> To cut emissions, we need to kill materialism, consumption economy

That’s a moral statement not a factual one. To cut emissions, we need to do exactly that. Pricing in externalities (yes it means less beef but that’s not the same thing as an end to the world as we know it) and investing in cleaner means of production is enough. Most of the people pushing for large societal changes are doing it because it was their goal from the start and they are using climate change as a mean to an end.

Pricing in externalities is probably the only way we can solve carbon emissions, and would still be very difficult. We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries. Also, we need to decide the price of emitting carbon. Perhaps survey economists from every country and aggregate the answers somehow.

> We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries

You can simply add a tax at entry to match your own carbon tax until evening rules are added into trade deals. The fact that such a tax is not in place in neither the USA nor the EU is proof enough to me that neither is serious about stopping global warming.

How would you determine how much carbon was used throughout the entire supply chain of an imported product? If the product is produced domestically, the government can enforce every business to measure its carbon emissions, but cannot do the same for imported products

Lucky the Earth is infinite and so perpetual growth will work. /s

Growth doesn’t have to depend on finite resources. Growth is simply more value being exchanged. You can have sustainable growth.

Plus the human population will soon be drastically contracting anyway.

Abandoning the only system since the birth of humanity to bring prosperity to billions in favour of one which has repeatedly be an utter failure, systematically lead to totalitarianism and is responsible for millions of death might not be the wisest choice especially when it’s pushed by people who think they should be amongst the rulers due to their moral superiority.

We can grow indefinitely if we entertain ourselves with more advanced and efficient technologies.

I run my apartment on LEDs I haven’t changed in 4 years and I max out at 100W. When I was a child, that was the power of one fairly bright living room reading light

About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

And for those we have viable solutions that either do not lower subjective quality of living or even improve it, but they are not sufficiently implemented by enough people.

Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.

We should first address the things that we have viable solutions for instead of loosing public support by insisting on reducing emissions in areas where there are no good solutions yet and some sort of asceticism seems to be in order.

> About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

Methane is between 30 and 200 times more dangerous than CO2 and a single cow produces 200 pounds of it per year.

Another fun fact: the mass of all cattle on the planet is higher than all other animals combined. All of them from cats to rhinos and wild horses.

> Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.

That's exactly my point: the real issues aren't related to government policies related to just focusing on CO2 emissions from energy but how much and what we consume.

What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far. The others, besides using more public transport are very small.

But nobody wants to hear or face it because it implies how we live and eat.

Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water, a scarce resource, I don't see as much arguments about how we consume but plenty of neverending EV and electricity gaslighting.

It's much simpler to point at vague problems

> Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water

That‘s a surprisingly small amount of water. Just a typical shower uses 150 liters and all it does is keeping you clean for a day. On the other hand a cotton shirt can last many years.

Are you saying the water is lost or destroyed or permanently polluted? This is, of course, not the case either.

It's not a small amount of water by any means and it's just one of the various polluting factors in its production. The average young american buys an average 10 shirts per year and this number keeps increasing.

One of the biggest disasters ever, the draining of the sea of Aral (back then shared across 7 countries) has been caused by the insane water needs of cotton farming in Uzbekistan.

So yes, not only the water there has been lost forever, and millions have been impacted in their health, livelihood, farming, etc, and all for what? Shoving $5 t-shirts for the fast fashion industry?

The cotton industry is actually very harmful for the planet, not just in central asia, but those are the many insanely huge problems that people don't want to talk about, because got forbid we stop shoving our closets with low quality junk fast fashion that we quickly forget exists.

And all of this goes back to my point. Consuming stuff is toxic for the planet, the easiest way to curb the evil impact we have on it is to at least try to understand how we could easily curb it with limiting our everyday actions.

Not only you can substitute beef for pork, pork for poultry many times and have a positive effect, you can also decide to buy better clothes that fit you better and last longer. And many other things.

> What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far.

No it isn‘t.

I understand your point and I have also long held the point of view, but have recently learned that this isn't the right framing. You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.

One example is air traffic. If you don't consume an available flight, then you don't actually help the climate, because somebody else will buy the seat at a lower price. This is just market economics. To reduce flying the society already has put Carbon credits out there for airlines to buy if they want to fly from A to B. These credits reflect the cost which society puts on flying currently.

> You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.

Oh, I agree, I'm not against eliminating anything, but a pollution sort of tax I would be perfectly fine with.

Like eggs taxed more than tomatoes, poultry more than eggs, pig more than poultry, etc, etc.

But it has to be taxed enough to make some dent in it.

Most people in the world do not eat that much beef. Some countries are outliers.

Paraphrasing your own metaphor, we can all eat 1 quality burger or steak once a week (or fortnight), cycling or at least driving a BEV to the restaurant and we would be well within sustainable limits