Preaching abstinence has never worked. It didn't work for sex and it is not going to work for meat-eating. The right question/attitude is how can we have an abundance of meat while protecting the environment? One possible solution is lab-grown meat and if that doesn't work then we need to invent some other solution that produces abundance with minimal cost to the environment.
Travelling less is much more important. Skip that vacation to Europe or Asia if you really want to have an impact on your footprint. Just one such trip dominates the impact of eating meat.
"... four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less)."
I'm definitely not strictly veggie: I just wolfed down a nearly free burger when offered! And though I haven't flown for years, I may need to visit China once or more over the next couple of years.
> having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year)
I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.
Indeed: if a few hundred million westerners made a real effort to curtail frivolous footprint then that 10b may happen with a lower-than-current total footprint.
Convincing a few hundred million to act in a certain way without force won't happen before we got 10b. I don't think that's an outlandish prediction to make...
<rant>Yes, but I get annoyed at some fat white western guy claiming that all those poor brown people a long way away are the problem. We (my family in the UK) managed to cut tonnes per year off our footprint while raising two kids in the UK; not that hard. Some would much rather blame others rather than even make any effort.</rant>
And I agree with you to a great degree (South African here...)
The problem is still, it's unlikely to be the solution. If we want the west to change there are two ways to go.
1. Legislation - This is the force option, i.e. if you break the law you go to jail and we'll come and take your property by force.
2. Market - Make technology that makes alternatives easier/more efficient/sexier etc.
2 is hard especially if alternatives are more expensive or about the same. Cost of panel can't really go much lower so we're stuck. Many people on the eco side don't like Nuclear (they're crazy).
Technology is getting better and I think small steps in regulation (i.e. taxing emissions slightly) may work. That's the direction that we're heading in so I'm pretty hopeful.
1. There has to be some of this: no market is totally free, and free-riders are always a problem to some degree.
2. Actually this is exactly the flavour of product/service that I am working on. Have the more efficient solution be better and easier, not a hair shirt. The area we are working on could knock 5% off Europe's entire carbon footprint and save most families hundreds of USD per year also.
Remember that rich westerners have a far higher per-capita footprint than the rest of the planet, eg the top 10% has about 50% of the total carbon footprint for example...
I prefer figuring out how to incorporate the externalities instead of banning/quitting things. Meat at twice the price would probably solve the problem.
Although it sounds outrageous when you say it like that, its pragmatic, and fits us as a species.
I'd like petrol to be 3 or 4 times the cost it is now. That would greatly reduce emissions, but fossil fuels could still be used in situations where there was no alternative (long distance flight, huge earthmoving machines?).
Inevitably, rich jerks would continue to ride their jetskis. So what?
You can't legislate people to have the right attitude. But taxing things does drive bulk behaviour.
Some of those giant earth-movers, like the tracked mining equipment that fills a giant mining-sized dump truck, are already powered by electricity that is generated on-site. They have big giant cables that trail behind them.
I mention this just to share that there is some chance of this improving, even in areas we might not think likely. If it is a long-term mining operation (short-term someday, perhaps) then I can't think of a technical reason that prevents wind and solar being used to generate the on-site electricity.
A recent HN article was about one of the mining dump trucks being powered by battery and using regenerative braking to mean it was able to charge itself. Those giant diggers are already using braking in their cables that power their shovels. Maybe there is something to capture there, as well.
In my work, I had the chance to deal with some riggers and some crane operators (smaller stuff) by just exposure while collecting data. During that exposure, I learned something new. Lifting the stuff up is actually pretty easy. It is putting it down that is difficult. Maybe there is some energy to capture in that process?
> If you have enough money you are free to do what you please to the detriment of the planet.
But it wouldn't be a detriment, the extra cost would be derived from the expenses associated with offsetting the negative externalities (by cleaning pollution, planting trees, recycling, water purification, whatever).
Uh, that's the exact business model of Whole Foods, now amazon.
Basically "only the rich shall eat healthy"
And to be totally honest, I want to tackle this issue through a startup called "standard pantry" which is the idea that one should have access to a standard pantry of goods and recipes (in place of a standard min income) and they should be able to sustain only and healthily feed themselves.
