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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

The pro-meat lobby has a weird obsession with sugar.

It's like the nuclear fans or anti-recycling groups that keep talking about how bad coal is.

We know. We can eat less sugar and less meat.

But the same places that published climate denial will attack any attempt to eat less meat or less sugar, probably pointing to the other one as the real villain.

Note that a current controversy is about reducing the sugar limit from 10% to 6% to better follow the science.

Which side does this evidence-based nutrition campaigner take? They don't mention it at all? Probably not relevant for their pro-meat interests except as an occasional scapegoat.

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> It's like the nuclear fans or anti-recycling groups that keep talking about how bad coal is.

I'm confused, are you implying nuclear is bad and coal is good?

It's a False Dichotomy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

If you can't argue well for your point, you talk about how bad something else is, with the implication that those are the only two options.

Coal is bad, worse than nuclear. But those are not the only two options.

And when comparing something that uses energy, like recycling, it's not a fair assumption for electric powered things to assume they are using the least efficient method possible, it's just deceptive. Like judging EVs as if the grid was 100% coal. Because even if it was, which it isn't, it won't be for long.

Similarly, added sugar is worse than meat in pretty much every way. Doesn't logically follow that people should eat more meat. It's a type of pass-the-buck whatabout-ism.

At least in Germany, they shut down the nuclear plants before the coal plants. When you shut down or decline to maintain, upgrade and expand nuclear, in favor of renewables which do not yet exist, fossil energy (coal, oil, or natural gas) tends to fill the gap.

Just look at Germany. Imagine how much better things would have been today if they'd shut down their fossil power plants before the nuclear plants.

Or, how much better things could have been if they'd not only considered 2 options, but instead built more solar, and more wind, and more interconnections, and installed heat pumps, and had their car industry not pointlessly fought the inevitable EV transition for so long.

Sorry, I forgot, you only want me to choose between nuclear and coal.

Well, coal is definately worse than nuclear, so if everything else was equal I'd definately choose nuclear as the better option. But, since they intend to phase both of them out, and since the Greens got some power recently they've accelerated the coal phase out by nearly a decade, and they have a carbon tax and emmission controls which mean they won't actually run the coal plants as much as they otherwise would and it's mostly an insurance policy, I'm not really that fussed.

I'm still annoyed that it took them so long to get on the EV bandwagon though, but they did a lot of good work with solar so I guess it evens out.

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