The only deep change that an individual can do that will make an actual impact is going vegan. Adding solar panels to your roof is not a drastic change, in fact in Australia it makes good economic sense. Driving an electric car is not a radically different experience to driving an ICE car. Telecommuting and working more days from home is, for many people, a desirable change to the way we work.
Once coal and then gas has been eliminated, 99% of new model cars are electric and lab grown beef matches the taste and texture a real cow the problem will be 80% solved. All of this can be achieved without a single person needing to change their lifestyle.
"High-impact beef producers create 105kg of CO2 equivalents and use 370m2 of land per 100 grams of protein, a huge 12 and 50 times greater than low-impact beef producers. Low-impact beans, peas, and other plant-based proteins can create just 0.3kg of CO2 equivalents (including all processing, packaging, and transport), and use just 1m2 of land per 100 grams of protein."
Shows Vegan and Ovo-Lacto Vegetarian neck and neck.
As another poster pointed out, in many areas living a pure vegan diet is far WORSE for the environment as you have to expend considerable CO2 getting the correct foodstuffs there.
There's also the open question about many countries where the land is only suitable for pasture as it's not arable.
I keep seeing this bandied about but it really feels like people pushing their ideology as the answer to whatever question was asked.
Short term: Build MODERN, waste reducing, nuclear (fission) plants. If proliferation is a concern, require the military be hired to protect them and the logs/supervision open to the public with short delay.
Long term: I like the 3001 / Gundam OO / generic scifi solution. Solar collectors. Point lots of solar energy at a focal location and do useful things with it.
I was 'born vegetarian' and I struggled to eat meat. I tried my hardest and genuinely believed that if I did not eat meat like everyone else then I would end up physically weak, without a fully developed brain etc. I endured eating burgers in the belief that they were really good for me.
I never learned to cook the stuff and got over my fears of not eating meat. Laziness really, not wanting to have the hygiene problems of a contaminated kitchen. A few meat food scares (BSE) helped me to take the easy route (for me) of living without eating meat. Haven't died of a lack of B12 yet and I know plants don't have any need for B12 but we do.
Anyway, I have had time since the days of teenage fear to think more positively about what I do and do not eat. There are notable athletes, thinkers and Hollywood stars that are strictly vegetarian. My meat eating friends only seem to know of Hitler as being famous for being vegetarian but I know not everything in this world is black and white, just because Hitler didn't eat burgers doesn't mean that I should.
Now role models are all well and good, however, the history of food is far more fascinating and I really like understanding how we got here.
The Chicken Tax is what got me to do my own thinking on the history of food. My grandmother was the last generation to remember when chickens were not what you ate every day. There was a time - not so long ago - when people saved up to eat a chicken based meal, this would be Christmas or a birthday, as a treat. Chicken is now wolfed down as part of a sandwich, sat at the desk, not savoured or enjoyed in some special ritual as per seventy years ago. The farmers in the USA changed the game to the intensive farming we have for chickens, the Chicken Tax that petrol heads know of was the gateway for me to learn that story.
Eggs were not a year round product, there was Easter and maybe a 'second brood' later in the year. So even eggs - a substitute for meat - are not actually what we think they are, we have forgotten the seasonal aspect.
Then there is the the cow. For most of mankind's history with the cow the cow was a beast of burden with added milk. You didn't eat your cows in times gone past when a cow was more like a domestic appliance, for pulling the plough. Only if there was plague and famine would you want to eat the cow. Doing so meant harsh times.
The Dutch invented a new harness for the horse in the 17th century that enabled horses to pull the plough. This put the cow out of work so there was a change on the farm. At around the same time the guy that inspired Darwin and did all the selective breeding made cows into the beef product every burger scoffer so enjoys. The cows that pulled the plough were nearer goat sized, albeit podgy goat sized, hey were not these giant things we have today, stuffed with corn and killed before the diseases from their corn fed diet kill them.
