"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.
People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.
And vegan diets would make a big dent, look up agricultural sector emissions, look up beef emissions and methane from their burps. It’s a major factor after transport and electricity.
They also tend to use polarizing identity politics that vilify all men, or all old people, or all white people, etc, even though most of those groups are suffering with everybody else.
The major limiter of veganism is cultural. People love eating meat. It’s a major source of protein and calories, especially in developing countries. Americans are not going vegan, so it’s kind of silly, in my opinion, to focus on it as a solution.
Compare to building nuclear energy or solar / wind + batteries. China, the US, Europe, and India are all well-positioned to do this. The limitation is political will, which is more difficult than it should be, but definitely easier than convincing a critical mass of Americans to go vegan.
Edit: I'm also not trying to equate eating meat with smoking - one is obviously more harmful to society than the other. I'm just thinking about the cultural change that happened. Culture is malleable. Laws aren't a great way to affect culture, but social pressure is really effective.
The reason for the decrease in smoking is still being researched and debate, but the main arguments that I have seen is the main role of smoking as social stress relief and as such it has been replaced by other addictions like opium use (mobile phone use, social media, and games has also been argued).
If we consider food culture to be malleable, we definitely should move to aquaculture as a main source of nutrients. Farms on land compete with forests and human activity, and land based farms uses artificial fertilizers (derived from natural gas) and massive amount of fresh water. Shellfish, invertebrates, and seaweed can provide both protein and calories, and has the lowest environmental impact of anything we eat today and can even have a positive environmental impact if farmed correctly. Changing farming from doing harm to doing good would have massive impact, and all it takes is a cultural change.
It's tied to their identity for a lot of people. The same kinds that will drive a huge SUV to compensate for the hole in their lives where meaning and connection is supposed to be.
The broken US voting system amplifies the effect.
They already told us. They hate anybody who isn't a cis white christian male. There's not a lot to find consensus on when one side wants healthcare for everyone and the other wants some people to cease to exist within the country.
Veganism is an individual choice, and individual choices are generally pushed by culture
Of course culture and politics influence each other in a myriad of ways, but when people start to try and push individual choices like being vegan into the political space it is never very popular
I personally would fight tooth and nail to prevent veganism from becoming a law in my country. Failing that I would immediately make plans to move somewhere else.
That's not something most countries want
Obviously the requirement would have to be significantly quicker than current spread of veganism which would, as you noted, lead to a big dent in the agriculture sector.
How are your calculations taking into account the need to kill off, en masse, cattle and other animals as veganism spreads because they no longer can be considered economically sustaining for the farmer to support them?
I ask because I've never seen any calculation about this! Everybody always seems to think that veganism spreads and the cattle fairy will blink them out of existence.
When I was working for Greenpeace all the holier than thou vegans were all talking about how immoral it was to kill animals for food, not taking into account that once you no longer user those animals for food you need to kill off a lot of them. This taking into account of things always caused me to have a sneaking suspicion that they wanted the animals not to be killed, as if the farmers would be oh well we can't sell you for meat so let's just keep you on in retirement and feed you, but not have you breed, until you die of old age.
Given the influx of sudden and wide spread veganism and the collapse of the meat as food industry, what are the plans for getting rid of the bodies of lots of dead cows? I know what the plans are now with meat as food, cows are butchered, cut up, refrigerated and transported all over the world, but without meet as food none of that will happen because there would not be profit at the end to support it, so please, what is your plan?
Frankly, the whole wide-spread veganism is part of the solution seems to have the weakness of having many problematic moving pieces that are not at all planned for in any meaningful way - that I have ever seen that is.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
It is one of the last pieces to focus effort on.
If I stopped eating all meat and dairy it would reduce the world's annual emissions by 0.0000000026%, assuming we can ignore animal quantization and market effects which could easily actually reduce the reduction to 0.
It only makes a difference if a whole lot of other people do that. If I decide individually to do it for the climate even though I will be less happy on a vegan diet and it is not also done by a whole lot of other people I've made myself worse off for no benefit.
