> the demand will always be there. Humans like to eat meat. I doubt very many will give up the privilege, esp. when others are not.

I guess that's why we're all doomed to a broken planet. As long as we keep using "well, no one else is going to change" as an excuse we'll inherit the world we deserve.

Any plan that relies on self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups is doomed to failure. We need to quietly change the math behind the scenes by internalizing externalities legally - long enough for green tech to get enough investment dollars to be cheaper than dirty tech even if those rules change later.

This is mostly already happened with solar / wind power, though we need some improvements on battery tech to get grid-scale adoption. The levelized cost of wind is lower than any alternative, and solar is getting close. I’m sure the situation has improved in the last two years, but here is a report from 2018:

https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

> Any plan that relies on self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups is doomed to failure

True, but if people who otherwise realize the necessity of the change are unwilling to subject themselves to any inconvenience, what hope do we have of ever making the kinds of organized societal changes that are necessary? If you are unwilling to make a tiny change like reducing your meat consumption, you're probably the kind of person who would never vote for a government that forces you to.

The argument is simply way to excuse your own behavior.

I completely disagree. Individual restraint will not do the trick. Your limited time and energy is better spent working on creating mandatory, systemic behavior change. It is not hypocritical to, for example, vote for closing tax loopholes while using the very same.

> self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups

We don't need self-imposed austerity measures. Just end the meat & dairy subsidies.

Absolutely. There are some many direct and indirect subsidies (fossil fuels, defense, farm) that actively encourage and reward actions with huge negative externalities.

Placing the onus for all these problems squarely on the consumer is misguided and ineffective. Even if a large percentage of the population gave up meat, it would not be nearly sufficient to curb C02 emissions and prevent further climate change. Such that, both innovation and policy changes targeting the private sector are needed.

Reducing methane from cattle is important, finger wagging at consumers is a red herring that will deepen partisan divides.

There's nothing partisan in choosing to eat meat, unless you choose to make a partisan issue. As it stands, livestock are a significant contributor towards global CO₂ emissions, and going in with the mindset that "this isn't useful unless innovation and policy changes come about" is the same as saying that it's not worth worrying about a car purchase because you have loans already that are difficult to pay off.

> As it stands, livestock are a significant contributor towards global CO₂ emissions

Correct.

> going in with the mindset that "this isn't useful unless innovation and policy changes come about"

Curbing methane emissions by including seaweed in the feed is useful and proactive. Blaming consumers is not.

There will always be someone telling us we're "doomed to a broken planet." Some people aren't going to subscribe to your brand of Catastrophism or your solution to the problem.

Well, maybe I'm wrong and technology will outpace our looming problems. I hope that's the case but it would be foolish to depend on it, don't you think? It seems to me that your brand of thinking is one that comes to down to a simple mater of believing what it is convenient for you to believe.

You at least see how hypocritical that is, right? The Western world got to fulfill our gluttonous desires -- now, when it comes time for the developing world to get their turn at the table, we wag our fingers and say "Sorry, that's bad for the planet!"

I don't see the hypocrisy. We did stuff one way. then we learned new stuff about how we do stuff, so we decided that we should change. It's fairly normal for an individual to grow and learn from their mistakes, why do you have to call "hypocrite" when it's time for the society to grow?

The OP is lamenting that western countries got to enjoy the fruits of their emissions. The cost, however, is externalized.

Now that developing nations have started to get richer, western nations cannot say that they ought to now make a sacrifice and stop consuming meat, because doing so _is_ hypocrisy.

On the one hand yeah, I do get it. On the other hand there's a very real possibility that not changing our ways now will result in a significantly worse future for literally everybody.

I’ve been cooking with and eating plant based meat every once in a while for a year now. I don’t even think about it. It’s meat to me now.

My recent observations of HN is that many here take their own experience, and extrapolate that they are common and therefore anybody else could've also done it, and would be willing to.

But there's empirical evidence that not many people want to stop eating meat. Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians. Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?

I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.

Yeah, I can also confirm this. I live in the midwest, so I've encountered these people more than a few times. Even on HN you'll see a lot of people arguing that vegetarianism is actively unhealthy if not downright unsurvivable without supplements.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, is it not? I am in the camp that we've over indexed on meat products in the weest(we eat too much of it) but I also believe that knife cuts both ways.

