a generation.

Or, we could hold accountable the handful of large companies producing the bulk of the emissions because all of our individual emissions combined are but a drop in the bucket.

/s if not obvious (except the part about holding polluting companies accountable - we should definitely do that)

Yeah there's a lot of ways to reduce carbon emissions. The important thing is to choose the ways that fits your life the best. It's all about making an effort and not about some kind of purity test.

I mean everything you have and everything you do is putting carbon into the air. Literally breathing puts carbon in the air.

But we probably should be prioritizing here. Could go crazy thinking of every activity that produces carbon. Take transit, have a plant burger. Most important thing is that everyone makes an effort rather than having a small number of people taking extreme steps to reduce only their own carbon emissions while looking like nutjobs to everyone else.

Sure if you don't feel like you need a pet, then don't have one. It helps. If you already have four cats, then you really don't need to get a fifth cat. Like come on, Janet, you already have enough cats FFS.

But no, nobody should suggest reducing the pet population as part of a carbon reduction plan. That just makes it all sound oppressive and crazy and will be rejected by a majority of the people. That will result in people not doing anything to reduce carbon emissions, which has a net negative result.

It's good to think in this kind of way though. But it's better to go with "take public transit, maybe try a plant burger, and think of other ways to reduce carbon emissions!" And let people reach the conclusion themselves about whether or not they need another pet.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Trying to be as neutral and objective about this idea as I can:

People who own pets are very emotionally attached to them. Even if pet ownership was the #1 contributing factor to climate change, it would still take an extremely terrible climate for the majority of pet owners to be willing to live without their pets.

If you were to try to introduce some legislation to make this happen, I think that at a minimum and currently owned pets would have to be grandfathered in.

A bit off topic, I have heard some calls to make it mandatory that all pet cats would have to be indoor cats, due to their predation of certain species

So? We suggest going vegan. Over 300 billion animals are raised and slaughtered every year. Pets account for such a small part of the environmental impact.

My favorite part of this unpopular opinion is just how far you could go with "reduce human population" before you get to the level of unpopular this opinion is. Assuming it ever gets that far.

Birth caps? Fine. Kind of works in an ideal world I guess

Neutering people? Eh... I get it, not for me but I get it.

Death camps? Ok, no, but like Thanos did have a point...

No more dogs or cats? That sir is a bridge too far!

This is just the fallacy of individual reponsibility dressed up to focus on one minor contributor.

First up the three biggest CO2 producers are planes shipping and cars. And by a long shot. I agree that there are some corrupt activists the ones that are really trying to make a change are promoting non car centric infrastructure.

Hey OP, I think you're focusing on specific use cases of broader issues.

Globally speaking, energy is about 25% of all CO₂ emitted into the air. Farming and agriculture is another 25%. Industry is 20% and transportation is about 15%. So in just those four categories we're talking about 85% of all CO₂ emitted.

So when you indicate:

We have semi trucks burning diesel to bring pet food and pet supplies to all parts of the world.

That's transportation.

We devote some amount of farm land and livestock to feeding those pets

That's farming.

We have big box stores for pets

That's both energy (for power) and industry (concrete).

So I just wanted to point that out. Now I also wanted to address something else.

It’s interesting when people suggest to reduce global human population

Rich people suggest this and poor people think it sounds good because they believe that the reduction is not including themselves. We have a TON of resources on this planet. We just do not have enough resources on this planet for the current distribution system. That's the key point here.

Population reduction should be viewed in the same manner on how humanity did the horse population reduction. The second we invented the car, horses were no longer useful, so we got rid of a ton of them. As we continue to progress in technology, we render a lot of people no longer useful through no fault of their own. So there's a few folk out there recommending we do the same to them as we did horses.

Now where that lies on your ethical meter, you know, I'm not here to judge. Humanity is a spunky bunch. But just remember that the folks indicating population decline as a viable answer, if you're not pulling eight or nine figures a year, you're in that group up for consideration for culling.

But back to your point. I mean the pet thing is indeed an interesting take on the four factors of climate change. Indeed an interesting take on them for sure. I don't have hard numbers on the CO₂ emissions for pet ownership, but they do indeed contribute to the big four. I cannot imagine that they account for a single percent of any of the big four's underlying values. 900 million dogs do sound like a lot but it's actually pretty small in terms of footprint on the environment. The big thing is that the vast majority of those dogs globally are not living high CO₂ producing lives. Just a few of them are. Same with cats. The vast majority are feral beasts. Wrecking diversity of various ecological areas for sure, but not exactly producing massive amounts of CO₂.

Which ecological impact is something that's a different topic than climate change but the two do sometimes overlap each other. But they are two different studies at the end of the day.

It's not a bad point but I'd love to see some data. I mean, what is my cats carbon footprint actually? I'm guessing it's not that much compared to all the rest I could do to reduce my emissions. But I could be wrong.

Footprint causes by pets is likely nothing even compared to just the beef industry, lol.

Also, my pet keeps me from walking in front of a bus some days, so she's also responsible for my carbon footprint. What a horrible little dog.

Seriously, though, there are FAR bigger producers of emissions and most of them don't bring nearly as much joy to this shitty existence as our pets do. Plus, the animals are there. They already exist, and bringing them into our homes just means we don't have a giant population of feral animals running around the suburbs. If people spayed and neutered responsibly and backyard breeders/mills were banned (and that was actually enforced) and countries with massive populations of street dogs were better equipped to control the population, I might agree with you that we should have fewer pets.

Number of pets per se is a pretty bad statistic, imo. Need to weigh the energy, land use and others that each pet have and compare it with other activities.

Congratulations on your unpopular opinion. It's an interesting point that clearly has hit a nerve with people. There's a lot of "what-about-ism" in these comments.
I think the important take out of climate change is individually you don't have to do everything (i.e. compost, put solar on, sell your car, avoid showering) but it is important that you do something that you can adjust in your life. If that's deciding to not buy another pet after your current one passes, good for you. If pets are a fabric of your being, then maybe looking for carbon reduction solutions elsewhere would be beneficial.

Instructions unclear, eat all the human babies first. Or take a 7 day Easter Caribbean cruise.

Sister, it’s already an unpopular opinion when you point out that all pets are a luxury. Bringing up pets like this is going to tip half the pet owner population into firmly far right voting cause “they’re coming for snugglewuggie”

An even more unpopular idea is that we need less people.

We have the resources for every human on this planet to live decently luxuriously, if, there weren't so damn many of us

There's unpopular opinions, and then there's straight up wrong opinions.

Concern troll is concerned

The ice caps are melting people; do your part and shoot the family dog.