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> Clearly, it is in humanity's best interest to...

Herein lies the problem. What happens to the environment is not governed by "humanity's best interest", it's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest.

To the Chinese government, more factories = more money = more power = good. To the US government, more military equipment = more power = good. At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security.

But it's not just two countries, it's every single country making these types of decisions for 100+ years... And if $country doesn't build that weapons facility or export that labor, $otherCountry will, therefore $country will be at a disadvantage. Repeat ad infitium.

Those in power are far more concerned with maintaining and leveraging that power than they are with "humanity's best interest".

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The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions isn't military, it's for ordinary consumer uses like heating, cooling, driving, and farming meat. No matter what the form of government, lots of people will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.

Does renewable power and hydrogen/electric vehicles not solve essentially all of what you listed, save beef?

There's other significant issues, such as concrete.

Read Bill Gates' "how to avoid a climate disaster" for a complete rundown, with receipts.

Nope. The way we build things from the ground up has to change. Literally build things. Flat topped buildings made out of steel and concrete surrounded by pavement generate tons of heat that doesn't get dissipated, which cascades into creating high pressure air bubbles around towns and cities that prevent rain from approaching. That cascades even further into affecting weather and creating droughts, because all the pavement prevents water from being absorbed by the ground and entering the water table. That water creates flash floods since the ground underneath the pavement is too dry to absorb it, creating a vicious cycle where the water table drops even further and the soil compacts and becomes even more hydrophobic.

We have to stop building parking lots everywhere, stop building flat top highrises, stop using concrete and steel, build everything with roofs designed to absorb heat and transfer it into the ground instead of radiate it, tear up a good chunk of the highways, parking lots, and surface streets, plant tons of trees and broad leaf greenery to shield from heat with shade and absorb it, and refill the water tables by pumping water back into the ground. All of which costs a ton of money. And what we should do, damn the financial cost and those who decry it.

Slapping a Mickey Mouse Band-Aid onto a gaping wound that needs seventy two stitches is the equivalent of what people suggest when they say "Well I'll just use renewable energy."

I think I would like to have safe housing, healthcare, nutritious food, and clean water more than "driving and farming meat" but I guess we all have our priorities.

I think that can definitely be sustainable indefinitely, but not so long as companies and cultures are unable to make any kind of real concessions to reality. We should not be using plastic. For basically anything. We should never have started. We should barely be using cars. We should never have started. We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries. We'd use a fraction of the agricultural area and be healthier to boot. Yet somehow meat being cheap is a god-given right?

I object to lots of things that reality forces me to deal with.

I was in full agreement with your comment until...

> We should not be eating nearly as much meat as people do in rich countries.

My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically.

Yes, at least some of us believe meat is very important for human flourishing. In strictly measurable health terms, I am extremely healthy, at least according to current medical science, so I'd rather not change my diet.

Sorry that saving the planet might cause minor inconvenience for you.

There were far fewer factory farms and antibiotics 500 years ago, and 95% fewer people. What was sustainable then isn't sustainable now.

If the price is saving the planet is turning it into the dystopia we seem to be zooming towards full speed, I will be happy to not pay it and suffer the consequences of our civilization collapsing. I’m not changing my behavior and I will fight vigorously for it.

If you stopped all meat production today it would not save you. (Post)industrial society itself is what is unsustainable. There is no way around that. There is no technological solution - we can barely maintain the pretense of keeping up with all the problems our tech causes. You can buy time (maybe), that’s all. Technological man cannot seem to grasp humility. There is no controlling the world. This article and some other comments go into some great detail.

>might cause minor inconvenience for you.

My current great health is not a “convenience.” It is an incredible blessing and I will fight to maintain the things that seemingly contribute to it.

It's not a binary choice, it's a gradient and you decide to pick one of the extremes. Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.

> Meat is a luxury, always has been for 'ordinary' people. One day per week if you were lucky until sixty to seventy years ago or so. The exception: farm owners and the wealthy.

