Don’t forget eating meat, the easiest thing to stop doing (people needs cars and trucks for work, they don’t need cheeseburgers). People can’t be bothered to make any changes, it’s always someone else’s problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/27/meat-gas...

More specifically, beef and lamb.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Replacing those with basically any other meat (pig, chicken, fish) would make a huge difference already. And it's far more realistic than no meat. Indirect demand destruction (from cost increase) through carbon credits or something like that in the future?

Even cutting back on meat can have an impact. Halving quantities in cooking etc. really is hardly noticeable.

Yeah I think this is a much better path. If you mix chicken with jackfruit 50/50 in tacos, for example, it’s barely noticeable.

We’re not going to convince Americans to give up meat, but if we can reduce consumption when they do eat it, we can make incremental change.

Even mildly advocating for veganism as a vegan would be infuriating if it wasn’t so comedic. The mental contortions that even intelligent people will put themselves into in order to either avoid the topic or keep their head in the sand are truly something to behold. And ultimately it often feels like arguing with a past version of yourself, who perhaps held some of the same views.

I just don't advocate, at least not without prompting; it's too maddening. That I'm vegan often becomes known naturally, and once it's established, people in the know tend to start bringing it up on their own. I hardly ever go into advocacy unprompted. I think this is more effective. Just by being present, you might spark the thoughts that lead someone to changing their mind... :)

Yeah, I have noticed this too. and I’m much the same now, over time my “advocacy” is mostly stating my reasons when asked. And sometimes bringing it up in online spaces.

it can be difficult, at least for me, to politely model in the face of what I see as a great injustice. But as you say, it can be maddening to do otherwise and still see no change.

So I do understand and support those who participate in a less passive advocacy as that can be effective for a different group. And keeps “our” voice in the mainstream, even if it is often vilified by popular culture.

People need cars... But not trucks for work :)

I've managed to avoid driving one for all but 1-2 years of my life, and I'm 42.

Your mileage, ironic phrase noted, may vary.

People need cars because we designed our environments to require them. It was a choice, not an inevitability.

And here we are. Needing cars. Unless you want to spend the big money of rebuilding cities.

To be clear, the money is already being spent, it’s just a question of what we make the priority. Even just keeping the current roads useable costs billions of dollars, let alone the amount of money spent on highway expansion (which, due to induced demand, causes even more traffic).

In 30 years, every road that exists currently will have been replaced. The question is if it should be replaced with another road, or should some of them have larger sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes. Amsterdam has been doing this for decades and it’s going very well. They spent money that would’ve been spent rebuilding a road on making it a better general transportation option.

Yeah people never haul anything with trucks for work

Uhh a lot of people need trucks for their work

Yeah? We need millions of personal, individual trucks? For work, of course, ignore all those white collar job parking lots full of extended cab pickups that get 10mpg.

Have you considered that sometimes people buy automobiles that can accommodate multiple use cases? Just because you don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day doesn't mean that you don't need to do it a couple times a month, or sometimes every day for short bursts of time.

With vehicles being as expensive as they are, some people prioritize the one vehicle that can suit their regular _as well as_ occasional needs.

To put it into terms this crowd might understand better, to a lot of regular people the wildly expensive and overpowered computing hardware we own seems like a ridiculous waste. And certainly, we don't need all that horsepower every minute of the day. But we need it from time to time.

I can see what you're about to say though: those people who buy trucks should just drive some crappy little three cylinder for day-to-day use and rent a truck when they need it. To which I'd ask, how would you react if someone told you that you should just buy a dinky little Chromebook and spin up a beefy EC2 instance every time you need some horsepower?

Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do. And this is frankly where a lot of resentment to the climate action stuff comes from. A lot of know-it-alls lecturing people on how their lifestyle is completely idiotic based on very little understanding of how those people might actually be living their lives.

"I see a pickup truck with nothing in the back, therefore in my expert opinion you don't need it."

The current potus was directly elected because “know-it-alls” kept trying to jam ideologies down peoples throats. I have this awful feeling we’re going to swing back that way, and the escalation on “both sides” will be an absolute disaster.

Hauling "hundreds of pounds of supplies every single day" is a fringe use case, essentialy nobody does this, it's not relevant.

"Maybe you don't understand people's needs and motivations as much as you think you do."

It's the opposite. You're confusing "needs" with "wants" and extrapolating the needs of the very, very few people who genuinely need a truck onto the entire population.

The vast majority of people use their cars to transport only themselves to work each day, then maybe pick/drop off one more person, then maybe go buy groceries.

I don't think you quite understand just how ridiculously niche valid use cases for trucks are. It's literally just towing, or some very specific off-road hauling. Everything else is going to be handled way better by something else, starting with a regular car, ending with a van.

Hell, for most people even a car is way overkill, a bike works perfectly fine to go to work each day, I assure you. So does public transport. You don't need 2 tons of steel just to to move your 100 kg body around.

To your analogy, I can use my dinky little chromebook 99% of the time and only boot up my PC when I actually need the power.

That seems not to be the case in large parts of Europe. Why do you think that is?

