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Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

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Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing. "Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's…

It’s one piece of many. They never said it was the only piece. You’re straw-manning this comment. And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.

how fast do you expect vegan diets to be distributed through society? What is the relation between the expectation of how fast they can be distributed through society and the requirement for speed of distribution to have the desired effect?

Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.

How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?

I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.

When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.

Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?

Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#282

Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization: 1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so… 2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. 3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that:…

Two of these things will definitely work. One of them is completely untested, poorly understood and with potentially massive consequences for the climate and food production.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#283

There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people. We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.

I was a kid in the early 90s and my school book mentioned climate change and need to change energy sources. This could have been, if not prevented, at least greatly mitigated. We have had plenty of time. But well, I guess that our species is not that intelligent after all. Too bad, maybe the next one will be better...

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change. Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch…

That's simply not true. Politicians have always known how to convince young men to go to war and die for them. Nothing is more selfless. So politicians could also convince people to change their lifestyles for the worse to prevent catastrophe.

To be fair, often that convincing happened at gunpoint. I would want to live in a society that enforced climate action with weapons. But of course politicians could do a lot more to motivate climate action before guns would be needed.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#286
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come veganism is cultural but alternative energy is political? Could one not be the other?

My washing machine doesn’t care how the electricity is produced, but most people can tell a vegan dish from a steak.

Unless they can't, then they get very angry: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Di55DEnNkUs

It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#288
post #274
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is zero shot at doing this versus energy and transportation. The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution. Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India…

How come veganism is cultural but alternative energy is political? Could one not be the other?

Energy policy is set by governments, which makes it a part of the political sphere

Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture

Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular

I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.

That's not something most countries want

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that convincing people to go vegan is one of the least plausible ways to combat climate change, but livestock are responsible for 10-20% of greenhouse gas emissions: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...

There is much lower-hanging fruit than demanding people alter their diets. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...

Thing is, we need to reach for high-hanging fruits

Re: Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

#290

I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but ma…

climate change became to be discussed as an issue since the 80s. I am in my late 40s and I have been hearing about since forever, and yet so little has been done since then. Now you can understand why I, as probably many here, have zero faith in this being solved in any sensible way.

Go and get depressed... or maybe go and eat your Brazilian meat burger, drive your SUV and book your flight to Hawaii, it won't last long.

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