Only a few people, I think. It's like we found the asteroid headed for Earth and instead of panicking, just shrugged.

There are probably fifty times a day I feel a deep seated dreadxiety about something I'm doing. Wearing synthetic fibre. Finding out a soap has triclosan in it. Using a disposable nappy. Eating an avocado. Eating fish (appropriately enough, eating said synthetic fibres in that fish). And yet I have colleagues who toss aluminium cans into the garbage when the recycling is RIGHT NEXT TO IT and they do. Not. Care. I don't know what to do. Individual action is meaningless - every gallon of gas I don't burn just makes it cheaper for someone else. Maybe even the driver who wants to mow me down. I despair.

My personal favorite version of this experience: Seven years ago I was working at trader joes and trying out vegetarianism for environmental reasons. A lady would come in every few weeks and buy just massive quantities of ground beef, like 30-40lbs in one trip. I finally asked her what all that beef was for and she replied "I feed it to my dogs".

What can you even do? Thats probably the no-meat diet of 10 people being offset by one persons dogs.

The higher your personal standard is the more angry you will be at your fellow human, its best to just not think about it.

If you want to change your diet for environmental reasons, I would recommend going for net positive rather than vegetarianism. It cost a bit extra, but products like honey (bee farming is generally seen as a net positive on the environment), fishing from overpopulated lakes, and meat/plants from invasive species are examples where additional commercial pressure would do wonders.

Invasive species in general often carries the problem that hunting them cost more than the population is willing to pay, so they are "allowed" to spread and cause havoc with the ecology. Overpopulated lakes generally stay such because the fish is seen as undesirable, often based purely on local cultural views. Vegetarianism do not address those issue and generally the veggies being grow are those that is already being grown beyond what would be healthy from a bio diversity perspective.

While the effect of livestock is major, my concerns were eating plastic fibres in fish (though the negative impacts of aquaculture are many) and suppporting cartels by eating avocados.

Get used to it. Everything comes to an end. All your favorite animals will, and humans will, and whatever comes after them.

I highly doubt consuming meat today affects lifestyle of most humans in 50 years noticeably.

True, and given the heat death of the universe I'm pretty nihilistic, but I like to think there is purpose in even temporary goodness and beauty. A bell's ring will fade to nothing but their sound still brought joy, if only briefly.

Nothing wrong about being an anti-nihilist. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

On the counter. What if it does. What if after 50 years, humans really hate their predecessors and carry shame like the Germans do for Hitler.

Just sayin!

Well, what if instead they think how stupid were we to not develop fusion sooner? Or immortality? Or human bioengineering? Eating cows hardly can make that list if we pick top 10 pressing matters.

Seriously, you want to make real impact, learn yourself a high energy physics degree and do research. Not eating meat is a joke. We as humanity will make not eating meat much sooner if we'd focus on uploading and fusion.

If you really want to make a change, leave the city and go live in the countryside. You'll be able to consume less, grow your own food and be closer to nature.

Funny enough,I've generally recoiled at that idea because traditional exurban living has a very, very high carbon footprint. Of late though I've been investigating homesteading and inexpensive land at least 20 metres over sea level that would still be comfortable 5c warmer.

Not sure what to do about civilizational collapse though.

In most cases I think that would necessitate owning a car. I think not owning a car and living an urban lifestyle is a better tradeoff for me at least.

Cities are more sustainable for most people, by definition really. Homesteading with high biodiversity and a cargo bike might be good too, but probably not for ten billion people.

Your actions are not meaningless. They are what one person can accomplish, and thats what everybody has to be content with when in doubt.

If you make the world better by being less bad, then chances are you are already doing what one human can do. That is fine and enough for one human, by definition.

When we aim for the stars we first must learn to walk, and be content with little steps for a very long time.

I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor. If half of Americans said "burning carbon is bad, I'll ride a bike instead" it would largely be making gas cheaper for the other half, who would then just buy bigger, heavier SUV's. This doesn't apply to all things, just cost-limited goods where the negative externalities aren't priced in. Plastic is basically free (not cost limited) so at least there reduced consumption kind of matters.

The other option is to run for office and effect change that way. That one just might do something.

Pretty much this.

If you want to reduce the consumption of some thing, make it more expensive.

Paradoxically: increased efficiency reduces costs and so increases total consumption. This was noted by economist and engineer William Stanley Jevons, in the 19th century.

There are different ways of increasing costs, and not all necessarily involve prices (or taxes), though those tend to be the most effective and easiest ways to do so. Legal, social, and moral costs can also be imposed (criminalising use, making use anathema, making use taboo), but these take time to impose and have various side effects.

This is a difficult problem, and even recognising the dynamic is difficult. It's deviled ecolologists, economists, politicians, and others, for over two hundred years (and arguably, for over two thousand).

Smaller scale of production usually decreases efficiency, increases costs, and thereby decreases consumption.

That depends on what's prompting the smaller-scale activity.

If increased capabilities allow more parties to engage in an activity, you'll increase total consumption.

If increased costs reduce the effective maximum scale of operations, you'll tend to have reduced consumption.

One formulation I've come up with is that "bad hygiene leads to decentralisation", where hygiene is meant in the general sense of systemic health and efficiency. Anything that reduces the capability of scaling up operations will lead to more and smaller rather than fewer and larger units of operation. This is something that proponents of decentralised systems might want to consider.

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/36518392

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7h8sqk/open_th...

> I just meant that my reduced negative externalities will be produced instead by an opportunistic actor.

I don't think this is true. Humans are deeply social and copy each other. One can easily see this with young humans, but I didn't fully appreciate this with adult humans before I saw it myself. When I turned semi-custom-vegan, I did hear that it is kind of pointless because animals will still be slaughtered for others. But even suprising to me it turned out that several of the people I interact with started to reduce their meat consumption as well. We aren't all egoistical ignorants that only think of their immediate benefit.

When I cycled to work in LA people seemed more keen on terrorizing me on the roads, or joking about killing me in the office, than on copying me.

If half of the current car owners in the US stopped driving, it would have consequences on a global scale. Presumably they'd also stop buying new cars, for one thing...

But that example is extreme. There's strength in numbers, even smaller ones. If 5% did what you describe, there'd be that much more people demanding streets that are safe for biking, etc.

Many of us also despair, but the world at large thunders on. Humanity seems to be collectively determined to march full speed ahead and face any problems as they happen. Sadly this means the planet is going to lose a majority of its genetic and ecological diversity, and that is going to be a great loss to us from several angles, but modern society and our economic structures are simply not placing value in such intangibles.

Planetary carrying capacity has to go somewhere. More humans + human animals and crops = fewer wild plants or animals

That's just an intuitive thought, I am not sure if it is necessarily correct in all cases. It certainly at least correlates.

Some of us are screaming outside as well.