To get enough people to do it will require government incentives. It's hard to see how incentives specifically for this could be designed to be both effective and not so unpopular as to get the government replaced at the next election.
If it ever comes about it is far more likely to be as the result of something more general such as a revenue neutral carbon tax. That might raise the input costs for meat production shifting some people to non-meat diets. (They will still mostly prefer meat, but this way they might not blame the government as much).
Compare to other things individuals can do, like switch to EVs. For the vast majority of people with good home charging an EV will generally be as good as or better than an ICE car except that it is several thousand dollars more expensive than a similar ICE car.
That's something governments can incentivize. Subsidize the cost difference and subsidize home charging equipment purchase and installation, and you will get people switching. Not because they want to help the climate and are sacrificing something for that, but because it is an improvement to their current driving setup and it helps the climate.
The biggest wins though are in the things individuals don't directly deal with. Replace fossil fuel power plants with renewables backed with storage that just use gas occasionally for example, and to the user it is all just electricity. You don't have to convince individual they need to change their lifestyle to so this kind of change.
Then explain voluntary work or all the people risking their lives for other people they don’t even know.
Human society existed before money.
And nobody said that a vegan diet would have stopped climates change, they said strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition.
Just picking one and say that would help is a nasty tactic.
It’s like saying you need water, food and sleep to live and you say, nope, water alone doesn’t keep you alive.
The reality is, consuming and producing less works but it’s harder then keep going and hope for a technical solution.
Same with being overweight, more sports, less food works but doesn’t make fun.
That is a very broad claim that can be challenged easily.
Maybe it would make more sense to say: "Money is not everything, and pockets of altruism exist"?
Depends on your definition of money and society.
Making money is not the only incentive system in society, but it is overwhelmingly the one that controls emissions. Another key one is regulations around housing, which require lots of driving, that's been built deep into our entire land use, and can not be changed on the time scale necessary for climate action.
Moreover, "making money" is the incentive system in all the world's big carbon emitting economies that controls decisions, from China to the US. Sometimes those incentive systems are based on the costs of technology, sometimes they are based on rules that governments make (e.g. China setting the price for energy capacity markets too high, resulting in buliding lots of coal electricity plants that sit mostly idle...)
As somebody who spends almost all of my political effort trying to get ground based mass transit and dense development, I often advocate for them on climate grounds, but only because climate grounds are convincing politically here. They are rounding errors on climate action, in practice, because new development over the course of the next two decades, the crucial two decades of climate cation, will only be a tiny fraction of our built environment.
There's only one true method for climate action: stop extracting fossil fuels to run soceity, and change all industrial processes that emit carbon to neutral methods, and make agriculture carbon neutral or ideally carbon negative. Strict vegan diets helps with deforestation in Brazil, for those that get meat from Brazil, for example. But the plains of the US used to be covered with bison, before they were slaughtered and replaced with cattle. We need to look at the overall ecosystem, where everything is going.
Talking about "strict vegan diets" when they are not needed is merely a recipe for keeping people from adopting far easier, far more effective, and far more necessary action.
Society doesn't require money, but it does seem to require mechanisms for coordinating resources and obligations. Money is one particularly powerful solution to that problem, especially once societies become large enough that most economic interactions occur between people who don't personally know one another.
That just makes it less possible.
Consuming and producing less is just not going to happen because there are at least four billion people who don't live the western lifestyle, but want to and there's not much that can stop them.
Thank you for writing that, because I think it is the key point. It's very easy to blame "decrepit old men" because that makes it someone else's fault - and I get it, as I think that there are a bunch of decrepit old men that deserve a lot of blame.
But democratic societies (and even authoritarian ones that are still somewhat subject to mass unrest) were never going to accept large negative impacts for a consequence that was not immediate and in your face. Like you put it, just go around and ask your average Joe or Jane if they would vote for any candidate who demanded strict vegan diets (or heck, even a lot of the other things on GP's list). You're fooling yourself if you think it's only decrepit old men who don't want that stuff.
