[zabatuvajdka]

I think the broader problem is the human mental condition. One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds?

Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do…

If you ask a big business owner to halt production in the name of climate change, will they? Hell no.

The government can squeeze people financially though so it literally is up to them to force businesses to comply lest they will exhaust their finances for non compliance.

I dunno it’s a pretty interesting dilemma though…

[nosianu]

> One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming

Unlike digging up carbon from below ground any activity involving only the carbon already above ground does not make the problem nearly as much worse, if at all.

Unless you mean the energy cost for that farming, which is mostly based on using fossil fuels? Which I don't think is a problem specific to animal farming (which of course should be reformed for ethical and health reasons alone) but to almost all farming all over the world. "Plant farming" is not carbon neutral either because it too requires a lot of fossil fuel input. So I don't think mixing problems and targeting only and specifically animal farming, which should be targeted for different reasons, is not helpful because it misdiagnoses the hearth of the problem of current farming techniques relying on ancient deeply buried sun energy instead of only using current sun energy (like the plants themselves do, but our processes don't).

[TeMPOraL]

> One of the largest contributors to global emissions is large scale factory farming but how many people are going to stop eating at McDonalds?

McDonald's process is likely also one of the most energy-efficient ways of producing these foods - they have incentives set right for that.

This is where things get a bit tricky: people like to paint a dichotomy between factory farming and small family operations, and God knows factory farms are indeed strip-mining the soil. But if we were to suddenly replace them with family operations, how much would we need to still feed everyone? I suspect the answer is, "way too much", and thus any working solution will have to be somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.

There are extreme efficiencies coming from the methods and the scales at which industry operates - we can't, and shouldn't, throw that all away. This conversation begs for being zoomed into, details cry out for consideration. Is industrial farming energy-efficient? Yes. Emissions-efficient? No. Can the former be improved without sacrificing the latter? Probably. Can large-scale farming be done sustainably with respect to soil use, without destroying efficiency? It's possible. Definitely worth looking into.

> Point being: people’s habits need to change across the board, but yet they argue that policy makers have no right dictating what they can/can’t do…

Yeah, that's part of why we are in this mess. I don't see a democratic way out of this; people won't vote for the right things until we're already all falling off the cliff, and marketers can no longer confuse regular people with disinformation.

Currently, I think our options boil down to one or more of:

- Governments getting more authoritarian and forcing businesses and consumers alike to adopt a much less carbon-intensive lifestyle;

- New technologies pop up that allow politicians and/or businesses to have their cake and eat it too - offer less carbon-intensive way of doing the things that are already being done. Renewables and electric vehicles are two examples of this - despite initial troubles and active resistance, they crossed the threshold after which the market wants them, and it's politically safe to mandate them.

That's why I'm very much bullish on all technological projects in climate space, and very angry at the "you can't solve social problems with technology" bullshit - new technology is a tried and true method of solving problems which are economically or politically untenable. New inventions offer new options to politicians and shareholders - which is what we need to have when our combined incentives paint the social process into a stalemate.

[ben_w]

I’m also bullish about tech; and the more I think about it, I expect any attempt by a government to force uneconomical solutions would result primarily in that government being outcompeted by others, so I see techno-cake as the only solution rather than one of two.