Only if "a lot" means <0.1% of people, at most.

Yeah, good catch, thanks.

Why should I stop eating meat, just so that Taylor Swift can fly everywhere with two jets !?

Fuck that, we're on this boat together, and we'll all go to the bottom together.

Wow great thanks for the intelligent reply

Acting politically for what matters is not giving up :)

Though, as always, we can and really should do both.

Government is the means by which the electorate acts collectively. Pushing for policy changes is not giving up.

Well, truth be told.. It _is_ nothing compared to Big Oil.

Spoiler: It's individuals who are driving that demand. The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.

Big oil isn't going to kick down your door when you buy an EV and switch to solar. There is no rancher in the grocery aisle slipping steaks in your cart.

Spoiler, the oil and other energy industries have done a world changing amount of lobbying and regulatory capture in order to drive decisions that cause more and more fossil fuel use. This includes everything from subsidies to industry stagnating regulations to reduced enforcement to suburban sprawl. Look at how the current US administration shills for big coal. Pretending they haven't shaped the world around the consumers is either naive or bad faith.

Yes, consumers have to stop funding these companies and behaviors. Also, the governments that operate on behalf of those consumers have to drop their corruption and start protecting those people they represent. Both virtuous and nonvirtuous conservatives know neither of these are going to happen, which is why they see massive terraforming technology as the only way out - if someone with power can't get rich(er) fixing it then it won't get fixed.

Spoiler, you exist in incredible luxury because YOU benefited from paying for goods and services made extremely cheap from oil.

You also have the oil on your hands, and its not washing off easily.

>The impact of the decisions of big oil are nothing compared to the collective decisions of individuals.

Yes they are, in the form of lobbying to remove subsidies and adding tax penalties to EV/solar purchases.

Using corporate externalities to trivialize individual contribution is utter nonsense, though. Coke does not make plastic bottles because they think it's fun. Big oil executives don't just fill big Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of the black stuff.

Individuals purchase products from companies, driving that demand. Then are absolutely unwilling to make even the tiniest, temporary sacrifices to demand those companies reduce those externalities.

Hell, half of these individuals don't even both to vote. That's straight-up the bare minimum participation trophy level of effort.

Who do you think benefits from the use of oil? Everyone. We’re all guilty, it’s not just oil companies. Goods are transported on ships, railroads, planes, and trucks. Virtually none of these are electrified because of energy density constraints. They all use oil. Anyone that consumes is an oil consumer.

This chain of blaming random persons is both useless and distraction. It failed in the past. And it is not even a good faith argument.

Guilting people for existing in society wont fix anything. Actually regulating largest contributors to the issue can fix things. And individual behavioral changes will logically follow once rules and laws change.

If the Gov stopped Oil Subsidizes, incentivize the move to renewals and nuclear instead of promoting Oil say 20 years ago, we could keep our A/Cs and 60 degrees (~16C) if we wanted to. The sames goes to flying and beef, make it expensive.

So yes, Governments share by far most of the blame for this. A specific individual is not going to change their life stye unless forced to, that is human nature.

Instead we have had governments in the US being too afraid to do the right thing. The only possible US President that was willing to make big changes climate wise had his election stolen by the Supreme Court in the year 2000.

So here we are still with no politician willing to really force changes on people's life style in the "first world". All they are doing is trying to keep the price of oil low.

One final thing, in the US, if you try to use electricity from all renewals, the price is much higher. And in some cases electricity you receive is still generated from fossil fuels.

Governments and industry are responsible. Personal consumption/waste is not the primary driver of climate change, no matter how much corporations tell us that using paper straws is the solution. It's tough to expect average people to take major action when corporations are essentially given carte blanche.

And who is buying all that stuff from corporations? Who is actually the one consuming?

We can quibble about edge effects like "induced demand", but by and large, people just love cheap energy, cheap calories, and can shift the moral burden by playing "not my responsibility" games.

From the IPCC report, 2/3rds of all global emissions are directly tied to consumption.

Well, yeah. Corporations aren't just nefarious evil entities, dumping carbon into the atmosphere for no reason. They're doing it to sell goods. The problem is that a lot of the environmental costs for the manufacture and transport of those goods are externalized and go unpaid.

It's difficult to put the blame for that on the consumer, who has no visibility into manufacturing or logistics, and who has vanishingly-small options for not participating. Buying domestic goods is very difficult or impossible, and goods which are manufactured in more environmentally-safe ways are significantly more expensive (because the costs I mentioned earlier weren't externalized).

If a consumer is presented with two options, one that costs $X and has unknown environmental costs, and one that costs $2X and is marketed as being environmentally safe, the majority will choose the first. This is especially true as economic forces continue to squeeze average people.

Consumers absolutely participate in the problem, but the only process by which it could be corrected is regulation, and the only entity capable of that is the government. (Democracy being what it is, you can however place more blame at the feet of voters.)

I think pinning the blame on them is the wrong way to look at it. Its more a very complex system where each actor's behaviour affect the behavior of other actors. So politicians doing more is super important, consumers doing more is important, companies doing more is important. Everyone's collective effort pushes the flywheel in a different direction.