I think the effort to get people to stop eating meat and XYZ favorite food isn't going to work. A lot of people eat what they eat because they don't really have much food choice. And with some people pushing weird options like bugs as a protein source while the rich will surely keep eating normal old burgers, life is starting to feel like a bad scifi movie.

I think the absolute biggest and most immediate solution is eating less. Not less beef. Not less pork. Just less of everything.

Obese people can easily consume 2x or more of the food a non-obese person takes in. In America alone, about 1/3 of the country is obese. Doing incredibly rough math here, cutting the calorie consumption of that top 1/3 in half would be the equivalent of 1/6 of food consumption vanishing. As someone from a rural family full of almost-carnivore 400+ pounders, getting them to cut their calories to ~2500 calories a day would be like half the neighborhood and their consumption simply vanishing.

And that's not even factoring in the gas we need to burn to accommodate the greater mass on airplanes, in cars, etc. Dropping the average weight of obese countries by 1/3 would put a big dent in emissions.

People have been prophesizing collapse and mass death for decades. They were wrong every time (obviously).

Do you have the numbers to back up your claim about middle-class lifestyles?

We do currently witness mass death for insects, which had managed to survive through quite a few geological revolutions but which apparently cannot survive the humans’ need for industrialized agriculture (and you cannot feed 8 billion people without industrialized agriculture). And the extinctions among the mammal genre are already pretty well known.

For millennia, actually. They have been right a few times.

> this planet doesn’t have the resources of providing a middle-class lifestyle for 7 or 8 billion people.

So what? What do you propose, concretely?

> Malthus was right,

Again, so what?

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think the only way to fight climate change is by changing to an economy that doesn't rely on increasing production, and accepting a lower standard of living.

I see people blaming climate change on overpopulation, but this isn't really the truth - a majority of the world's energy usage comes from first world countries.

How much of a reduction are we talking about? Because if it's far enough, then it won't really be any different than the destruction of our civilization. At that point we might as well go full steam ahead into climate change, because the results of it aren't actually set in stone. The IPCC says that we still don't know how to properly model clouds in our climate change models - they could have a significant cooling or warming effect.

> and accepting a lower standard of living.

I think nearly everybody is ready to accept a lower standard of living... for their neighbourghs!

> So what? What do you propose, concretely?

I did say:

> I’m afraid is already outside of our control.

so you could say I'm a defeatist, as in I know of no workable and ethical solution. I am just laying out of the facts as I think they are happening.

Maybe we agree in the following conclusion:

Global warming is here to stay (because only a global effort can constrast it and human nature is against global efforts). Let's stop pretending we can make anything about it and let's instead focus on adapting to it (because humanity thrives when everybody can try and improve his own condition without sliding into theft).

> I don’t think real milk has been replaced by soy milk.

It doesn't taste like cow's milk though. And it's not trying to. Artificial meat on the other hand has a goal of being as close to beef as possible.