To ask how drivers of massive SUVs square it with themselves in terms of climate change?

[Bleepingtons]

Same goes for those who go long haul on the regular? Buy loads of cheap, disposable fashion? Etc etc? Do you just not worry about climate change?

I know I sound sanctimonious but I am genuinely baffled by people driving massive diesel SUVs like there isn't a major issue.

@Dojacatpaws

Kaykay, yeah lorries never go over that speed limit and never go in the fast lane

Unless they’re euro trucks they literally can’t go faster than that. You’ll almost never see lorries in the fast lane of a proper motorway.

I agree OP. Why do people drive massive gas guzzlers? They want to be ‘superior’.

I think a lot of people just don't think about it. I cringe at some of the habits of my friends and family - constantly buying disposable plastic toys, water bottles etc, driving everywhere, wasting resources - and I think they 1 don't know how bad these things are and 2 don't think about the environment in anything other than an abstract way. Educated people, but just totally out of sync with the climate and good habits.

And when they do know something is bad it's in a breezy 'oh I know it's terrible isn't it' way, in the way you'd say 'oh I know I really shouldn't eat this dessert.'

KayKayWat

I do drive dhs hatchback occasionally and I find it incredibly scary how close some lorries get to the back of these little cars

To be fair, 99% of lorries are restricted to 56mph so you may be driving too slow on the motorway if they're right up your bumper.

As they're prohibited from using the fast lane to overtake, a lorry up your arse is usually a hint to stop hogging the middle lane and pull over so they can get past

It isn’t just me. I have watched where small cars are being tailgated by huge lorries.
I go at the speed limit but when the speed limit is 30, 40 or 50 which seems to be most of the motorways I use then how are you supposed to get away or drive faster. Even if the limit is 70mph it is usually so busy that you haven’t space to start accelerating away.

@Bythemillpond

KayKayWat

I do drive dhs hatchback occasionally and I find it incredibly scary how close some lorries get to the back of these little cars

To be fair, 99% of lorries are restricted to 56mph so you may be driving too slow on the motorway if they're right up your bumper.

As they're prohibited from using the fast lane to overtake, a lorry up your arse is usually a hint to stop hogging the middle lane and pull over so they can get past

It isn’t just me. I have watched where small cars are being tailgated by huge lorries.
I go at the speed limit but when the speed limit is 30, 40 or 50 which seems to be most of the motorways I use then how are you supposed to get away or drive faster. Even if the limit is 70mph it is usually so busy that you haven’t space to start accelerating away.

@ Bythemillpond there are no "motorways" that you drive at 30,40 or 50 mph unless it has a speed restriction in place due to an accident or roadworks! i think you are mis using the term motorway when your talking about a dual carriageway.

But there are so many speed restrictions in place that to do a journey on a motorway without speed restrictions is the exception rather than the norm

Yesterday I got on M25 to signs of 30mph. It then went up and down between 40-60mph. I was about 45 minutes on the motorway and only the last 3-4 miles didn’t have a speed restriction.

Apparently there was an obstruction
Never did work out where the obstruction was. The only obstruction appeared to be the speed restrictions that changed randomly to catch people out.

Definitely not talking about dual carriageways.
I can’t remember the last time I did a journey where I got on the motorway and actually did 70mph all the way.

@Bythemillpond
Totally agree. I use the M3, M4 and M25 most regularly and large chunks seem to constantly have speed limits between 40 and 60mph. Rare to get an unrestricted section where you can do 70mph

@JassyRadlett amd@GaryLurcher19 here's what UK cattles the ones I know of are fed;
We hear so much in the media that “the rainforest is destroyed by people growing soy to feed cattle” and that the animals are fed food which is soya based and imported. Especially with COP26 being all over the news and allegations being thrown round that all cattle are fed soya.

We’d like to set the story straight. Like most UK farmers our animals live most of the year on grazing. This is mostly grass but also herbs and broadleaf plants which grow in the pasture.

We only give hard feed at certain times – over winter, pregnant and nursing cows and if course – the bulls get hard feed as they work hard.

We use a UK company called Manor Farm Feeds who are based near Oakham. We feed a basic finisher feed and most of the contents of this feed are supplied from within the UK with not a sniff of Soya

🌾 Barley – Local Farmers, generally customers within 30 miles

🌾 Wheatfeed – Flourmills mainly in the East Midlands and East Anglia

🍚 Sugar Beet – British Sugar Beet Factories, mainly Newark and Bury

🍺 Malt Nuts – Breweries, mainly Coors @ Burton-on-Trent and others in East Midlands and East Anglia

🌿 Cane Molasses – Sourced globally and delivered from Liverpool, mainly South Africa. This is often a byproduct of sugar manufacturing.

🌱 Rapemeal – From Oilseed Rape grown domestically, pelletised with additional ingredients in the Midlands.

The fats and oils, maize and sunflower extract are all present in the same pellet as the rapemeal and the vitimins and minerals are all sourced from @trownutritionGB in Ashbourne, Derbyshire.

Over winter, grass has very little nutritional value so the cattle are fed hay which is grass that has been cut, dried and baled in summer before being stored.

This is the truth of what UK farmers are feeding cattle - not necessarily what you read in the media.

How much meat consumed in the UK is reared in the UK though?

Another thing that makes lorries seem so close is the sheer size of them and the way they look over you. Even if no closer than most cars they will often seem closer.

I mean, I did very specifically say that ruminants are not the only meat, and that lowering consumption to more expensively reared, lower-carbon meat would probably benefit UK producer over cheaper imports that are more intensively farmed.

