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Comment by pikma | Hacker News Reader

I'm doubtful that much change can come from personal choices made by consumers. It seems to me that it would require tremendous energy and commitment from a very large number of people to significantly reduce the global demand. It seems to me that it's much more effective to raise the price or to reduce the supply (something like quotas or cap-and-trade).

Can anyone point me to examples where my thinking is wrong, where changes came from the demand side?

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I think I agree, though personally (not as a counterexample), this only targets the environmental aspect of avoiding meat and leaves behind the ethical decision around animal consumption to some degree. While reducing subsidies and other benefits would go a long way here as well, there are still some animal byproducts that have a relatively low ecological footprint and effecting changes to these through legislation still seems premature and heavy-handed in the current political climate in most any country.

It seems to me that for those considerations, bringing new perspectives to consumers to try and influence their choices at the store is one of the only practical options for now.

Well, boycotts are a pretty good example. Those seem to change corporate behavior pretty frequently actually. That being said, i'm very skeptical of this type of demand-side strategy, in this particular area.

Isn’t the face of the earth mostly shaped by our consumer choices (including where you put you pension and savings). Everything else (like military, etc.) does only contribute minor. Who else if not us?

This is exactly what is proposed. "It would be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect". "Appropriate incentives" is a policy, "less meat consumption" is simply the result.

Dairy consumption has been on the decline for years in the US as plant-based alternatives on the rise.

The restaurant industry reports that profits are up for restaurants serving plant-based meat options, so more restaurants are trying it.

Every meal is a vote.

Changing the demand side is fundamentally what marketing does. It’s how Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola and any big worldwide brand came into existence, by convincing consumers to choose their product over the alternative.

Why tremendous energy? Cutting individual consumption by eg 30% doesn't look so difficult to me.

You would need to get a large part of the global population to do it though, say 50%. And the prices for meat would go down, so you would need to convince the other half of the population not to increase their consumption.

Meat is disproportionately consumed in western countries, so, even a change only in those countries would have a big impact. Eg, China consumes half the meat per person of the US, and India just 5%.

As far as China goes that’s purely because it’s not all at first world levels of consumption yet. In any coastal city where people are roughly as prosperous as Poles or Romanians people eat first world amounts of meat. And telling people they can’t eat meat will not garner support for the government, whether in India, China, Indonesia or any other developing nation. Not eating meat is either an ethical or a religious stance and on a global level the ethical stance is marginal. People who can afford to eat meat do, and do so regularly.

The Chinese could become more environmentally conscious when climate change will become an even more serious problem for them. In the meantime, starting to cut consumption on our end is still useful, and would give us a much better stance if at some point we'll have to negotiate reductions on their part.

It's not quite that simple though. China has 4x the people as the US, so even consuming half as much meat per person, they'd still consume twice as much meat.

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