Humans evolved eating meat - just a whole lot less of it than we do today. It was a luxury, something you got once in a while, when an animal could be caught. I believe if we all went back to this intake level (90% vegetarian) we, and the planet, would be better off.

On average ancient hunter-gatherers got about 30% of their calories from meat. But it varied widely by location. People living in colder areas ate more meat because there often weren't any edible plants to be found.

>Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians

So how do you explain that many people become vegetarians even though they checked all the boxes of "knowing it is possible but yet not willing to change"?

I was in that category until I was not. Why?

I knew it was possible (like almost everyone) and I didn't want to stop eating meat. But it isn't just an information, it's a belief (how the knowledge affects you, exactly).

What makes people believe they can't or don't want is mostly a product of culture/habits. It's really easy to change that, especially as it's become a hot topic. Not everyone changes at once, but it's quite viral (when people stop eating meat around you, the possibility of change doesn't seem abstract anymore). Idem when restaurant start offering good options in their menus (not a mere salad).

The issue is not of "knowing" but of "realizing". You can't distinguish people who are in one camp or the other as if those who change their eating habits become whole different persons, all the sudden.

>Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?

Yes! I actually do think that! Anecdotally, almost every time someone, especially the 50+ crowd, finds out I eat a vegan diet they ask "are you getting enough protein?!". My answer is usually "do you think about how much protein you're eating right now?" and the answer is always no, people don't think about their diets period, even the easy tracking stuff like macronutrient intake. Given the obesity epidemic going on in the US right now, many people don't know how to live healthily as omnivores.

I think most of us think it is possible to live healthily as vegetarians, but much more difficult. Meat from other mammals contains almost all the nutrients we need in a convenient and properly balanced format. In particular the protein quality and digestibility is higher than in most plant sources.

For those of us who are active athletes, there are a lot of anecdotes about people who tried vegetarian or vegan diets and found they had trouble recovering from workouts or healing from injuries. I suspect many vegetarians suffer from subtle, sub-clinical nutritional deficiencies and that makes me hesitant to give up meat.

There are around 300 million vegetarians in India. That is close to the population of the United States. Whatever health problems you think they may suffer from it isn't the ability to procreate.

I gave up meat 6 years ago. All of my non subtle clinically diagnosed health problems went away.

I did it because I couldn't think of killing animals anymore and the wonderful side effects of obesity, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure all went away.

I'm never touching meat again.

Most of the benefits you mention come from weight loss, and almost any intervention that can cut weight during the first years would report similar improvements.

Plenty of people lose weight, drop blood sugar and drop blood pressure by going keto. And some with a more extreme carnivore diet.

The real comparison here would be to have "2 people like you" 6 years ago and have two interventions. One going vegetarian and another going keto or carnivore, and see where there are now.

There's more to life than procreation. How many of those 300 million vegetarians are still able to perform at a high level in strength and endurance into their 50s and 60s?

Assuming equal caloric intake there is no reliable evidence that eating meat increases obesity, blood sugar, or blood pressure. Rather the opposite.

The fun thing about restrictive diets is that you have to watch what you eat to stay on them.

I post this hesitantly because it's probably some subtle bias (possibly selection/observation bias), but: the vegetarians and vegans I know personally, they all look borderline unhealthy and seem to lack energy in a subtle ways. Also, my wife sometimes watches cooking vloggers, and I can usually tell at a glance whether the particular tuber is a vegan/vegetarian blogger or not: the ones who are also give this impression of health problems and lethargy. This observation makes both of us hesitant to go vegetarian (though we try to reduce the amount of meat we consume).

> heathly as vegetarians

Worth noting that being vegetarian does not necessarily equal healthy. There are plenty of vegetarians who are just eating mac and cheese. My sister, when in high school, became iron anemic due to poor food choices while being vegetarian.

This is common. Vegetarian diets are much harder for sexually mature aged women than men, because of monthly blood and therefore iron loss.

Cholesterol is also linked directly with testosterone production in men, If I remember correctly

If you're consisting of a diet of mac & cheese, or other poor food choices... Being a vegetarian isn't the problem. Poor food choices are the problem.

That is quite obvious, you can be unhealthy with any kind of diet if you are nutrient poor...