| "I don't know what the solution is" I'll get hate for my comment too, but the answer is less people. Resource consumption (for multiple resources) and freedom are competing interests. You have to trade freedom to restrict resource consumption. But even if you do that for this topic (meat). You have to look at the secondary effects and still need to do that for other topics to make any impact. For example, if you do away with meat, you would also have to do away with egg, milk, etc products. In some cases these products are used in things like formula, vaccines, etc. Every alternative has some trade-off too. Some may be better, some may be worse. If you're still producing eggs or milk for these other purposes, then you still have meat as a byproduct. You'll also end up with people raising their own, which is less efficient and possibly worse for the environment if done on a mass scale. Certainly worse for health impacts is done illicitly in high density areas. I do agree that there are many people who are disconnected from their meat source, among other things (eg people who think hunting is cruel but happily eat mass produced meat, or want their almonds/almond milk). I'm not sure licensing will really fix that. Either it had to come with a wide restriction to local only production to remove many environmental issues and force people to see production issues more visibly, or we slowly reduce population so we can maintain our desired lifestyles. My estimate is that we will see restrictions in historical freedoms and economic pressures on everyday activities. This will led to some natural reduction in population. But it will be precarious because there will be people who don't agree with the restrictions or nations willing to fight for resources. Edit: If you're going to disagree, please say why. Specifically, why is it not true that reducing resource consumption to truly sustainable levels won't require lifestyle restriction or a population decline? And not just that some unknown future tech will save us from out current situation. |