[seasox]

Don‘t think about microwave vs. stove. Instead, do the following:

1. stop buying meat

2. stop eating meat

3. stop buying dairy-based products

4. stop eating dairy-based products

5. stop eating eggs, honey, fish

6. use public transport, if possible

7. don‘t fly, if possible

Congrats, you now are an environmentalist.

[dbingham]

If you live in the US, your order is wrong.

1. Walk or bike.

1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.

1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.

2. Insulate your house.

3. Get solar if you can afford it.

3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)

4. Don't fly.

5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.

At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.

[jeffbee]

Burning 1 gallon of motor gasoline emits the same carbon as producing 1.3lb of finished beef. Flying once from U.S. to Europe has the same GHG impact as producing 80 pounds of beef. For a typical U.S. household, transportation is a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than food.

[jshen]

Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?

[throwaway894345]

Honestly a “fuck carbon emissions” t-shirt is probably an easier and more direct way of communicating your membership to the “environmentalism” tribe while still doing fuck-all to reduce emissions. If you actually care about the environment, then you’re doing everything in your power to promote carbon pricing or other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices. Personal responsibility stuff plays right into fossil fuel industry’s hand—it’s all premature micro optimization. To copy another commenter, it’s arranging deck chairs on the titanic.

[Schroedingersat]

Using transit, walking, or cycling is promoting 'other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices' because these modes all hage network effects. It becomes vastly easier for city planners to override idiotic traffic engineers with once a comparatively tiny threshold of people are using them. There is also a network effect in knowledge and experience. If you learn all the safe byways and tracks then it becomes immensely easier for anyone nearby who knows you to start walking, if twenty of you in an area start cycling then your local mechanic might be afford to stay in business and run an outreach event.

[Lacerda69]

Why would stop buying honey from beekeepers?

[CatWChainsaw]

Also skeptical of the honey thing. Honeybees produce honey which is a valuable product on its own, but honeybees are also distinguished from other bee species by their massive colonies (colonies are the groups of bees, hives are where they live). This is why there is an industry that trucks honeybee colonies/hives around the country to pollinate whichever crops are in season. This is to the detriment of whichever pollinator species live locally. The honeybees pollinate, but they take a disruptive amount of pollen to feed their own colonies at the expense of the native pollinators, and in return they share their diseases like varroa mites.

If a crop needs pollination but you want to reduce dependence on honeybees, it's likely you would need to break up the land the crop is on in order to plant flowering species that attract native pollinators at the edges, and that comes with its own downsides for maintenance and harvest.

[WastingMyTime89]

That’s extreme and I think most of your point comes from a belief in being vegan as an ethical way of life rather than from a genuine willingness to limit people environmental impact.

The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk.

Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.

[seasox]

Honeybees‘ environmental impact: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-...

[dane-pgp]

Let's say you could convince an extra 10% of the world to follow those rules, and that it doesn't cause a rebound effect (as per the Jevons paradox). How much extra time would that buy us before an unstoppable climate catastrophe?

[chrisamiller]

There is already an unstoppable climate catastrophe happening. Many of the effects are already baked in for the next 50-100 years and it will disproportionately affect the poor.

What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting.

When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes". These rules are fine - we should eat less meat, we should drive and fly less, etc. We should also do more systemic things, like investing heavily in battery tech and solar and wind and even fusion longshots. We should regulate the hell out of emissions, and use the proceeds from taxes and fines to help mitigate the effects on the poor. Getting to net zero carbon is going to be hard but it has to happen.

[Schroedingersat]

> as per the Jevons paradox

You don't start eating 50kg a day if you become vegetarian, and you don't spend 30 hours a day travelling if you do it by train. Yes, universally switching from cars to any other form of transport would save people 1-3 hours a day to do other things, but if they spend that time doing anything other than sitting in a car it's a win.

You also don't get to use "what if noone did that" as a counter argument for something helping if everybody did it.

If everyone insulated their home properly, got rid of their cars, stopped eating beef, and cut the remaining animal proteins by half we'd be pretty close to net zero right now.

[xenocratus]

Link(s) to a source that analyses the health impact of those first 5 things on your list?

[seasox]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19279075/

[AstralStorm]

A few extra:

Get your house insulated. Helps with both heating and cooling.

Use a fan rather than AC if you can.

Do not buy unneeded stuff, buy durable, sell or repair rather than junk.

[bjourne]

How about: 0. Make it your goal to participate in at least one climate rally next year. That's enough for you to be an environmentalist.

[akomtu]

This is just performance, like chaining yourself to a concrete slab. The real thing, if anyone really cared, would be to prosecute manufacturers for planned obsolescence. A washing machine uses a plastic bearing instead of a slightly more exlensive aluminum one? You send it to an FTC like agency, they inspect it and send some VP to jail. This would drastically reduce the size of plastic islands in the oceans, emissions from factories (who are busy manufacturing junk to replace broken junk).

[blueflow]

Ergo, be poor?

[samatman]

No, but I do appreciate your personal boycott making animal foods less expensive without having any marginal effect on production. As an avid consumer of such foods: thank you for your service.

[theqabalist]

Congrats, you are actually just an inconsequential stooge. Environmental corruption and depletion is not a consumer problem, at least not directly. It is a product of industrial production processes. Eat meat, eat dairy, preserve your health and your brain in doing so, and find ways to create industry that is clean, that would make you an environmentalist... maybe... if you successfully altered the system.

Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers and can be controlled by "turning your lights off."

[endtime]

I think you have a valid point, but I'm not sure it's made effectively, which I think is why you got downvotes.

An example might help: Elon Musk is not, AFAIK, vegan. But he's done a lot to popularize electric cars, having far more impact than he could by changing his diet. Likewise, the Beyond meat people have probably done a lot more to reduce meat consumption than they could ever outweigh by eating steak every meal for the rest of their lives. (I am actually not clear on the net environmental benefit of using gas vs. making more batteries, but let's say for the sake of argument that electric cars are an environmental benefit, since it's just an example.)

[throwaway3b03]

> Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers

But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores?

It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming.

You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action.

So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause.

So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.