> The vast majority (~80%, [1]) of the greenhouse gas emissions do not come from "lifestyle" choices such as eating meat, but from transportation, industrial use and electrical production.
But the reason we use so much transportation, industry, and electricity is due to lifestyle choices. Meat requires feed which is transported, and then the animals are transported, and then the meat itself is also transported. Industry makes those iPhones you buy a new model of every other year. Etc.
> As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by about 5%
5% is nothing to sneeze at. Eating less meat alone won't stop climate change, it's true, but in combination with other sacrifices?
Here's my problem with the people who make arguments like you're making: I feel like you're unwilling to make sacrifices and are using this argument to justify how you can claim to care about the environment while also doing basically nothing to improve the situation. You'll say "well, one person isn't going to make a difference", yes, in the same way a raindrop does not consider itself responsible for the flood. If we are so unwilling to make sacrifices for ourselves, why should we believe that other people will make any? Why will they vote against their interests? Pay lip service to the idea in a public forum and then explain away your own contribution to the problem as being but one drop in the flood, voting is secret. Someone says "we should eat less meat", an objectively helpful thing to do by your own metric, and you say "No, no. It's a small thing, we should focus on something less important to me!".
It's frankly quite frustrating to see. Short of some miracle techology, I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is the reason we won't be able to avoid the worst case scenarios of climate change and future generations will look back on us with well deserved disgust.
Food or Goods which are cheap are very often not handled in environmentally friendly ways. For example, shipping foods and clothing from the US to china produces a huge chunk of greenhouse gas. Yet because of the labor differences offsetting the shipping costs, those goods are very often cheaper than locally made goods.
This is where policy really needs to be put in place. Personally, I think a carbon tax and tariff would probably make the most sense. Because, until it hits the wallet, you simply can't expect someone to choose the green option over the inexpensive one.
It also isn't always a matter of people being greedy or heartless. How can you expect the portion of the US making less than $60k per year (about 50% of the population https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/demo/p60-... ) to choose green over cheap? A reduced salary translates into reduced options.
I think people have a lot of negative emotions towards tariffs because they were implemented by Trump, but I think de-globalizing with a minimally-coersive market solution is a great way to incentivize local production and reduce shipping emissions.
Yeah, I don't honestly think it will work simply because not everyone would adopt it.
You'd want to say something like "We are going to impose a 10% import/export tariff on all shipped/air transported goods" since land transport is a lot green than air or shipping.
The problem for the US is that if Mexico and Candida don't play ball, then what will happen is you'd see people shipping goods to Mexico and Candida and then ground transporting them into the US (That already happens now with Trump's tariffs. People are shipping to a non-tariffed country and than shipping it up to the tarriffed country).
So, what you end up needing to do is a 10% across the board tariff for all countries indiscriminately. But that can put you in a pretty big financial disadvantage if you are the only country doing that.
IDK, maybe someone will do it. I certainly wouldn't argue it for the EU, for example, simply because many of those countries are closer to each other than states in the US are.
I honestly don't know what the solution is to the shipping problem. It is a huge CO2 emitter and yet it's very nature resists any sort of financial disincentive. It is simply too easy to make goods switch hands in a non-taxed area to avoid taxes.
Yeah, I think tariffs should be applied equally to all goods at the border.
Maybe you could achieve some sort of useful agreement where countries can get tarrif exemptions for meeting similar labor condition, quality, and pollution standards AND enforcing the same tarrif on any country not party to the agreement - making a 'raised standards' zone, somewhat similar to EU. Enforcement may add more complexity than its worth, though.
> So, what you end up needing to do is a 10% across the board tariff for all countries indiscriminately. But that can put you in a pretty big financial disadvantage if you are the only country doing that.
I don't think this would actually be that bad. For one tariffs go into the coffers: we can use those funds to subsidize local manufacturing of goods our country cannot produce competitively vs other nations and help achieve local economies of scale.
Yeah. The big thing for me is you'd want to discourage big shipping vessels burning bunker fuel. Even with equal pollution/labor standards, shipping something from china to the US probably shouldn't happen.
I could see an exception if nuclear powered shipping became a thing, but that isn't really likely (I wouldn't want a shipping company in charge of nuclear waste management). That leaves us with battery electric shipping and... well... that's a TON of batteries. Battery density would need to be WAY higher than it is (like, near fuel density)
Heh. I always like to challenge my ideas, if not from someone else then by myself. I don't think it is terribly healthy to be 100% sold on single ideas (or at least not to have thought about consequences).
The tariff idea was one that would work if everyone plays ball, but I'm not enough of an optimist to think that is going to work.
I wrote that without really thinking about the ramifications (until the second post). At which point, my pessimism won out.
