Remember, 100 companies are responsible for 71% of climate emissions. These need to be dealt with, swiftly.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Most of these 100 companies are oil companies, and the emissions from oil they sold on to consumers is unfairly attributed to them. Exxon don't burn oil for fun, they sell it to people to power their cars.
This statistic is incredibly misleading.
The artificially low price of oil due to postponing / offloading these external costs significantly slows free market innovation of alternatives and efficiencies.
So... what's the best way to pay for these negative externals so we don't simply pass the buck to our kids?
We don't have to throw executives in jail for addressing the market, we just need a more comprehensive (and truer) price (via taxes) applied to oil.
Is it? When I pour motor oil in my motorcycle, drain it 500 miles later, and have it recycled does it put CO2 in the atmosphere? Nope, at least not beyond the refining process.
Burning oil is what puts CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's consumers that do that. Not oil companies. Sure, one could say that oil companies are the ones providing the fuel that consumers are using, but that's sort of like an obese person complaining about food companies making him fat.
We could charge more for fossil fuels, but this effectively functions as a regressive tax. It's a tax based on how long people need to commute through and need more energy to deliver goods over greater distances. This disproportionately impacts less developed areas, which are typically less wealthy.
In terms of gasoline, the technology builds on itself. Infrastructure like roads and fast food, expectations like the ability to commute, etc. If cars and gasoline were prohibitively expensive, commuting would pretty quickly become obsolete. Companies that require workers to drive 2 hours a day would have a hard time hiring people... or we'd find new ways to sustain it (alternatives and / or efficiencies). The price of all goods would go up considerably too (shipping, manufacturing). We rely on it so heavily!
Obviously we can't eliminate dependence overnight, which is why being proactive (arguably not proactive enough anymore though) and gradually implementing programs to phase it out or change it are required.
The goal should be to manage the pain / cost so we don't get hammered by a massive change in the future, or maybe taking too long and getting stuck with an unmanageable situation like massively accelerating climate change. The pain WILL happen regardless, and probably already is.
Just running with it, like we're mostly doing right now, is likely to disproportionally affect less developed areas far more than the price of gas and goods (floods, fires, and apocalypse type stuff).
If you believe climate change is real and negative (I assume you do) this is one part of a potential solution. If you don't believe climate change is real and negative though, then we're just not on the same page yet, and it's too early to have this discussion.
Start sequestering carbon or create funds to research effective ways to sequester carbon. For the US, it’d be as simple as giving the DOE R&D funds and a mandate.
I’m fed up reading comments along the lines of ‘we shouldn’t try to solve this problem, because we should be solving this other problem instead’. In every case I’ve seen this argument, there’s absolutely no constraint at all preventing us from doing both.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
> Results of recent population studies suggest that soy has either a beneficial or neutral effect on various health conditions. Soy is a nutrient-dense source of protein that can safely be consumed several times a week, and is likely to provide health benefits—especially when eaten as an alternative to red and processed meat.
By the way, the reason @jaxr is talking about eating lots of soy is not because we'd need to be heavily reliant on soy for protein if we gave up meat - there are lots of other protein sources, of course. They mentioned eating lots of soy because we currently feed something like 70+% of soy to livestock, so there'd be a lot of it "laying around" if livestock suddenly didn't exist. Of course, it wouldn't actually play out like that.
The thing about research is that if you look for studies to support a particular conclusion, you can always find them, usually more than one. You could probably find a study or two to support eating nothing but beef and pork, if you tried hard enough. But if you want the truth, you have to read ALL the related studies, and you have to critique and interpret them and understand their scope/limitations and relate them all together to build up as complete a picture as you can. Dr. Greger isn't perfect, but he and his team seem to be doing a hell of a job trying to find the truth.
