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Don‘t think about microwave vs. stove. Instead, do the following: 1. stop buying meat 2. stop eating meat 3. stop buying dairy-based products 4. stop eating

• dane-pgp 4y ago
  Let's say you could convince an extra 10% of the world to follow those rules, and that it doesn't cause a rebound effect (as per the Jevons paradox). How much extra time would that buy us before an unstoppable climate catastrophe?
  • chrisamiller 4y ago
    There is already an unstoppable climate catastrophe happening. Many of the effects are already baked in for the next 50-100 years and it will disproportionately affect the poor. What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting. When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes". These rules are fine - we should eat less meat, we should drive and fly less, etc. We should also do more systemic things, like investing heavily in battery tech and solar and wind and even fusion longshots. We should regulate the hell out of emissions, and use the proceeds from taxes and fines to help mitigate the effects on the poor. Getting to net zero carbon is going to be hard but it has to happen.
    • dane-pgp 4y ago
      Okay, perhaps I should have asked "How many lives do you think would be saved this century compared to the default scenario where an extra 10% of the world aren't convinced to follow those rules?".
    • scottLobster 4y ago
      And rhetoric like your last paragraph is just going to produce backlash and make the problem worse. "The rules are fine", and net zero "has" to happen". So in your mind there's no room for argument and the objective is sacred. So how many guns are you willing to put to peoples' heads to get them to change their diets? To get them to stop flying? Driving in particular is required for many peoples' livelihoods, particularly those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. IMO, the truly "hard" part of getting to net zero is getting people like you to realize you're not going to force your proposed solutions onto the rest of the world. You're going to have to team up with people you don't like. You know why Texas, the oil/petrochemical capital of the US, has so much wind power? It isn't because an army of environmentalists descended on the state house shouting slogans and waving signs, it isn't to save the environment, it isn't to stop climate change. It's because wind energy is cheap in Texas, something that appeals to even the most coal-rolling, roundup-spraying, green-lawn-in-the-desert Texan. If you want to save the environment, drop the moralizing and meet people where they are. Until that happens environmentalism is just going to produce backlash, that allow the environmental movements feel even more superior and do things to produce even more backlash, until the price of meat, power, transportation and housing goes up so much that you get a backlash that undoes any short-term progress that was made.
      • chrisamiller 4y ago
        I'm under no illusions that everyone is suddenly going to sacrifice quality of life to save the planet - humanity, writ large, is happy to burn coal until they choke to death on the fumes. So how do we stop the slow-motion disaster that we're living in? 1) I completely agree that trying to minimize pain by teching our way out is important. The reason we have cheap wind and solar power is heavy government investment in research, which eventually trickles out and becomes commercially viable. The recent energy bill is great, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Still, if you take an honest look at the numbers, it's simply not going to be enough to avoid the worst effects. 2) We have to make it more profitable to be low-carbon than it is to burn things. I think that unavoidably leads to the conclusion that we need to tax carbon. It also has to be done in a smart way - not super-high all at once, and then return the proceeds with checks to the middle/lower income people who are hit hardest to solidify political support. The goal is to nudge people to change their behaviors, without doing it so hard that they vote you out of office. Look, we were happy to keep dumping arsenic in streams until those externalized costs were built into the cost of doing business. The effects of carbon as a pollutant are here now - we can't keep pretending that they don't exist. What is the cost of Miami being underwater? What is the cost of wildfires and drought in the west? Yes, it will cost billions of dollars, but if it saves trillions, that's a smart investment.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > as per the Jevons paradox You don't start eating 50kg a day if you become vegetarian, and you don't spend 30 hours a day travelling if you do it by train. Yes, universally switching from cars to any other form of transport would save people 1-3 hours a day to do other things, but if they spend that time doing anything other than sitting in a car it's a win. You also don't get to use "what if noone did that" as a counter argument for something helping if everybody did it. If everyone insulated their home properly, got rid of their cars, stopped eating beef, and cut the remaining animal proteins by half we'd be pretty close to net zero right now.
    • dane-pgp 4y ago
      My point about the Jevons paradox is that if, for example, 10% of people stopped eating meat (for climate reasons), that could mean that the price of meat goes down, which would make meat more affordable for other potential consumers, so a different 10% of people might end up starting to eat meat. That's an extreme example, but it's not impossible to imagine that there are low-income occasional meat-eaters out there who might start consuming more meat if the price went down. Maybe the increase wouldn't completely reverse the initial reduction, but if the net result was equivalent to only 5% of people changing their lifestyle, then we're talking about a very small change in CO2 emissions.
      • Schroedingersat 4y ago
        So 'your thing doesn't work if I imagine that people instead do the opposite' as a rebuttal then?
        • dane-pgp 4y ago
          I'm imagining that people will do the opposite because it is known that people usually buy more of a desirable commodity when its price goes down. Of course there are limits to how much latent demand there is, and how price-sensitive consumers are, but it is not unreasonable for me to have raised this as a possibility.
• Lacerda69 4y ago
  Why would stop buying honey from beekeepers?
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Also skeptical of the honey thing. Honeybees produce honey which is a valuable product on its own, but honeybees are also distinguished from other bee species by their massive colonies (colonies are the groups of bees, hives are where they live). This is why there is an industry that trucks honeybee colonies/hives around the country to pollinate whichever crops are in season. This is to the detriment of whichever pollinator species live locally. The honeybees pollinate, but they take a disruptive amount of pollen to feed their own colonies at the expense of the native pollinators, and in return they share their diseases like varroa mites. If a crop needs pollination but you want to reduce dependence on honeybees, it's likely you would need to break up the land the crop is on in order to plant flowering species that attract native pollinators at the edges, and that comes with its own downsides for maintenance and harvest.