And regarding GP's comment that "And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US." Yes, there are some people trying to sabotage this to make money for themselves, but it will not take them too long to fail miserably precisely because the economics are not in their favor. Just look at Texas - not exactly a place known for its love of vegan diets, among other things - and solar, wind and now batteries are now a huge portion of the energy mix and growing fast precisely because it's economical.
Strict vegan diets would objectively massively help reduce climate change.
Not exactly selling the idea of “strict vegan diet” to a bunch of people with enough cash for meat and incisors in their jaws.
You got any examples of cultures en mass with “strict vegan diets” because lentils taste delicious?
Converting to a vegan diet alone won't stop human driven climate change. Therefore, the prospect of climate change won't be enough to convince people to give up meat en masse. That drum has been banged on enough for long enough for that to be obvious.
> Religion also plays a role in dietary habits. Nearly all of the Muslim (99%), Christian (99%) and Buddhists/neo-Buddhist (97%) populations eat meat. Among Hindus, a little over three-quarters consume meat, while Jains and Sikhs have the highest share of vegetarians. Only one-quarter of Jains and half of Sikhs have ever eaten meat.
And lentils do taste very good yes. In Spain they make a really nice lentil broth. Though the traditional version has meat in it, it can easily do without. It's just that in Spain meat goes into everything:)
Admittedly it's not fully vegan but still.
Indians have long recognized the virtues of a vegetarian diet: both the moral imperative & it's health benefits. That's something everyone should be able to admire.
That is such a misleading comment. ~80% of people in India consume meat. That "or" is doing some incredibly amounts of borderline lying.
Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters. the "or" stands in for the context of the fact that Chicken/fish are an order of magnitude healthier for the planet, and frankly, for individuals.
Cows are not for eating, they are holy animals in India, more like pets. I hope you are not advocating eating dogs in west!
Your claim was that 3rd world countries like India "are already eating de-facto vegetarian or vegan diets" which is incorrect. Moving goalposts
> Chicken/Fish produce an order of magnitude or in some cases two orders of magnitude less pollution than cows do.
Cool, irrelevant because the vast majority in India are neither vegetarian or vegan.
> Trying to gaslight me on this topic even though I'm right on the part that matters
This is called "being incorrect but trying to move goalposts"
I live in a very leftist place, and there were always those at climate events demanding "strict vegan diets" however I didn't see these people out in the general world outside of my little leftist bubble, trying to actually get their idea out there.
I agree with Michael Mann that what most of the public only encounters this idea of "strict vegan diets is a required climate solutions" by hearing it from climate denialists poisoning the well of climate action. But I also see this idea online, and in meat space in very isolated areas.
So the idea of "strict vegan diets" is a real idea on the fringe, but its overall effect on climate action has been to turn people against climate action in the US.
an odd place to be a hotbed of vegan advocacy.
Many vegans I know were in fact motivated to that choice by realizing that meetings of humans were in fact "meat space."
MY LUNGS ARE ADAPTING! I'VE INHALED A ROAST
It would already help to consume less meat.
It seems to me you focus on vegan diet to use the annoying vegan stereotype for your purposes.
This personal belief is grounded on an assumption that all mankind follows a neoliberal or even libertarian economic model.
Back to reality, west Europe is firmly a social democracy where states impose behavior through law, regulation, and policy, which is topped by a federal system that coordinates policies. Countries such as China are totalitarian with a centrally managed economy that's guided by N-year strategic plans.
Misconstruing this as normative, and attributing it to a political belief, is your cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile where actual climate action is coming from.
We must understand the world as it is, if we are to effectively change it to a better state.
No, it is a expression of your personal and unsupported beliefs. Asserting that the whole world enforces a libertarian economical system is simply out of touch with reality. I mean, China alone is a totalitarian regimes that still manages it's economy through central planning.
And yet, air travel continues to grow (after a small hiatus due to COVID) and state and EU money will be dumped into a new airport near me, to support more than doubling current capacity, much further away from the city (adding tens of millions of car trips to and from the airport).
I'm simply the looney for not taking the kids on low cost European city escapes.
It starts from the “bottom”: people will talk about it, but will pretty much continue to do whatever the fuck they can afford to do. And Europeans, like Americans, can simply afford to much, while harping about what will happen to the world once the BRICS can afford the same.