I guess we have different perspectives. For me, for most of human history, "ordinary people" were farmers (or hunters.)

However, even among urbanites, "once a week" is probably too rare. For example, see this paper on the mid-Victorian diet:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/

> Red herrings were a staple of the working class diet throughout the year because they were easily cooked (e.g. Idylls of the Poor). Other favourites were cheap and easily obtainable varieties with better keeping qualities than the more vulnerable white fish, including sprats, eels, and shellfish (oysters, mussels, cockles, whelks).

> Consumption of meat was considered a mark of a good diet and its complete absence was rare: consuming only limited amounts was a poverty diet [23]. Joints of meat were, for the poor, likely to be an occasional treat. Yet only those with the least secure incomes and most limited housing, and so without either the cooking facilities or the funds, would be unlikely to have a weekly Sunday joint; even they might achieve that three or four times a year, cooked in a local cookhouse or bakery oven. Otherwise, meat on the bone (shin or cheek), stewed or fried, was the most economical form of meat, generally eked out with offal meats including brains, heart, sweetbreads, liver, kidneys and ‘pluck’, (the lungs and intestines of sheep).

There is a reason there is a Van Gogh painting called 'the potato eaters' and it isn't called 'the sides of beef' eaters. Eating meat was a luxury simply because the vast majority of the people was poor. Poor beyond our present day imagination. In between the hunter gatherers (who had a diet that went from 'gluttony' to 'starvation' twice annually) and the industrialized production of meat (and chicken, and fish) there is a long period where poverty was the norm, and meat indeed an occasional treat.

'Urbanites' were the exception, living on or near the land was the rule. If you were lucky enough to live inside the walls of a city you were already rich.

The idea that you could eat meat 7 days per week, whenever and whereever you wanted is a historical anomaly, so don't present it as normal, or even a right. It isn't.

It was absolutely normal for most times for most people. I cited a source for you. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time in my life studying social conditions and the daily experience historically. I get the feeling we’re not going to be able to meet on this. If expertise isn’t enough for you, well, it is what it is.

Your source do talk about the introduction of tinned and canned meat.

I haven’t find ratio or quantity. But furthermore I find this bit problematic in the context of this conversation.

“ This period was, nutritionally speaking, an island in time; one that was created and subsequently squandered by economic and political forces”

In the light of this last paragraph, it seems incorrect to use this source to qualify the diet or the ( nebulous ) “past”. It seems to apply only for the Victorian era.

Sorry, but AC's don't get to claim expertise.

Honestly, absolutely wild that you view “reduce meat intake to environmentally sustainable levels” as dystopian. Nobody’s saying you have to eat bugs for every meal.

It's easy for me to see how my comment could be read that way, but I would consider that only a very small contributing factor to to what's going wrong with society. Instead, read my reference to "we can barely maintain the pretense of keeping up with all the problems our tech causes" as having a lot to do with it, which even carbon-neutral will cause the destruction of ecosystems and continue the increase in cancer rates. We could also talk about the total loss of privacy, atomization, the obliteration of communities, anomie, the accelerating decline of democracy and increase in bureaucratic authoritarianism, the grim future we can expect from things like genetic engineering, etc.

> My peasant ancestors were eating meat every day 500 years ago. You can find different groups of people all over the world that are documented eating absurdly meat-heavy diets historically.

That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy. Most people's food subsisted on things you would go outside of your house and forage/barter for. Vegetables, grains, mushrooms, pulses and maybe some small game here and there.

Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.

In the country where my parents grew up, this was their way of life. Small game you would eat maybe once a month, and a livestock would be sacrificed at the end of the year as a treat.

> That can't be true, unless your ancestors have always been exceedingly wealthy.

I am honestly not sure where this meme came from. That was sometimes true, for very poor people in places where the population was too high for the amount of land that was seeing agricultural output. For example, this would have been true in parts of the American South amongst the kind of people that were coming down with pellagra, or during the Great Depression. It was manifestly not true during most times and for most people. You can study local diets and records and see it was quite usual to eat meat every single day as the core of at least one meal.

