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Most estimates put it at around 15%, not 5. Stopping climate change is going to require action on all these vectors, and diet is one of the easiest to change. It also has knock on effects like clear cutting rainforest to plant crops to feed to cows.

On top of that it’s just cruel and unnecessary to go on eating so much meat.

Also clearing rainforests for palm oil trees.

It's 15% globally, but just 5% in the U.S. That's because eating meat is one of the few things your average Bangladeshi or African does to create CO2 emissions. Those people aren't going to become vegans, and as those economies develop, they'll want more of the things that are responsible for the other 95% of your average American's carbon emissions.

The main argument in favor changing diet, to me, is the potential psychological and social effects. When something you do multiple times a day is different from what you used to do, and what many others around you do, it stays active in your thoughts and might trigger other, more meaningful activity.

I don't know if this is actually true, but anecdotally at least it seems to be. The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans. And many of them started down this path by changing their diets, sometimes even for reasons that weren't ideological.

> The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans.

What do these people do? Unless they're working on renewables technology or carbon-capture technology, they're not doing anything useful. That's just how the math shakes out. The climate problem is so huge that only engineers and scientists can help us now. Everything else is just putting on one of those "raising awareness of breast cancer" ribbons.

Oh yeah, quite possible.

I imagine some of them could be working on the things you mention, but most of them don't. But that's particular to my current network.

But some of them do have strong relationships with people who play some meaningful role in the whole climate issue. At least two of these 'people around me' have siblings that occupy high-level engineering/management roles in some of the most impactful (and worst) companies.

It's not much, maybe, but perhaps it's not meaningless.

The math seems to be shaking the proximal solution (green tech), and ignoring the path to get there. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum, and green techs are disadvantaged because not only are they competing against options whose true costs are externalized, but there are trillions of dollars invested in the unsustainable status quo. We need not just for the right technologies to exist, but for policies that will allow them to win. And that requires people (even non-engineers) to care.

Going from the average diet to becoming a vegan would save about 1 ton per person annually: http://www.greeneatz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foods-ca.... The carbon footprint in the U.S. is about 20 tons per capita annually, so going from an average diet to full vegan would save just 5%. (Just cutting out beef would capture most of those gains, reducing CO2 footprint by 0.6 tons, or 3%.) Just eating less meat, or eating organic or whatever will have zero impact. And that's assuming that switching to veganism doesn't alter your other habits. If switching to veganism means you e.g. sign up for a meal delivery service to keep things interesting, or drive to the grocery store more often to get fresh fruits and vegetables (which, unlike meat, you can't freeze in bulk), your gains will be much less.

All of this stuff about "reducing your carbon footprint" is just such a mind-boggling waste of time. To keep the temperature increase to 2C we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 19 gigatons in the next decade. Instead, China added 10 gigatons in the last decade. The U.S. and EU28 together emit just 9 gigatons. In the face of those numbers, all this "turn the lights off when you leave the room" and "try to eat less meat" stuff is pissing in the ocean.

Even if individual waste were the problem, it would be woefully inadequate to engage in moralistic posturing. People tend to just form counter-cultures.

If I were a more careless person, I would have half a mind to increase my waste in response -- something I may as well advocate for anyway, because so long as society is not going to stop (or even measure) my wastefulness, then who can say it is wrong? Only 'feeble hypocrites' who don't care enough to actually do anything about it. You can blame me for destroying the world, but if you won't lift a finger to stop me, then you're intentionally conceding your moral responsibilities to permit outright evil. Our ship isn't strong simply because it refuses to go into rough waters.

> Just cutting out beef would capture most of those gains

I was shocked when I read how much cows contribute to warming, and I have mostly stopped eating beef. "Don't eat beef, eat less dairy" and you're good when it comes to diet. That said, there are far more important factors contributing to your carbon footprint. This Ars Technica article from 2017 sums things up well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/emissions-eschmissio...

China's emissions are the EU and US's offshored emissions

>It would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing.

I think this is where you would get the most disagreement. That is, people are focused on transforming all those listed rather than forgoing them, which is a non-starter. Transformation to emission-reduced or emission-free processes.

mostly methane rather than CO2

Which makes it even worse, by my understanding.

According to its 'global warming potential', it's about 86x as potent over 20 years and 34x as potent over 100 years : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Value...

I agree with you but I wonder why you discourage changing diet to include less meat. While it has less of an impact it's one of the easier things on that list to directly influence as a single human being. It also has knock on effects and health benefits. We can focus our efforts in multiple places, going vegan won't distract us from the other areas. I won't try to debate you or change your mind however and I agree that the numbers are overwelming, especially when you take into condisderation that carbon emissions are only one part of the planetary boundary system.

I dont think eating a lot of meat is a bad thing. I feel 100% better when I eat mostly meat and no carbs. I could argue that a vegan diet, for me, is much worse than carnivore diet.