Did we forget that EU took an austerity approach following 2008 and all that did was immiserate their population enough where they are voting for fascist/nationalist political parties?
This personal belief is usually coupled to people who have become wealthy following this belief. So it tracks that they would declare any solution that doesn't allow them to continue their plundering impossible.
Technology is the only option in constant system, but with nothing happening, the system won't remain constant for long, and sacrifices will have to be made, not by choice.
Degrowth per IPCC / earth system scientists mean the 10% the richest consuming less power.
It’s much more a wealth distribution problem rather than a technological one. Both IPCC and IPBES agree there.
Can’t wait for the downvotes on that one. That’s the one hill I’ll die on, literally.
Edit: AR6 (WG2+3)
No. I am not.
I'm saying that unless the incentive system is aligned with our goals, then it's not actually climate action.
Technologists succeeded at doing that.
People who decided to use non-policy driven political action failed utterly at this. The degrowthers are particularly bad at this, but then all their thinking was muddled and riddled with errors about the reality of the science.
Technology makes the system non-constant. Technology is one of the biggest sources of social change.
Have they? How have they done that? I just want to know what you mean here.
Technology did that. With lots of government subsidies, and in particular with Germany kick starting a ton of solar industrial development.
Even in the US, with concerted anti-renewable sentiment at all levels of decision makers in both electric utility leadership and government leadership, new electricity is overwhelmingly carbon-free, because the technologists made it the cheapest:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
Technologists caused massive social change, by changing the technology. Far more than the people that focused only on culture and changing society through those means.
Technology by itself has never been the problem, the problem is the scaling up of it. Fossil fuels are harmless at a small scale, it's only once you exploit enough of them that you start to see harmful effects. But renewables are no different: we're drawing from the Earth's natural energy allocation, but that's the same energy that heats the planet in the first place -- so as we scale up renewables, we will also end up wrecking the planet. We'd need to scale it up so much it feels preposterous, but it seems obvious to me that if we can, we will. There is no upper limit to energy demand.
And that's what I'm worried about in the long term, I suppose: that surprised Pikachu moment where human ingenuity (and AI, I guess) worked so hard on extracting every bit of solar energy that the rest of the planet, not receiving any of it anymore, predictably turned into an ice ball. This kind of nonsense could never happen if we could properly look and plan ahead as a society, but neither would climate change, so.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that renewables are booming, but we could also have built a sustainable utopia on the back of fossil fuels if we had properly budgeted their use. We need to switch ASAP and start budgeting, because the problems we currently have aren't the only problems we will ever have, and the size of them, unfortunately, tends to scale with energy.
The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.
Renewable energy will power places like Bangladesh towards far greater wealth and prosperity. Aside from the distastefulness of using the term "leftovers" on any group of people, I think its clear that India will become massively more powerful due to their education system, once its further enabled by cheap clean energy and AI.
The US is falling into civil war over stupid culture issues as India is rising. The US is dismantling its education system, its research system, to spend it on wasted defense spending (just in the past few days huge amounts of research money from the National Institutes of Health have been funneled over to DoD. Or DoW, whatever).
Additionally the US's terrible culture war is resulting in slow adoption of cheap energy, which will further lower the US's global position.
There will always be limited resources. If not one, the other. But cheap renewable energy is a great leveler and the US will be leveled far more for its refusal to lead the way with it. India will be hugely ascendant as a massive nation with coordinated, highly educated human resources. Even in the era of AI, perhaps more so, human resources are the ultimate limit on human happiness.
Once we rip the institutions that are breeding this inequality out by their roots and replace it with better social safety nets, free medical care, reformed education systems resulting in lower inequality. Then we can tackle planting more trees, bulking out solar, onshoring manufacturing, etc. The "war" is the people who have abused the system so long that they are multi-generational "social elites" complaining that they being called out on it.
A lot of people from bangladesh and india are working in Russia. China and Russia are also investing, and building factories there.
no, it has not
2) not technology aligned societies incentive systems, but politics which a) incentivized producing electricity by renewable methods and punishing electricity produced by fossil fuels, which again encouraged research which in return made renewables mostly cheaper than fossil fuels - and we are lucky that the physics aligned with that.
