> It is going to require a collective effort by the human population to reverse the already apparent effects of climate warming. All we can really do is each do our best on an individual level to reduce our carbon footprint.
When we start saying that a collective problem can only be accomplished via individualism, we've basically already lost. Even the phrase "carbon footprint" is the product of British Petroleum, because they recognized that encouraging individual action would be less harmful to their business of selling oil than government action. That is, they saw clearly that individual action was so much less effective than government regulation, that they spent millions of dollars encouraging it.
But Western culture (United States especially) is hyper-individualist, and we resist collective actions that would inconvenience the individual. Our government is hence limited to pushing levers to try to "encourage" or "discourage" individuals to take the "right" actions. So, our discussion of alternatives (Overton window) positions a "carbon tax" as the unreasonable leftist position, where the incidental increase in price of polluting products will hopefully nudge enough price-sensitive consumers/entities into reducing consumption enough to solve global warming.
So no, climate change won't be solved by individual people deciding to eat less meat. There may come a day when our agriculture and food system is so devastated that it's no longer possible for most people to eat meat.
Broadly speaking, sure. But I can't name any crisis that was solved by people individually deciding to purchase less of a bad thing.
US slavery wasn't ended by people boycotting goods produced with slave labor. We didn't go to the moon by holding a fundraiser. The ozone hole was repaired by banning the harmful chemicals, not by consumers deciding to pay more for refrigerators that didn't use CFCs.
Asking consumers to research every product they buy for its "carbon footprint" (including the whole supply chain and transportation) and modify their purchasing decisions accordingly is doomed to be ineffective. Some people will be very passionate about it and make a big change. More people will avoid some terrible offenders. And most people will make only small changes that don't inconvenience them much, because they already have 90 other things to worry about in their life.
(And now that it's been politicized, you get people "rolling coal" and purposefully creating extra emissions to... stick it to the libs, I guess.)
There is a lot of shit what would be manufactured, transported to the other side of the planet, sit in the warehouse, [luckily] sit in the store and would be thrown out.
Eg: all this shit made for iPhone/iPod pre-Lighting, all these thin-thick Nokia chargers made in early 2000, all USB 1.1, 2.0 gadgets. Add to this a phone/tablet cases.
That isn't a lot, all things considered, right? Could you not fit every phone accessory ever made on a single cargo ship? That ship's carbon footprint is only so big.
> Could you not fit every phone accessory ever made on a single cargo ship
Why do you focus attention only on the phone accessories? But even if we do focus on it:
there were not a one big single cargo ship what moved them, there was a lot of trucks, trains, ships what were involved in bringing the raw materials, bringing the processed materials to the factories, from the factories to the warehouses, from the warehouses to the docks and depots, from the docks and depots to the warehouses again, to the shops, from the shops to the garbage piles.
Everything in the process generated some pollution which ended up futile. And while some of it can be somewhat negated, ie it was only 1 ISO container from the hundreds on the supercargo ship - but again, that container could be with something more useful than a phone cases what nobody would buy.
And yes, this is not only about phone, smartphone and computer accessories. There is a lot of shit what is made and ends up in the garbage pile. Clothes, kitchen and other consumer appliances, plastic shit for everything, Christmas decorations, automobile parts... the list is long.
> Why do you focus attention only on the phone accessories?
If you recall, they were the majority of your examples.
I'm not saying what you're saying isn't true. Maybe all phones are futile, by some definition. Maybe pollution generated by your comment was futile. It's just an unfalsifiable claim.
Individual actions to fix this kind of problem are pretty ineffective. That isn't to say it's not worth doing. In the US / UK with FPTP it's basically all you _can_ do voting and activism under FPTP is also pretty ineffective again worth doing but insufficient for this large a crisis.
The basic reason for this is down to markets being very very good at resource allocation. Lets imagine you're a huge beef eater and previously ate 2 cows worth per year. You reduce to zero cows. What happens?
The price of beef drops a tiny tiny bit. Other people who previously couldn't afford beef quite so often now can and increase their consumption. If a large number of people switch away from beef eventually the price reductions feed through and some farmers go bust or else reduce their production. But since the externality isn't priced in chances are _someone_ out there will consume it.
