The skill we desperately need to teach to the public is prioritization. It only takes 3 steps:
1. Identify what measurable effect you want to achieve (e.g. reduce emissions by X% within Y years).
2. Look for multiple ways to do it.
3. Pick the combination with the best cost/effect ratio.
Until this is taught in schools on par with math or basic history, we are extremely prone to manipulation. Whoever owns the media will cover one solution that benefits them, declare it as a religious virtue and fill their pockets off pushing the crowd to adopt it. If may never solve the actual problem, but the public lacking those skills will never notice and will never question the narrative.
I am gonna say, priorization is nice and all, but you can have your priorities all figured out and not achive anything because you live in a nation where there is no majority for it and if there was your politicians are incentivised to ignore it.
So you do the things you can do. Fly less, eat less/no meat, use your bike more often, point at the coal plants and vote for political parties that want to get rid of them. May later generations (should they exist) say: "He was one of the good ones". Or you know, you could hide behind your priorities, fly, eat meat, drive a SUV and point at the coal plants.
I get it, we should not let them blame individuals for corporate and political failure, but what you do yourself also matters, because it makes you more aware, it makes you have higher standards, it makes you less tolerant to weak excuses.
Sorry, it doesn't work like this. The reason politicians are not prioritizing those things is because currently the effects from the climate change are not affecting profits. It's cheaper to do lip service and lip service they do. At some point as things get worse, some actual solutions like biodiesel will start paying off and governments will start adopting it.
All you can do by your personal martyrship is delay this point by historically negligible time. But this is not fair to yourself.
It's like you have a drunkard neighbor. You know once he runs out of money, he'll sober up, take it seriously, find a job and start rebuilding his life But instead of letting him do it, you sell your own house and keep buy him more booze! Sure, he will be thankful, but it won't solve the problem. You are just fooling yourself by doing the simplest thing that appears to give your life a meaning, but on the grand scale you are just wasting your own life away.
SUVs are nice, you can fit multiple kids and hiking gear into them, tow your own speedboat and go to multi-day roadtrips along the coast. So what, I am supposed to give that lifestyle up, reduce my life to eating bad-tasting food in front of a TV so the politicians, who are agreeably bad at their job could take more flights with their private jets? I don't think it's fair. I mean, the politicians would love you do do that, but that's just not fair to yourself.
Nope, not really. Not so long ago horse manure on the streets was a real problem. Do we remember those who decided to sit at home and never travel? Nope, we remember Henry Ford for making automobiles a mass product. Similar with bubonic plague vs. hygiene. Similar with bacterial illnesses vs. penicillin.
Every single example of a positive societal change benefited the person behind it. Martyrship, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of religious cults and third-world countries. A stable system where everyone suffers in the name of abstract greater good, while the handful of elites reaps the profits. Don't go that way, it sucks.
>Do we remember those who decided to sit at home and never travel?
That's a problem with your education in history, not the reality of past progress or markets. Not to mention that your response has barely any relevance to the point I made.
Does the US debt threaten to end the life on earth? Then I'll happily join the movement that aims to bring it down by private action.
I know individual action on it's own is not terribly effective. The game plan I see here is that we keep public focus on how bad meat eating is for the environment, and hopefully reach a critical mass in public opinion so that one day it is politically acceptable to reduce the dairy industry subsidies. It takes time, but it is a feasible idea.
There seems to be a huge overlap between people pushing abstinence from meat on the grounds it is better for the planet and people who a prior believe meat consumption to be immoral.
It would be wise to have a healthy skepticism if a beef and dairy association said there was no impact, so it seems it would be equally wise to apply skepticism to ethically minded vegans saying it is not fine.
Great article. This bit blew me away: "investment in improving and scaling up the production of meat and dairy alternatives resulted in ... 11 times more than zero-emission cars.
And giving up on meat wouldn't solve the nitrous oxide problem, which is mostly created in the process of growing plants for food. If you are going to let perfect be the enemy of good you're going to end up hungry.
Meat and dairy production is a product of oil, so how is the accounting done here? Is the emissions from the diesel burned in a tractor used to grow and harvest the hay for the cattle beast on the oil company or on the meat companies? Perhaps is it counted twice?
Obvious fix: break up the biggest meat & dairy companies into a huge number of smaller companies, cutting the "emissions from 15 of the biggest" value by ~100x.
(Or, maybe it'd be better to focus on metrics which aren't so easily gamed?)
For the burger, which are eaten quickly in between? Definitely. And that is definitely the very largest part of meat consumption worldwide. I don't think most people would even notice if the burger patty, bursting with sauce, was replaced by Beyond Meat or Impossible Meat.
I tried the beyond meat offerings by the various burger joints when they came out and I can tell you that if you think the above is true you need to eat some more meat to refresh your memory (not to mention the brain fog and gassy belly I got from some of those offerings).
Because for the most part, meat is carbon neutral. Meat is not and has never been the problem.
Look at it from the standpoint of the carbon cycle. For example, where does the carbon in the methane originate? It is carbon that originated in plant matter consumed by cattle. It originates in the atmosphere, and goes back to the atmosphere. We do not feed petroleum or coal to cows. So net-carbon increase from cattle production is very minimal.
Yeah, we do. Cow feed is grown with petrolium-based fertilizer. Eating a cow that ate plants will always consume more fertilizer and therefore petrolium than just eating the plants directly, because the cow is less than 100% efficient.
Nominally meat production emits more CO2, but one also has to take in account the nutrition of the food. 1kg of beef vs 1kg of rice. Not exactly the same.
The CO2 footprint of a plant-based diet is lower. However, that is not the only aspect of this discussion. All the studies on the subject that I read seem to indicate that eliminating animal protein always leads to deficiencies and lack of growth in children. All the studies on the health benefits of veganism only seem to apply to obese people eating junk food.
But one does not need to go full vegan. Reducing meat consumption to the bare minimum and maybe selectively eating animal products that are less harmful to the climate, it arguable a better strategy.
"Always," you say? It "always" leads to deficiencies and lack of growth? Shoot. Don't tell my kid, who at five is half her mom's height and is in track to be taller than I am. I eat the occasional meat and ate more when I was younger. My kid is a vegetarian, like her mother. Maybe check the hyperbole a bit.
People who only eat plants do just fine. People who don't put thought into what they eat, do badly, no matter the diet. Your average American probably has a significant glut of protein and carbs and days and everything else and they probably significantly overestimate the amount of protein they need (discuss it with athletes who have professionals planning their intake). We glamorize protein for some reason but look around you. People are fat. Arguably it would be better if most people probably went vegetarian.
All the studies that I have read indicate that protein quality is important and children on strict vegan diets do worse on multiple growth metrics. As a layman on the subject I cannot really give you professional advice, but in my very best estimation is does seem to me, that a healthy diet that includes animal protein is a more cautious approach to one which totally excludes it, assuming the health of the child is being prioritized.
Only 8500 plants need to be replaced and we can reduce 20% of emissions.
Hey I’ve got a stupid idea. Let’s tell everyone to stop eating meat, replace a billion gas powered cars, drive less and stop flying
Let’s rinse and repeat and have this discussion every day for the next decade, just like we have done for the past 2 decades