Then there are the sheep. I grew up in an area where wool was what mattered. I have studied the local history and absent from it is any mention of eating lamb or mutton. The products that were shipped out of the area were wool, more wool and more wool. The world was getting clothed not fed.
Clearly our ancestors had many uses for the animals they lived with and every scrap went to 'good' use. Unless you were lord of the manor then game was off the table too. People were not at all well nourished with the chemicals we sprinkle on the land today - doors in old houses are only 5 foot 6 inches tall, they didn't need them to cater for 6' tall people.
I think it is really important to understand a little bit about how we got here and why it is that we think we need beef. The ethics of the slaughterhouse is divisive, an in-depth appreciation of history is not. Really we have been conned into believing so much of the modern life, tricked into believing we need things that we do not.
This is my own pet thesis, there is fact rather than myth that backs up the story. You can truly enjoy the fact checking though. For instance have a look at pastoral scenes painted by the grand masters of old. Cows are smaller, a lot smaller, and these are not errors in painting to scale. Children can reach out to cows without them the cow towering above. The history is right there in paintings that you probably had no interest in the first time you saw them and decided not to major in 'Art History'.
Same with the Chicken Tax related part of this 'thesis', along the way you can learn how the VW camper van became a thing - it was a tax workaround to put seats in the van so it wouldn't be a 'van'.
We also imagine Darwin started from a blank canvas, really that was not the case at all. Not trying to dismiss his work, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...
He was the chap who turned cows from beasts of burden to beef. His work was what Darwin wrote about to 'prove there is a god'. Yeah.
Also check out the humble turnip. The turnip made the British Agricultural Revolution possible, without the turnip there would not have been the British Empire as we know it. The turnip was a crop that could be fed to livestock, planted in the 'fallow' year it nitrogen fixed the soil making it good to go for other crops. Nowadays the turnip is just a Blackadder joke.
The Moldboard Plough was another part of the puzzle, the Chinese had this first, the Dutch copied it and they got it hooked up to horses. I don't have a handy reference for that, particularly how the harness worked. There is plenty to study though, Jethro Tull being an interesting chap for the 'seed drill' that ended this random scattering nonsense.
Dutch Golden Age paintings have the clues to the story in them, I have my 18 month old niece to help me research this, although she can't talk she is good at pointing at cows, in art and in fields. She goes 'Maggie Simpson' on me at times, I would not have spotted unusually small cows in paintings without her help and would not have gone down the rabbit hole of working out the why questions without her promptings.
So much of the politics of food is based on belief and opinion. Various diets are nonsense. I don't want another religion, I just want to understand. History gives the answers. And art history that has bored me to date comes to life when I am looking at paintings for things like how people ate, how big various animals are and what 'tech' was used on the farm. There is no longer a need to aesthetically decide if a painting is pretty or not, I find so much more in what I see when it is for this type of personal research.
Forgot to mention sheep - in the part of the West Country (UK) that I know the lucky mix of fortune that made the area prosperous included Fullers Earth, used to get wool nice and clean from grease etc. There were export restrictions on Fuller's Earth, so precious it was! The final product - cloth - ended up in those red uniforms that the British Army conquered the world with. The Cotswolds also had a lot of rain and very steep hills. So waterwheels and canals were part of the story. Plus the wonders of capitalism, with cottage industry making way for bigger mills and eventual decline...
I owe a great deal of thanks to some old people who are not here any more for taking the time to show me the relevant industrial archaeology. A retired gentleman who I used to deliver newspapers to as a teenager took the time to take me to local places so I could draw things for school history projects. In today's 'stranger danger' world where newspapers aren't delivered by 14 year old kids this type of thing would not be possible.
Only recently have I wondered, 'okay I know a bit about the wool, what about the sheep?' and wondered what amount of lamb/mutton was on the menu then. Nobody has studied that bit, so again I am in my favourite realm of history, where it becomes fascinating. It is so nice to escape the 'dull' world of people lecturing others to be vegan or not, to explore this realm of 'oral history'. I am glad someone out there likes it too.