Personally I think the low hanging fruit is coal fires

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire

Good point. Also keep in mind the 5.5% of livestock emissions simply replaced the emissions by hundreds of millions of bison/buffalo, elk, deer, etc that we wiped out. So the livestock contribution is pretty much zero if you offset it with the loss of bison/buffalo, etc emissions.

And we have been in a global warming trend for thousands of years. Most of north america ( including NYC ) was under a sheet of ice, in some places sheet of ice 2 miles high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

It's disappointing to me that the nytimes would use climate change as a tool to push a highly environmentally and biologically destructive lifestyle like veganism. I wonder how many of the authors of the article has even farmed a day in their lives.

And the article reeks of ideology rather than news. Where is the news in the article? It's just pushing vegan propaganda which harms more young people everyday than nonsense like anti-vax movement. Vegans have starved their babies to death thinking that veganism is a healthy human diet. But I doubt they'd get as much backlash as the netflix '13 steps' producers did. The most environmentally and biologically friendly human diet is the omnivore diet. It has been since humans began and it will be while humans exist.

Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is a well established idea. I wish journalists would simply report news rather than pushing destructive ideologies, especially since they haven't a clue what they are talking about most of the time. They aren't an expert in almost anything they write about. So why not stick to reporting? Why give "advice"?

Why are you citing a popular science writer who is a psychologist? Who would bother to refute his numbers in the first place, when he's clearly not a primary source on them?

And that is only a secondary critique. Why should changing diets be mutually exclusive to other approaches? That seems like a false choice.

Why are you dismissing Pinker simply because he is "a popular science writer", and "not a primary source"? If you're going to refute Pinker, show your work. Otherwise, it's just borderline ad hominem.

It's definitely not ad hominem, nor am I dismissing him. He is absolutely and indisputably a cognitive psychologist. And I would say that Enlightenment Now is clearly a popular science piece.

Nothing is wrong with that. But he is just not a primary source on this data. So there is no refutation to be made in this context. Go to the bibliography, find the citation for the statistics that he used, and those can be discussed. I don't have the book and can't quickly obtain it, so I cannot provide that information.

This is social media, not a peer-reviewed journal. I don't think primary sources are necessary to justify basic numbers.

Pointing out that Pinker isn't a primary source isn't ad hominem. Bringing up that he's a psychologist and popular writer, repeatedly, is very much ad hominem. It's trying to discredit the messenger in order to dismiss the message. Don't do that, it's bad rhetoric.

Popular science writers serve an important role in disseminating ideas. As long as they're not misquoting sources, making up facts, or applying radical interpretations, there's nothing wrong with them. I don't see Pinker doing any of those things (if you disagree, be sure to source that!). And although Pinker may not be a climate scientist, he is a scientist of considerable credentials. He has taught at MIT, Stanford, and is a full professor at Harvard. In my mind, that brings a great deal of credibility to what he has to say on other scientific subjects, at least when quoting numbers.

So your arguments, as presented, provide approximately zero reason to doubt the numbers presented by the OP.

You say that, but witness Roger Penrose and James Watson speaking and writing outside of their areas of specialty. I think it's completely reasonable to ask for primary sources in any informed discussion, regardless of forum. It's just as easy as citing the secondary source in any book worth citing. I think your concerns over my rhetoric have some merit, but ultimate editing my comments at this point would just create confusion.

I think looking for primary sources is only necessary at this level when there is good reason to question the credibility of the secondary source. "Not their specific field of expertise" isn't sufficient, especially when they're just citing facts and not interpreting them.

I think there's a substantial difference in value between citing primary sources to refute a secondary source, versus dismissing a secondary source out of hand because it's not a primary source.

(This is actually familiar ground to me; my spouse has been teaching popularized dance history lately, and I've been encouraging her to write a book on the subject, because her interpretation challenges some conventional wisdom. She doesn't want to write a book because she's too reliant on secondary sources and too lazy to go read through more of the primary source material.)

I hope she writes the book. It doesn't have to be scholarly, it can just scratch an itch - but I am sure it will be a great contribution to the body of knowledge in that area. Createspace, Lulu, Gumroad are all pretty good resources for taking a single piece from a single print of "vanity" project to something with an isbn and distribution channels, possibly over multiple editions. Some have editing, cover design, and "typesetting" services available for reasonable prices. I hope nothing I've said would give the impression that I would hold this in anything but the highest regard. Best of luck to her.

Why shouldn't try to improve our diets, in addition to everything else?

How is eating a vegan diet an improvement ? Diets vary from person to person. I dont like the way I feel on vegan diets.

I believe this was addressed in the article

>the energy needed to supply energy

Isn't that a rather strange measure to pull out.

Also every source I've seen puts aviation much higher than 1.5%.