Eat less meat: UN climate change report calls for change to human diet

I don't think people will stop consuming meat if you ask them nicely. You have to make decisions that will hurt the meat industry and make it infeasible.

This would likely best be achieved through slowly dropping tax incentives, and transferring them over to alternatives so that people have something equally economical to today's meat.

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?

In the last couple articles I've read to reduce your own carbon footprint I've found one thing is sadly missing most of the time: butter.

It's way worse than beef.

One kg butter blasts 24kg CO2 into the air before it gets to you, with beef it's around 13kg.

I have become an 80% vegetarian - meaning I try to avoid meat completely, but I am not "strong" enough and end up eating a (usually small) piece of meat, once every week/second week.

It took me at least one year to achieve this, because meat is so prevalent in our society. A friend of mine was in India recently and he said he did not miss meat at all since the non-meat dishes were so great. I think a lot of it is just how good the quality of vegetarian dishes is.

The difference is that you don't consume butter in 250g quanities in a single sitting. Even if butter is worse the consumption patterns for butter are not those of beef.