To tackle this kind of thing you need the externality brought into the pricing system. Add taxes somewhere on the chain of green house gas production. It doesn't actually matter where you tax it, could be a sales tax, could be a production tax. You can even make the tax revenue neutral and pay it out to everyone. You can tax imports to keep a level playing field...
Of course doing that would massively hit the profits of fossil fuel companies and their share holders so they're lobbying like crazy & paying millions to promote bullshit like the idea of 'carbon footprint' to stop it happening.
It would make more of a difference than if they didn't.
This isn't binary, obviously every little bit helps a little, and the more people, the more it helps. There's no threshold under which it's not worth to do anything about it.
>There's no threshold under which it's not worth to do anything about it.
I'm pretty sure there is, if we're interested in any specific outcome. Below some threshold not only it wont get that outcome, but it wont even be statistically significant.
Statistical significance is relevant when you're trying to find correlations, not when you're trying to figure out whether it's worth removing a few grains to make a cup of sand lighter.
If you don't want to try, don't try. If you're looking for an excuse to say "fuck it, I won't do anything, since that's what most people are doing", you won't, because it's always worth doing something right, no matter how small.
>Statistical significance is relevant when you're trying to find correlations, not when you're trying to figure out whether it's worth removing a few grains to make a cup of sand lighter.
You got it backwards. It's relevant when you're trying to find correlations, precisely because it helps measure the impact of a change.
This is true whether the change is some variable change in research space searching for correlations, or real world accessment of the impact of something...
>because it's always worth doing something right, no matter how small.
This one is different argument though. This one is moral, the previous one (I responded to) was about efficacy.
But it, too, is problematic: even in moral terms, it's not "always worth doing something right, no matter how small", given opportunity cost.
At the margin, individual efforts to abstain from this or that product are useless, let me elaborate.
Let's say in an effort to reduce your carbon footprint, you abstain from beef. The effect that has, however small it may be, is to reduce demand for beef. That brings the price of beef down, making it more affordable for beef enjoyers, who buy more.
The only net effect here is that you no longer eat beef. It hasn't moved the needle on your reason for doing so.
You might reply that if enough people join you, this will result in supply reduction. This is a coordination problem involving the whole planet, including a few billion people who will very happily eat more beef if it were a bit cheaper. It won't work.
I get your general point, though I disagree with it, but the beef issue is very US-centric. Beef isn't such a staple in most countries, even ones that can afford it.
Beef consumption is high among Muslims in Asia, and of course in South America where beef culture is very strong (Brazilian and Argentina steak houses aren’t just a misunderstanding). Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also eat lots of beef (as new world countries with lots of land for grazing).
It isn't in any sense US centric. Most countries do eat less than the US, some eat more, but this too is not relevant to my point. Beef is esteemed in Africa, yet they eat very little of it. As African countries become wealthier they eat more of it, so it stands to reason they also eat more of it when it becomes more affordable. The billion-ish people in India who never eat it have no effect on beef production, why would one person in the US abstaining, or a few tens of thousands, change this dynamic? The answer is that it doesn't.
With that attitude nothing would ever change unless there is immediate visible change from a very small group of people making said change.
Instead the point here would be to try and "go viral" so to speak. Start small and grow your group of supporters "around the edges". At some point you may achieve exponential change.
Of course certain things that affect the entire planet make such things exponentially hard to pull off in the end. Also, you are very unlikely to convert literally everyone to whatever it is you are trying to change. You usually only need to reach a certain level to have an effect.
And in the end not all endeavors will succeed either but it doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying.
That said I will definitely never switch to these commercial meatless meat alternatives. Given what they do to make those that's one of the least healthiest things you can do.
>With that attitude nothing would ever change unless there is immediate visible change from a very small group of people making said change.
It's more the opposite: unless there is immediate visible change from a very small group of people making said change, nothing will change in the end.
Which is precisely where all the "personal responsibility", "do it and others will follow" wishful thinking mottos have gotten us thus far: nothing ever changed.