> Pound for pound, the amount of meat eaten was substantially low, since what farmer could afford to sacrifice their larger livestock on a daily basis, as well as keep the carcass for potential customers in a time without refridgegeration.

Of course people didn't have refrigeration, but that didn't mean that people threw all that meat they couldn't finish away! They used smokehouses (and other methods, of course.) Even in my parents generation, before electricity was common in some areas, everyone had a smokehouse, where meat could be preserved basically indefinitely.

One animal provides quite a lot of meat - for example, a single healthy bull can feed a family for about a year. Of course, it is true that people were not historically eating sirloin steaks every day - the most typical meat-centric dish was a long slow-cooking stew, and very little went to waste. Everyone was eating cuts most people have never touched today.

> Small game you would eat maybe once a month

This seems really uncommon. My friend for example used to eat squirrel every day for lunch. Without knowing anything, I would speculate they were from a country that went through some very hard times in their or their parents generation?

This conversation seems like it could be clarified with references to subject matter expert’s publishings on the topics related to historical food sources.

Your peasant ancestors weren't with 8 billion. It doesn't scale.

Industrialized agriculture doesn't scale either. We are rapidly destroying the fertility of the American midwest via intensive farming of corn/canola/soybean. Even ending a animal agriculture will only slow this down. What's your solution?

What would be sustainable is returning grazing animals to the Great Plains en masse to regenerate the rapidly-depleting topsoil originally built up by the American bison, but virtually nobody is talking about that because the entire focus is on one thing, CO2.

> majority of greenhouse gas emissions

To be extra precise, human initiated greenhouse gas emissions. My understanding is about half of the emissions are natural and there's little we can do about their emission (but can do about their sequestration). Of course that doesn't/shouldn't stop us from addressing the half we can :)

What's the point of being "extra precise" here? Aren't you just giving deniers a talking point?

>No matter what the form of government, lots of *Americans* will object very strongly if the solution to climate change is not having central heating, cars, hot water, or beef for dinner.

FTFY. Countless people outside the US get along just fine without cars, central heating, and the entire 1B+ nation of India is fine without beef for dinner.

FYI, India has a large Muslim population, and they eat beef on the regular.

> At the executive level of either organization one would be laughed out of the room for suggesting environmental issues should take priority over national security

Supposedly some folks are starting to frame climate issues as threats to national security. It may just be lip service so far, but we're now seeing "Meet the Climate Crisis" listed as one of the top 5 priorities for the US Department of Defense: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/331664...

“Hell hath no wrath like a national security apparatus threatened,” I think that’s how it goes. Once USG, or Wall Street even, is threatened nothing is really off the table.

I’m always extremely suspicious of “we care about climate charge” arguments that always argue for exactly what the group has always wanted to do.

The Green Party comes to mind. They pushed for the shuttering of German nuclear plants and ended up increasing CO2 emissions.

They pushed for the shuttering of something they considered (and consider) an existential risk to life on the planet, and believed that movement towards renewable electricity generation would occur relatively quickly (which is now starting to happen, but did not happen as fast as they believed it would).

You can call it a failure of judgement, but it's not what was claimed in the GP.

Yeah I was more referring to groups that want to do X, and then when a new "hot button" item appears (climate change, anti-racism, poverty, whatever) they quickly release how doing X is the solution to whatever is currently in the news.

It's most obvious with companies, drinking Coke™ is always the solution, no matter what the problem, even if the problem is drinking too much Coke.

And even that's not true.

It's governed by the eyeballs of whoever has the most power and the biggest stick. We don't, for instance, know what the actual rates of theft is in a civilization because we cannot accurately discern lost belongings from stolen belongings. Anyone who tells you they think they know the number is absolutely full of shit. A truly crafty thief makes you think you lost something, used it up, or threw it away. In which case there is no report, because as far as you know nothing happened. The better the criminals, the bigger the disparity between the reality of theft and the perception of theft.

