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Comment by morley | Hacker News Reader

The most common refrain I've heard is to reduce meat consumption, and to shift from high-carbon-output meats to lower-output ones. I think the rough order, from highest to lowest, is:

  - Beef 
  - Pork
  - Seafood
  - Chicken
  - Non-meat diet

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I'm willing to believe you (and I am already doing this!) but can you show me where any climate scientists advocate for consumers to take this kind of action? And model out how supply of these high-carbon-output food sources will be affected by this depending on how many consumers take action? If you don't have the time or interest that's totally fine, but I'm trying to make the point that it's really confusing for me as a consumer to understand what to do about climate change. I really wish the IPCC or other climate groups would get together with a list of actions for regular people, along with the predicted effects of those actions.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climat...

The information is widely available. I don't think needing more summaries of it is the problem. The problem is people don't care enough to change their behavior. And food is really tied up with identity, while people covet bad identities.

This is not from the IPCC but a multidisciplinary commission that presumably included climate scientists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_diet

Many high-level decisions fail to take into account lower-level intricacies.

For example, assuming you live in Germany (for the sake of concreteness) and you want to move down the chain from pork to seafood.

1. Are you aware of fish rated as green, yellow or red?

2. Are you aware of other consideration, such as logistics and methods (e.g.: aquaculture vs. wild)?

3. Do you have access to local and sustainable pork (but perhaps not seafood)?

And even if you consider this stuff, most people won't; supporting pork is supporting pork, because pork is fungible. Only the simple approach is viable.

The order in that list may depend on how the animal is farmed. For example, in some countries the beef is raised outdoors on grass and the pork is raised indoors.

Interesting; I hadn't seen that list before.

Annoyingly, most of it goes directly against arguments I have seen [1] about how best to reduce animal suffering in the human food chain without everyone going full vegetarian, since one suffering cow can replace an awful lot of suffering chickens even if you percieve individual chickens as "less conscious".

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/23/vegetarianism-for-meat...

What happens when you have 15 billion people eating a non-meat diet?

That's 35 or more years out. First fix the emissions then work on population growth to increase the doubling time. Unless we want to discover the point at which Malthus was right?

They eat vegetables instead. What are you getting at?

Soon, 7 billion living people.

Humans aren't immune to mass dieoffs. We're animals too.

You get a lot of pesticides.

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