Every little bit helps, by definition. At the same time, by distracting us with arguments about plastic straws and meat, the fossil fuel industry shifts the focus off of their enormously outsized contribution to climate change. It can also result in moral license - the feeling that I recycle, so I've done my part.
I'm not suggesting not minimizing your individual impact on the environment (and frankly, the elephant in the room that we can't talk about is the impact of producing children), but at the end of the day, if we keep on dumping carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the destruction will continue.
It won't change much if only small groups of citizens starts taking individual action to mitigate their environment footprint. But I strongly believe that it is nonetheless a mandatory step towards global awareness.
It is not "the magical solution", but I don't see any solution that don't starts with individuals taking action to start trends.
Political action will start only when the people electing government starts caring. And that starts by individuals convincing the others.
If you mandate that all meat come from field fed, hay fed sources, with no fertilizer (hay is a great rotational crop), instead of corn or other crops, solved problem.
You know, like the rest of the world does it.
(That is, unless you plan to shoot and kill and exterminate all bison, deer, etc, that would take over any land we leave fallow...)
I ask because I've met Europeans who were convinced that all of their beef was grass-fed, while I've personally seen cattle being grain-finished (and/or fed a variety of supplemental non-pasture-grass feeds like sugar beets) in places like Ireland and Germany. Marketing != reality.
Keep in mind massive bison herds roamed North America for millenia, so large animals emitting methane isn't really an issue. Over decades, they're mostly in steady state - plants take up CO2, bison eat plants, emit CO2 and CH4, and the lifetime of the CH4 is ~10 years in the atmosphere (oxidized to CO2).
The difference today is the large amount of fossil fuel energy used to produce fertilizers and fuel tractors and so on. This can all be transitioned to renewable energy.
I think the vast majority of people who are saying 'stop eating meat to save the climate' are vegans concerned about the atrocious treatment of animals on factory farms, and they're trying to come up with additional reasons to restrict factory farming (which is a good idea, it is a filthy practice that relies heavily on antibiotic and hormone use, and the end product is disgustingly unhealthy as well as unethical IMO).
The only realistic way to stabilize the climate is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix, but even if that's accomplished in the next few decades, planetary warming is going to continue for some 100 years due to forcing-reponse lag time and side effects like permafrost melting and outgassing.
I'd be willing to bet that the total biomass of ruminants is much higher today than it was millennia ago due to domestication/humans. Ad a lot of that fossil fuel use and fertilizer is going to those domestic ruminants; you've gotta grow the food to feed your food, so it's a lossy process vs just eating the plants directly. It's not always that simple though; cattle can graze on marginal land and their manure/byproducts can be fed into other agricultural processes. It's not something I really know a lot about other than to know that it's all quite complicated. That said, I suspect if the world gave up beef, it would indeed make a significant dent in global warming.
I'm far from a vegan and can recognize the above. When it comes to cruelty, that's a different axis. I believe beef is actually lower on that one since the cows spend a lot of their lives wandering in fields and getting to do more or less what they want. The finishing process where they are put into feedlots seems pretty bad but is rather short, and the slaughter is about as humane as can be; they are rendered unconscious instantly with a blow to the head and then insanguinated. Chickens are sort of the opposite; they are marginal in the scheme of global warming but live lives of immense cruelty. It seems hard to win.
Estimates hover around there being ~2x as many cows in North America today than there were bison in 1500, but there were also large deer and antelope populations at the time. The carbon went from atmospheric CO2 -> grassland biomass -> animal biomass + CH4 + CO2, and the CH4 was oxidized back to CO2, so this was largely a steady state situation, and it certainly can be a model for sustainable meat production. Estimates of the human population are more contentious (genocide denial is an issue) but 50 million for North America might be the upper bound.
If everyone stopped eating meat, while fossil fuel production and consumption remain unchanged, there would be little or no noticeable effect on our current climate trajectory. If everyone kept eating meat, while eliminating fossil fuel use, then atmospheric CO2 and CH4 would stabilize in ~100 years.
Practically, if meat was raised humanely without fossil fuels, it would be a good deal more expensive, so people would eat less of it, perhaps leading to a 50% cut in meat production.
I've heard this, but is it true? Would it make that much difference if a small group of citizens stopped eating meat?