[jwr]

Yeah, but… We won't all do it today.

And this is really just blame-shifting and conscience-cleaning: we'll kind-of try to reduce our impact on Earth, feel better about ourselves, but the total impact will be minimal.

Also, if you look closely at meat production, by far the biggest problem is methane, and that's a problem that's been pretty much solved (seaweeds added to diet), except there is no incentive to implement the solution on an industrial scale. Instead of avoiding meat, we should make sure that the solution is actually used.

I believe the first step towards actually dealing with the problem is putting a significant price on carbon emissions (CO2 and CH4) and sticking to it worldwide. The current attempts, unfortunately, are half-assed. It should be really expensive to emit CO2, so expensive that everybody would immediately start looking for mitigations. Unfortunately, I also believe that humanity is too stupid and disorganized to do it, what with the local politicians pulling this and that way.

Personally, apart from trying not to do stupid things myself (e.g. avoid buying an SUV, ride an E-bike around the city, etc), there isn't much I can do. If I were young, I would look to join one of the companies trying to implement carbon capture, because that's the only thing that can save us.

[tchvil]

An animal hate about 5 times, if I remember well, the quantity of food you will get by eating its meat.

Add then the energy to grow it and its food, shelter, kill, transport, and cool the meat to preserve it. Add then quantities of single use plastic for some of these steps.

I eat less meat than before more because of this than CH4 emissions.

[Isinlor]

You should read about "cap and trade system" implemented by European Union. The idea is to cap emissions according to the Paris Climate agreement and auction resulting remaining emissions.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

[gdubs]

This cultural meme of the past several years that people shouldn’t make what changes they can because no one else will change is pretty awful. There’s a good argument to be made that by building a critical mass among some percentage of the population, we can actually lead to a change.

And methane is the one solvable problem with meat production. Far worse is the land use change. We’ve destroyed natural forests to grow soy beans that go primarily to feeding animals. Crops grown with a fertilizer heavy, petrochemical driven process. This food is shipped all over the planet. Even if we switched entirely to regenerative pastures, we would come up short — unless we magically solve carbon capture engineering, natural forests remain our only serious method for re-sequestering carbon and slowly undoing the damage we’ve done, for future generations.

[jwr]

Again, a few of us changing our habits will not move the needle. It will make us feel better, but the situation will be much the same.

But introducing a high price on carbon emissions and sticking to it will force meaningful change.

[gdubs]

You know who’s more likely to vote for a carbon tax? People who are already committed to making a change. People who are already making changes in their own lives. To fix climate change, everyone will need to make changes to their lives. Doing it now might not be enough to move the needle, but it also doesn’t hurt, and it also primes people for meaningful action.