Expecting people to make changes in their behaviour does absolutely nothing apart from making a tiny minority of people feel superior for their choices. It simply doesn't scale well to the entire population. You need systemic changes and big developments in technology to actually make a difference in climate change.
Reducing usage of technology can increase emissions through secondary factors.
It's a major inconvenience with a minor or even sometimes negative gain (real life activities like driving are more co2 intensive).
Reducing meat consumption doesn't increase emissions because animals already have to eat plants and they already fart on our behalf. If you cut out the middleman (the animal) you need less plants and also fart less. It's a major inconvenience with a major gain.
You can make systemic changes to reduce the amount of animal products that people consume.
For a start, you could stop subsidizing them. For the long term you could fund a massive meat replacement research project.
(Though I disagree with the OP that this is the biggest issue, it is a large enough issue that it's worth tackling it, and certainly larger than streaming video.)
Agreed. Especially since the actual biggest individual contributor (for people living in the developed world) is having children, and we really don't want this kind of individual focus to land there.
st1x7|5 years ago
imtringued|5 years ago
Reducing meat consumption doesn't increase emissions because animals already have to eat plants and they already fart on our behalf. If you cut out the middleman (the animal) you need less plants and also fart less. It's a major inconvenience with a major gain.
hannob|5 years ago
For a start, you could stop subsidizing them. For the long term you could fund a massive meat replacement research project.
(Though I disagree with the OP that this is the biggest issue, it is a large enough issue that it's worth tackling it, and certainly larger than streaming video.)
spectralflux|5 years ago
lewurm|5 years ago
OTOH social distancing and wearing masks has shown recently that (most) people are fine with changing their behavior, if necessary.