I can't beat you with a stick if you're dumping toxins somewhere I can't see. And it's no good beating your successors once you're dead, or you once you're very old, because there is no lesson to learn there except that you can get away with bad things for 30 years, so time your crimes accordingly.

I recently came across a game theory term called "Moloch" in which individual incentives lead to negative outcomes for all parties involved. Nobody individually wants the negative outcome, but it's extremely difficult to break out of the cycle.

I've also just learned this recently. See "Meditations on Moloch" for the original essay. It explains so much but it's also very depressing -- it's hard to imagine how any ordinary person has a prayer of changing the system when so many elements of it are primed to both produce terrible outcomes and to resist change.

It's possible that you could design a new system of government deliberately designed to counter some of these natural tendencies, to change the rules of the game to reward beneficial outcomes better than selfish ones. But I don't know you'd ever get such a thing in place when the people who can make that kind of change are the ones with the most to lose.

It is interesting that the Great Filter Theory usually concerns itself with issues such as nuclear weapons, or disease, but not the failure to overcome greed and self-interest, which, let's face it, is how the modern world is structured.

I'm pretty sure SlateStarCodex coined the term, in reference to game theory. It's originally from an Alan Ginsberg poem, and I've never seen it anywhere else in game theory literature.

The game-theoretical term is a "Nash equilibrium", which is the state that reality ends up in if every participant follows their own incentives (i.e. no participant can improve their individual outcome by altering their decisions). It is possible - even very common in many real-life games - to end up with a negative Nash equilibrium. The classic example is the Prisoner's Dilemma, where the globally-optimal solution is for neither player to defect, but each individual improves their own outcome by defecting, and so what actually happens is that both suspects confess.

It's also possible to achieve a positive Nash equilibrium out of morally-abhorrent individual choices. Mutually-assured destruction is a good example. The game is setup so that if either superpower launches their missiles, humanity ends. Therefore, both superpowers have an incentive to avoid nuclear war, and we're still here.

Interesting read so far. Some examples rely on overly idealized or simplified assumptions but they still illustrate how isolated individuals and groups are powerless to resist the race to the bottom.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

> t's governed by whomever has the most power and the biggest stick. These entities act in their own best interest

Everyone acts in their own interests. The gilets jaunes were a grassroots protest against a gas tax increase. You see similar gas-station sticker-shock pressure exerted by voters in the United States.

There are coordination problems to climate change. But it's less a prisoner's dilemma than a time-horizon problem: the fruits of a green transition won't yield for decades. (Economies of scale help with this. Geopolitical decoupling gets in the way of that--this is the only domain where I see the prisoner's dilemma that you allude to.)

Digression :

The Gillet jaune started this way. Very true. But also self organise to be something vastly different pretty quickly. Maybe 20 days into that months long movement ( it’s not officially over; like Korea war … )

Another flavor of the Tragedy of the Commons. Everyone optimized by their local, short term priorities.

And another opportunity for me to point out that there is no such thing as the Tragedy of the Commons. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term, has walked it back, and others, as long ago as the 1990s, have pointed out with a wealth of evidence that the popular conception of "the Commons" never actually existed. More or less all "pooled" resources in human cultures have historically been carefully managed by a variety of cultural, social, political and economic systems. The so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" happens not because typical individuals over-use the resource, but because specific individuals violate norms, actively work to dismantle management processes and willfully work to utilize the resource for their own benefit to the detriment of others.

Hmmm, I think if we had similar (but roving, pastoral, etc) neolithic with population we do today (ok, doubtfully possible, but whatever carrying capacity), we'd never the less have resource fouling, resource depletion and we'd be sending soot into the atmosphere.

I guess until govts realize enviromental security is national security...

> Repeat ad infitium.

Unlikely since these entities all end when the environment is fucked. I don't know the Latin for: approx next 100 years.

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