Carbon tax could still work though (especially if it becomes a "carbon dividend" type plan). Probably it's biggest problem would be measuring carbon output.
You're right – so take your argument, and follow it to its logical conclusion.
Precisely because individuals act in the way you describe, change has to come from the top, ideally in the form of economic incentives. Make polluters pay, and the market will work out the rest. If you're worried about carbon taxes hurting the average Joe, well, just give the tax revenue back to the citizens – the competitive incentives still work regardless [0].
Getting this kind of legislation through requires putting pressure on politicians. And they would love nothing more than for us to continue bickering amongst ourselves about whether vegetarianism or plastic straw bans are the greater personal sacrifice.
If you look at carbon footprint of an average person, it is made up of electricity consumption, transportation, heating and food. Durable goods like iPhones and fridges are absolutely irrelevant to the carbon footprint for 99% of humanity.
Real impact comes from renewables/nuclear, getting rid of beef and lamb in your diet, public transport and well insulated homes. That would get us down to 2 tonnes per person per year, and we would never have climate change and ecosystem can recycle 3.
It costs $50 to plant enough trees to offset your carbon footprint, you need a couple hundred trees a year and they cost 30-50p per tree to plant in UK.
It would cost $100-$1000 to sequester same carbon through carbon capture directly from the air, depending who you speak to.
You're trying to turn a coordination issue into a moral one.
And in terms of difficulty it's far easier to pass a carbon tariff that reduces our carbon footprint 5% than convincing the entirety of the U.S. to go vegetarian.
I don't get this reasoning. Global warming has been self-reinforcing since before my dad was born, so a 100% reduction in human co2 emissions will not stop climate change, just slow it down. It's also an exponential process and we're not in the early stages, so it won't even slow it down that much. Imagine the effect of a 5% change now, which is a completely unrealistic goal to boot. It's nothing.
We don't need miracle technology, we have the technology to take control of the climate, and we'll be forced to use it, whatever other measures are used.
So lifestyle choices are great and all, but please stop saying they're for the climate. They're insignificant, even if 100% implemented.
The proverbial raindrop you're talking about matters very little if the reason for the flood is a dam breaking. Great attitude on the part of the raindrop to not make the situation worse. But all the raindrops together only make the situation 0.1% worse than it was before the rain ...
> So lifestyle choices are great and all, but please stop saying they're for the climate. They're insignificant, even if 100% implemented.
This is false.
> That’s why the late 2018 IPCC report stood out that reducing meat consumption by 90% is the single biggest way to reduce global warming. Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by over 75%. In this way, reducing your meat consumption is also a big step to stop not only deforestation but also global warming on a larger scale.
> Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by over 75%
But reducing farmland by over 75% is not enough by itself to counter climate change. And, if we can plant enough trees outside of farmland the reduction of farmland is not even neccessary.
It seems, we agree that we need more trees. But you want to get there by eating less meat. Yes, there is a connection between meat and trees, but why not just plant trees?
>Global warming has been self-reinforcing since before my dad was born, so a 100% reduction in human co2 emissions will not stop climate change, just slow it down.
Just like death, I guess we shouldn't bother with trying to slow that down.
Apparently if you add up all the C02 of the food you buy imported world wide and compare that to the C02 generated by driving down to the store to pick up that food it's the driving that produces much more CO2 than the food transportation. To me that's a surprising result that shows just thinking about what's going on is an unreliable guide to what really is going on.
But the reason we use so much transportation, industry, and electricity is due to lifestyle choices. Meat requires feed which is transported, and then the animals are transported, and then the meat itself is also transported. Industry makes those iPhones you buy a new model of every other year. Etc.
> As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by about 5%
5% is nothing to sneeze at. Eating less meat alone won't stop climate change, it's true, but in combination with other sacrifices?
Here's my problem with the people who make arguments like you're making: I feel like you're unwilling to make sacrifices and are using this argument to justify how you can claim to care about the environment while also doing basically nothing to improve the situation. You'll say "well, one person isn't going to make a difference", yes, in the same way a raindrop does not consider itself responsible for the flood. If we are so unwilling to make sacrifices for ourselves, why should we believe that other people will make any? Why will they vote against their interests? Pay lip service to the idea in a public forum and then explain away your own contribution to the problem as being but one drop in the flood, voting is secret. Someone says "we should eat less meat", an objectively helpful thing to do by your own metric, and you say "No, no. It's a small thing, we should focus on something less important to me!".
It's frankly quite frustrating to see. Short of some miracle techology, I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is the reason we won't be able to avoid the worst case scenarios of climate change and future generations will look back on us with well deserved disgust.