That said, not all beef farming systems are as local as yours and more intensive systems in particular use imports. We import billions of pounds worth of feed every year.

I will reiterate however what I’ve already said about chickens and pork.

It’s a weird misdirection that when we talk about the footprint of the ag sector it always gets diverted to ruminants only fed on locally grown feeds and reared on land unsuitable for crops?

We import lots of meat, mostly reared less sustainably than here. We also feed vast quantities of foreign-grown soy to chickens and pigs (and some cattle and sheep.)

Still hard to argue that the land used to grow the feed for those cattle couldn’t feed a lot more humans than the beef does. I’m not anti-cattle farming personally but we need to be honest that eating meat does have a greater footprint than eating plants.

But I’ll shout it again: ruminants are not the only meat. Why suggest that I focused on cattle by singling me out here, when I was very clear in pointing out that chicken and pork are the two biggest issues for soy - and we consume more chicken than anything else.

Chicken chicken chicken. Why do we never talk about chicken?

(For the record - I come from a cattle farming family. I’m also not going on anything I’ve ‘read in the media’. Figures I’ve quoted are from primary sources, some from the NFU, others from Defra, others from independent research.

I'd imagine fat people are also bad for the environment as they over consume.

This is interesting.
www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/carbon_cost_food

How many people eat vegetarian and vegan ingredients grown here? It’s nearly all imported. Lots of forests being felled to grow it!

Until China and the USA get emissions under control, little uk is pissing in the wind. I have an electric suv, heat pumps and I’ve not flown for 2 years. Is that ok? Copt26 and people who like lecturing,such as M&H, use private jets when they feel like it. Which is quite often. Let’s cull them for a start! The jets and the people who use them!

My current mild hybrid suv does 35-38 mpg in real life, my car 10 years ago, an old small Polo did 30 mpg.

@TizerorFizz

How many people eat vegetarian and vegan ingredients grown here? It’s nearly all imported. Lots of forests being felled to grow it!

Until China and the USA get emissions under control, little uk is pissing in the wind. I have an electric suv, heat pumps and I’ve not flown for 2 years. Is that ok? Copt26 and people who like lecturing,such as M&H, use private jets when they feel like it. Which is quite often. Let’s cull them for a start! The jets and the people who use them!

50% of uk food is imported. Meat eaters buy imported food too - bananas, chocolate, coffee, tea, rice… list goes on!

The truth is that no individual's actions make a difference to climate change. I could live perfectly and everyone else could pollute to their heart's content, the world would be fucked. Everyone else could be perfect and I keep a coal fire burning 24/7 and my hobby is revving my diesel SUV whilst stationary, the world will be fine.

People know that alone they can't make a difference. It doesn't matter that they do what they want, combatting climate change relies on everyone else doing the right thing.

Also, people tend to target the behaviours others do but they don't. It's easy to complain about SUV drivers and people who fly around the world when you don't drive and haven't left the country in fifteen years. But the same people have other problematic behaviours, be it buying Chinese products, using Netflix or drinking almond milk, all of which cause climate change too. (China because they use so much coal, streaming services because they use an inordinate amount of energy for the data centres to keep them going, and almond milk because of how much water is wasted.)

TizerorFizz

How many people eat vegetarian and vegan ingredients grown here? It’s nearly all imported. Lots of forests being felled to grow it

I think you will find the majority of food grown on these sites is for animal feed that will end up on the plate of meat eaters.

@Bythemillpond
I think you will now find that, with the growth of vegan/vegetarian diets, there is a great deal of land being cleared for these crops.Land is not solely cleared for beef feed. Palm oil bring one such crop but there are others.

It’s much easier to buy British reared meat than it is to buy British grown and harvested vegan food. However price is a determining factor for poorer families. But vegetarians and vegans don’t get a free pass on this.

I totally agree with you, I wouldn’t drive one, but nor am I perfect.
I rarely fly either, but I do eat meat.
But as far as I’m aware, the farming in the UK is sustainable, if cattle are fed on grass, it actually helps to keep carbon captured in the earth.
It’s when cattle are fed on other types of feed that you get the problems, environment wise.

TizerorFizz

But would a committed vegan actually eat the type of processed food palm oil was in. A lot of the stuff palm oil is used in isn’t vegan anyway.

Whether it is British meat or meat that has been imported it all involves raising an animal and that takes an awful lot of resources.

Even animals that would normally rely on grazing get fed extra by the farmer.

Yes. Raising animals takes farmers, butchers and all the people in between. I want to see British farming go from strength to strength. I don’t want to see farm animals die out.

Lots of converts to being vegan don’t give a XXXX where their food is grown. Especially recent “converts” who virtue signal but still fly all over the globe! Most don’t grow their own food and rely on mass produced products from factories where lots of the raw ingredients are flown in from abroad. It’s utterly hypocritical.

Quite a few people who can afford a new Range Rover can also afford an electric run around. Large cars also are not environment friendly if they are old diesels. Modern diesels are very different, and SUVs in the EU6 category are pretty good when compared to an older diesel small car. However if it’s war on people with bigger cars, that’s completely different but some are electric or hybrid. The truth is that richer people will covert to electric first! They can afford it!

We drive a fairly big SUV purely because we own a large twin axle touring caravan that we use for hlidays. We take the caravan over to France or Spain by ferry and tow it all over the UK. So no flights for us but we do need a decent tow car to haul the caravan.