    • blueflow 4y ago
      So the problem is not honey/bees, its driving them around in a truck.
      • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        I don't know if I would say it's 100% on the trucks (the honeybees didn't ask to be driven everywhere, after all), but the honeybees do disrupt the native ecosystems when they get to their targets; call it a 90-10 or a 95-5 split of culpability perhaps. Smaller scale hive operations that produce honey in one location probably don't have the same outsized impact on so many locations as these truck operations do.
        • blueflow 4y ago
          This sounds a bit like blaming cows for eating grass after you placed them on your neighbours lawn.
• AstralStorm 4y ago
  A few extra: Get your house insulated. Helps with both heating and cooling. Use a fan rather than AC if you can. Do not buy unneeded stuff, buy durable, sell or repair rather than junk.
• bjourne 4y ago
  How about: 0. Make it your goal to participate in at least one climate rally next year. That's enough for you to be an environmentalist.
• dbingham 4y ago
  If you live in the US, your order is wrong. 1. Walk or bike. 1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport. 1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do. 2. Insulate your house. 3. Get solar if you can afford it. 3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec) 4. Don't fly. 5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem. At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.
  • jshen 4y ago
    Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?
    • dbingham 4y ago
      a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways. b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna. There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world. In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey. She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
• theqabalist 4y ago
  Congrats, you are actually just an inconsequential stooge. Environmental corruption and depletion is not a consumer problem, at least not directly. It is a product of industrial production processes. Eat meat, eat dairy, preserve your health and your brain in doing so, and find ways to create industry that is clean, that would make you an environmentalist... maybe... if you successfully altered the system. Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers and can be controlled by "turning your lights off."
  • endtime 4y ago
    I think you have a valid point, but I'm not sure it's made effectively, which I think is why you got downvotes. An example might help: Elon Musk is not, AFAIK, vegan. But he's done a lot to popularize electric cars, having far more impact than he could by changing his diet. Likewise, the Beyond meat people have probably done a lot more to reduce meat consumption than they could ever outweigh by eating steak every meal for the rest of their lives. (I am actually not clear on the net environmental benefit of using gas vs. making more batteries, but let's say for the sake of argument that electric cars are an environmental benefit, since it's just an example.)
    • theqabalist 4y ago
      You are probably right. I didn't sleep well and I'm tired and the smarmy "one-weird-trick" vibe of the post I replied to just annoyed me . I will own the "not made effectively" indictment.
  • throwaway3b03 4y ago
    > Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores? It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming. You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action. So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause. So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.
• xenocratus 4y ago
  Link(s) to a source that analyses the health impact of those first 5 things on your list?
  • seasox 4y ago
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19279075/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19279075/
• throwaway894345 4y ago
  Honestly a “fuck carbon emissions” t-shirt is probably an easier and more direct way of communicating your membership to the “environmentalism” tribe while still doing fuck-all to reduce emissions. If you actually care about the environment, then you’re doing everything in your power to promote carbon pricing or other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices. Personal responsibility stuff plays right into fossil fuel industry’s hand—it’s all premature micro optimization. To copy another commenter, it’s arranging deck chairs on the titanic.
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Using transit, walking, or cycling is promoting 'other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices' because these modes all hage network effects. It becomes vastly easier for city planners to override idiotic traffic engineers with once a comparatively tiny threshold of people are using them. There is also a network effect in knowledge and experience. If you learn all the safe byways and tracks then it becomes immensely easier for anyone nearby who knows you to start walking, if twenty of you in an area start cycling then your local mechanic might be afford to stay in business and run an outreach event.
    • throwaway894345 4y ago
      > Using transit, walking, or cycling is promoting 'other policies that have an outsized impact beyond shallow lifestyle choices' because these modes all hage network effects. I see your point, but this isn't viable. Too many people live too far away from their workplaces, shopping centers, etc (not to mention unpleasant weather) for walking/cycling and we don't have adequate public transit networks (nor can we build them in time to meet our public transit goals). Moreover, EVs are coming in very quickly and will largely wipe out our personal transportation carbon footprint (especially as the grid transitions to clean energy) such that there's very little to be gained (environmentally speaking) from a transition to walking, cycling, and public transit (I say this as someone who wants America to be more walkable, but not at the expense of the environment). Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars, but it's politically unviable--apart from urban progressives, there's very little political will for public transit (many of the people who say they support increased public transit networks aren't actually going to avail themselves of them until they really become more convenient than cars for their specific transit needs).
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• blueflow 4y ago
  Ergo, be poor?
• samatman 4y ago
  No, but I do appreciate your personal boycott making animal foods less expensive without having any marginal effect on production. As an avid consumer of such foods: thank you for your service.
• akomtu 4y ago
  This is just performance, like chaining yourself to a concrete slab. The real thing, if anyone really cared, would be to prosecute manufacturers for planned obsolescence. A washing machine uses a plastic bearing instead of a slightly more exlensive aluminum one? You send it to an FTC like agency, they inspect it and send some VP to jail. This would drastically reduce the size of plastic islands in the oceans, emissions from factories (who are busy manufacturing junk to replace broken junk).
• WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  That’s extreme and I think most of your point comes from a belief in being vegan as an ethical way of life rather than from a genuine willingness to limit people environmental impact. The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk. Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.
  • seasox 4y ago
    Honeybees‘ environmental impact: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-...
    • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      That’s only an American things. Honey bees are native species where I live. Also foreign honey bees displacing native species are not really what people have in mind when they think of protecting the environment. Just import foreign honey if that makes you feel better.
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