Travelling less is much more important. Skip that vacation to Europe or Asia if you really want to have an impact on your footprint. Just one such trip dominates the impact of eating meat.
"... four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less)."
I'm definitely not strictly veggie: I just wolfed down a nearly free burger when offered! And though I haven't flown for years, I may need to visit China once or more over the next couple of years.
> having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year)
I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.
Indeed: if a few hundred million westerners made a real effort to curtail frivolous footprint then that 10b may happen with a lower-than-current total footprint.
Convincing a few hundred million to act in a certain way without force won't happen before we got 10b. I don't think that's an outlandish prediction to make...
<rant>Yes, but I get annoyed at some fat white western guy claiming that all those poor brown people a long way away are the problem. We (my family in the UK) managed to cut tonnes per year off our footprint while raising two kids in the UK; not that hard. Some would much rather blame others rather than even make any effort.</rant>
And I agree with you to a great degree (South African here...)
The problem is still, it's unlikely to be the solution. If we want the west to change there are two ways to go.
1. Legislation - This is the force option, i.e. if you break the law you go to jail and we'll come and take your property by force.
2. Market - Make technology that makes alternatives easier/more efficient/sexier etc.
2 is hard especially if alternatives are more expensive or about the same. Cost of panel can't really go much lower so we're stuck. Many people on the eco side don't like Nuclear (they're crazy).
Technology is getting better and I think small steps in regulation (i.e. taxing emissions slightly) may work. That's the direction that we're heading in so I'm pretty hopeful.
1. There has to be some of this: no market is totally free, and free-riders are always a problem to some degree.
2. Actually this is exactly the flavour of product/service that I am working on. Have the more efficient solution be better and easier, not a hair shirt. The area we are working on could knock 5% off Europe's entire carbon footprint and save most families hundreds of USD per year also.
Remember that rich westerners have a far higher per-capita footprint than the rest of the planet, eg the top 10% has about 50% of the total carbon footprint for example...
