[tessierashpool]

If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time...

Not really. Methane from cows causes more harm to the environment than cars do. If he had gotten the world to go vegan, that would have been doing the impossible. Musk made an idea fashionable and sold carbon credits.

[consumer451]

I mean, Musk went the practical route. Make things that nearly everyone wants... fast cars that you can refuel at home for next to no cost.

But I hear you about food. However, the sad joke is: we don't need vegan purity. If we could just convince everyone in wealthy countries to skip meat for only two days per week, then the we might actually hit 2C max temp increase. But everyone is all about paleo meat-only or vegan/vegetarian purity crap. We just needed some moderation, but that's not as sexy as being a vegan or a Hummer driver.

We will pilot our extremes straight into the ground.

[Eisenstein]

I completely agree with you about 'vegan purity'.

Making people abstain from meat completely will turn people into the meat-eating equivalent of alcoholics. I bring up the comparison because sobriety is contingent on a period of continued abstinence along with veganism or vegetarianism. You will be mocked if you called yourself vegan and ate meat a few times a month, as you would be mocked if you called yourself sober and drank a few times a month.

Many people look at a lifetime of denying themselves a basic pleasure and rightly balk at the prospect and put it off to some distant 'later' or create a rationalization for why they don't need to do it. This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we quit using absolutist terms like 'vegan' and instead came up with a way to make it a moral issue to acknowledge the problems associated with meat consumption without shaming those who limit it but do not abstain from it.

Basically -- advocating that the solution is a 'vegan' one is probably not going to work, and if it does it will create (at least initially) a population of guilt-ridden people and an associated culture of shame. Let's think of a better way to do it.

[tessierashpool]

nobody's advocating that. I used the example of making the world go 100% vegan because it is an example of a thing which would be incredibly effective, yet which any reasonable person would consider impossible.

[tessierashpool]

> I mean, Musk went the practical route.

sure. but going the practical route isn't being some kind of hero. you don't go to a hero's gravestone and see the words "well, he did what he could."

Musk harnessed a very powerful desire which a lot of Americans share: to counteract climate change by buying stuff they like. If there's any credit to hand out, it's that desire which deserves it, especially since Musk answered the "buying stuff they like" part vigorously and the "counteracting climate change" part to a far lesser extent.

And then turned around and pretended to be more interested in the part he did less to accomplish.