As a matter of fact, animal agriculture - including the growing of crops required to feed the animals before slaughter - is the largest contributor of greenhouse gases. You're right that there are other awful practices that need to be remedied, but not doing one because of the other taking place seems short-sighted, no?

Not eating meat is simply the single most impactful thing you can do to reduce human impact on climate change. Plus, it may also help your conscience, as there is a strong dissonance in our relationship with animals.

Food and nutrition is certainly important, and there is plenty of research that shows vegetarian and fully vegan diets are healthy at all stages of life; ADA recognizes this as well: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/

The amount of options available have increased dramatically in even the last few years. Talk with your doctor and try it again sometime!

You realize your position is contradictory, right? If nutrition is important, then people in the city should sacrifice their water, so that farmers can grow more almonds. If you're saying that corporations need to take more responsibility, you're asking farmers to grow fewer almonds, means consumers eat fewer almonds anyways, but they'll also be more expensive.

This is why we’ll never “stop the climate crisis.” Everybody thinks somebody else is causing the problem and that somebody else needs to change more than they themselves do.

The truth is, stopping the climate crisis involves everybody changing how they live in a significant way. Anything short of that and you better hope your great grandkids like eating crickets and forest fires.

The sadder truth is that the climate crisis is unstoppable so it doesn’t really matter how many cows you eat.

If someone focus’s on 1% of the problem and never touch the 99%, the former is going to get frustrated and give up.

Agriculture is responsible for far more than 1% of the problem - USDA says about 10.5% [0]. And those of us who do advocate for making more sustainable decisions are not ignoring the other 89%, we're actively trying to reduce that too.

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/natural-resources-environmen...

If everybody doesn’t treat climate change as a problem that they’re both the cause of and solution to, we’re never going to touch the 99%.

You think these corporations are growing almonds in the desert and raising cows because nobody buys them?

You're asking a lot if you think consumers should know what the effect of buying almonds has on the water supply. Simply charge the almond farmers more for their water, almond prices go up, consumers buy less of them.

We’ve had fifty years of behavior change messaging. It’s time to take a different approach.

Societal change (down to the individual level) is the only thing that's going to work. People will have to change how they live and make different decisions. Full stop. There's no magic solution waiting to be discovered.

Whether the change comes voluntarily or through war, famine, and misery for future generations the likes of which we can't imagine is up to those of us alive today.

Behavior change is completely necessary if you want societal change. If you reduce the supply of meat/oil with policy without reducing demand, it would increase prices and people would protest, so we'd be back at square one.

Not having kid is a pretty non starter idea. It's akind to asking a species "why don't you just commit suicide"?

So called entitlement to breed is how life started in the first place.

That’s fine with me. More resources for my grandkids!

I actually agree with you. But nobody wants to hear it. A person deciding not to have biological children is the best decision they can make to combat climate change. This does not mean everyone will stop having kids. It means that if you are willing to make the choice to not have biological children then it's something you should strongly consider if you want to maximize your individual impact on fighting climate change.

Nobody wants to hear it because it's a knee-jerk, throw-your-hand-in-the-air reaction. Taking this stance boils down to questions like "what's the point of life", whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, and whether you're individualistic or not. You know, trivial things that everyone agree with and no one has strong feelings about.

Hence I don't think any real solution can come close to something as fundamental a change as "just don't have kids". To a lot of people, this equates to "why do you even bother being alive?". Folks are already annoyed if you ask them to segregate plastics by types, how do you think your "don't have kids" suggestion will pass? It's not a real plausible solution to the climate problem, all it does is infuriate 50% of the people, while solving no problem and changing no one's mind.

> why do you even bother being alive?

This is going to be a very real question to hundreds of millions of people within a few generations — because of climate change. Hopefully the people alive today think the answer is to create an enjoyably livable world for the people alive a few generations from today.

But I don’t blame them if they don’t. It’s fine to be selfish and not care what happens after you’re dead - it really doesn’t matter anyway. So have kids, don’t have kids. Separate plastics or don’t.

Also adoption exists.

TBH, if someone bases their decision whether or not to have children on their ecological impact to the world, I would suspect that they're mentally ill.

Like most things, I think this is a little more complicated.

If somebody doesn't want to subject future generations to the reality of catastrophic climate change, are they mentally ill?

TBH, I think anybody who has kids and still bothers to recycle is incredibly delusional.

If we just want to label people whose decisions make us uncomfortable as "mentally ill" I guess that's our right.

If the most conscientious people stop having kids it will leave the next generation in worse shape to fight climate change. The CO2-lovers are having as many kids as possible and indoctrinating them heavily.

> most conscientious people

The difference between most and least conscientious people is essentially zero. Anybody having kids isn’t conscientious and is also a CO2-lover themselves.

Is there actually fracking in California?

Yes there is some fracking now but the state government has stated that they will stop issuing new permits for it.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2021/04/23/governor-newsom-takes-acti...

yes - Bakersfield, Calif. and a few other places, mostly in SoCal.

Fish perhaps?

> Disclaimer: I tried being a vegetarian for 2 years, I didn't feel good mentally and physically so I went back to consuming meat.

No wonder. 2.5 million years of meat eating has evolved the human to what it is today.