He advocates a whole-food plant-based diet because overall, that's what the evidence seems to say is healthiest. But he's not a hard-line vegan or anything, just trying to ensure that people have can make informed choices by giving us all the information. Not just in terms of broad strokes like "eat more vegetables, don't eat so much meat", but all sorts of weird and interesting details like which sorts of lentils are healthiest, or why broccoli sprouts are amazing at fighting cancer.
And it's not an alarmist site -- here's a nuanced take on glyphsate, used on GMO soy https://nutritionfacts.org/video/gmo-soy-and-breast-cancer/
Back to the topic at hand, here's an example about Soy and prostate cancer. https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-role-of-soy-foods-in-pr...
And to find a way out of the forest of conflicting info -- if you find a study and want to get a second opinion on it, search for it on nutrition facts (you probably have to use google, with a query like "site:nutritionfacts.org <study keywords>").
I'm not encouraging you to blindly believe what Dr. Greger says! You should evaluate it for yourself. But I strongly believe that after watching a few videos on random topics, you'll start to see how most people have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to nutrition science, and intentionally or unintentionally spread falsehoods.
Cows milk is optimized for cows.
Eating lots of soy is not healthy.
It’s a very weird and unconvincing argument on your part, to suggest humans should just start eating crops fed to cattle and that would somehow work in terms of sufficiently healthy and available nutrition as well as being net positive on climate change.
Cattle eats grass which grows everywhere in the world and cattle produces vastly healthier and nutritious profile of fat, protein, vitamins and other essential nutrients than what you could achieve by growing human edible crops for similar price. Sure you can achieve good nutrition with other expensive vegetables but that’s not what will happen if humans stop eating cattle. Let’s be realistic.
Suggest you read
Steinfeld, Henning; Gerber, Pierre; Wassenaar, Tom; Castel, Vincent; Rosales, Mauricio; de Haan, Cees (2006), Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
Or alternatively anything about food culture and supply in India.
I don't believe your current position is substantiated by any evidence; but I'm happy to look through any relevant numbers if you can find them.
> The water used by the livestock sector is over 8 percent of global human water use. The major part of this water is in fact used for irrigation of feed crops, rep- resenting 7 percent of the global water use.
And, yeah, that’s kind of my point - let’s limit cattle to grass and push it’s production somewhere out to steppes of mongolia or something, which will help recover Amazon rainforests and free-up land for more nutritious vegetables for humans.
"The comparison measures direct emissions from transport against both direct and indirect emissions from livestock."
Cattle can eat grass, but most of them in North America eat very little grass. They eat a lot of grain that is intensively farmed. That feed farming has a significant impact on the environment through regular agriculture practices. By growing food for humans instead, the impact would be reduced simply because not as much crop is needed.
Red meat does have a good nutrition profile, but a balanced vegetable focused diet does too. People underestimate how much protein and fat can be had from plants. I'm not sure why you think people won't do this if they stop eating red meat. Why isn't that realistic?
I speak as someone who absolutely loves meat and thought much like you do recently. Life without, or with much less meat is fine. I've come to realize I largely eat it out of convenience and comfort.
You obviously missed my explicit position against corn-fed cattle and went on to attack some straw man. Please re-think and re-state your argument such that I don’t get an urge to dismiss it based on irrelevancy from the very first statement?
In fact in your following two paragraphs you just repeated the same things I already said just using different words.
We don’t disagree on much.
There is simply not enough land to replace all meat supply with grass-fed cattle meat. So if we all want to eat meat from grass-fed cattle only, that would mean exactly radical reduction in meat consumption.
It doesn't. I reduced my own meat consumption and I don't think it was enough. In fact, no single measure would be enough. There are no low hanging fruits here. We need lots and lots of different adjustments across the board.
So, this is a good advice, along with all the other good pieces of advice.
For example, flying is so cheap I would say people "over do it" just because they can. I often think it would be great if there was more cost associated with air fair to factor in the environmental damage each flight causes.
Yeah people will be inconvenienced slightly but what is the alternative? Holiday in locations closer to home? Go by rail? Video conferencing ? They all seem like good options compared to the alternative.