Educate? The only thing between me and a home cooked meal is fast food. Cooking is not inaccessible.
If the only problem is nutrition education then that is not a rich person privilege.
A large majority of the public cannot afford Whole foods but are educated enough to understand that home cooked meals from non-processed ingredients are healthier than their counterparts.
If education is all it took we'd all be rich with six pack abs. (Derek Sivers.)
Habit rules all.
Make unhealthy food illegal? Make marketing unhealthy food illegal?
See, your logic is sound, and the math isn't working out recently though.
I learned to cook from my depression era grandmother. Home cooking is healthy, but not always cheap.
My grandmother used to tell me "this meal is $1.37 per serving"
As we made things, I learned to cook in le curset pots from a woman who used to travel the world with Martin yan and Julia child... (we were state department family and had a lot of opportunity)
But my main point remains: the "educate" is pArt-and-parcel to the whole greater idea of a home cooked meal: "family time"
"Fast food is the bane of existence as we have basically brought generations to not value what home cooking means... then we exploit them in the cheap labor force and perpetuate the idea that having a "home cooked meal" means that "the way mom used to cook it" is an actual phrase and it means the disruption of the basis of modern society, the family...
This issue can spiral and spiral, but my point is that rather than basic income, we need basic pantry - the basis of understanding, having access to, and the knowledge to cook a good meal without breaking the home (due to how hard people need to work at jobs for their ability to provide food on the table)
Yeah good luck achieving that using pure capitalism. Unless you liberate all the farm animals by buying them out. You need regulations to prevent factory farming!
I want to show that there is a lot more murder today than before because of guns.
I pick one year (a far edge of the bell curve type of year) to compare to today where there was the least amount of murders and compare it to day.
Without showing an average or showing even a distribution bias should be expected. There is very little reason for picking a single year to these types of arguments and it is too often done.
Why would we do that when are bodies are specifically evolved for eating both vegetables and meat?
I, for one at least, consider along the millions of years that evolution tried a version of homo sapiens that couldn't eat meat, and it was selected against...why would we now attempt to overturn the apparent wisdom of that selection?
I don't think they're saying we should stop eating all meat — just that it should be significantly reduced.
That's pretty much a no-brainer for our health, for the environment and to reduce the suffering of millions of animals at the hands of the industrial livestock industry.
Personally, I used to eat meat multiple times a day, and now I only eat it once or twice a week. It has really improved my life. I think everyone should try it.
> Why would we do that when are bodies are specifically evolved for eating both vegetables and meat?
Our bodies specifically evolved for reproduction, but that doesn't stop us from using contraception when we have sex. Evolution also designed us to have wisdom teeth, but that doesn't stop people removing them.
Your argument assumes that natural selection has some kind of innate "wisdom", and that's just not true. Natural selection doesn't produce perfection or have any kind of intelligence behind it, it simply produces "good enough" (or, as we're on HN, the minimum viable product).
Because the wisdom of that selection isn't so wise, now that there are almost 8 billion of us. Natural selection is dictated by conditions; conditions change. There is nothing permanent about it. And existing population of the target species (humans in this case) is itself one of the conditions.
Also it's probably a mistake to attribute something like wisdom to what is essentially a statistical crap-shoot. The great temptation of religion is of course the idea that there is an Intelligence at work. But just to pick a silly example, does the dodo bird or the passenger pigeon think it was "wise" and "intelligent" for the forces of nature to select for meat-eating humans? Dodo philosophers and theologians in the last days - did they question why God would unleash such a fury on them?
Anyway I can tell you human ones will. Natural selection will most likely start killing off humans as soon as our technology can't keep up with all our baby-birthin'. It will manifest in forms you're already seeing in today's headlines. Voluntarily consuming less is an attempt to deal with it before the wisdom of natural selection deals with it.
This is the classic "appeal to nature" fallacy. On top of that, we don't know much about the diet of ancient humans, including how often they actually got to eat meat. Natural selection isn't wise, it's just an uncaring response to the environment. The environment has changed dramatically.