There might be a tiny bit of nuclear built, but we don't have the capability to build enough to make a dent in the time scale we need to, and nuclear is far more expensive than solar plus batteries, so the profit motive means solar wind and batteries will win.
The people that built the technology aligned industrial policy and government incentives to allow them to create the technology, true. But it was technology action that is solving climate change.
There are two groups of people opposed to clean energy, one right wing and one left wing, and they were both extremely wrong about the technology, and the path of technology has been crystal clear for decades.
It was obvious in the 2000s, based on learning rates, that batteries solar and wind were improving at rates that would solve our climate crisis. The only question I had was if nuclear could play a part, and Vogtle, Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville, and Hinkley proved decisively that nuclear would not be a big player.
We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges). Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
what even is this?
> We don't need carbon taxes,
yes we need them, otherwise we will keep emitting CO2 as always
> We don't need carbon taxes, those turned out to misalign incentives in weird ways (not all industries are equally sensitive to carbon prices, so applying equal taxes is far less than economically ideal for motivationchanges).
so? the ones which are most sensitive (usually the ones with the highest footprint) will transition first, others will follow later with increasing cost of emitting co2 - not including difficulty which will rebalance the equation
> Tax credits and guaranteed small purchases turned out to be extremely effective and efficient.
what tax credits and what guaranteed small purchases? and how do they prevent greenhouse gas emissions? and why do we want them if technology already provides the incentives (your claim)?
Wind is great to reduce fossil consumption to around 50% in regions where the conditions of solar is not great. After 50% the cost increase significantly as overproduction competes with existing investments and prices drops below zero (see Denmark as an example). Batteries is also prohibitively expensive to cover months of poor production, which is why regions that heavily invest into wind also construct thermal power plants for equal capacity that burn carbon rich fuel for electricity and heat (see all of central/northern Europe). Regions with colder climates also has inverse consumption behavior than warmer climates, which mean that solar produce the least when consumption is highest. This is where nuclear can be economical viable, but only if we discontinue building more thermal power plants that burn cheap fuel. EU voting to have natural gas defined as "green" demonstrate this perfectly well, as well as the complete lack of any political party advocating to building battery as the solution for low wind production.
https://woods.stanford.edu/news/meats-environmental-impact
>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.
14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit
I also feel like the idea that technology will save us can only exist if you're fully ignorant of the sheer amount of money poured into lobbying by various industries into deregulation (like, for eg, the beef industry: https://www.ucs.org/about/news/agribusiness-industry-lobbyin... or Taylor Farms https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...)
not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...
just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...
Yeah, where did you get it from? They said "strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition" Would you also have said "the idea that energy transition and ground based mass transit would have stopped climate change is just nonsense", too?
Only to then go on to talk about "the reality of human society", as so often with these top response to the top comment. It's the sophistry two-step.
I admire anyone and everyone who wants to be a vegetarian/vegan. Expecting the rest of the world to follow suit is a fools errand.
If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?
Sure there is. If the mere act of eating a staple food item causes so many carbon emissions it contributes to planetary-scale climate change, you have an overpopulation problem.
That is incorrect. If there is one person who produces the same amount of carbon emissions, it's the same problem which is independent of population count. All resources to sustain life are going to dwindle and secondary effects will continue to amplify, regardless of humans exist at all, over a long enough period of time.
"Overpopulation" is used to define the set of problems (logistics of practical food/water production) that make climate change a secondary concern. Ofc, you can define it how you like to talk past other people.
If that population consumes a resource at a rate which is not sustainable—which as people upthread are arguing re: emissions and agriculture—then it is an example of overpopulation.
Degrowth is coming. And you don’t have a say in the matter.
There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
> There just aren’t mega heatwaves causing famines and there won’t be at 1.5c of warming either.
Oh we’re going way past 1.5C.
> Oh we’re going way past 1.5C.
Are we? The IPCC projects that no change in public policy or tecchnological advancement globally has us on track fro 2.6C rise by 2100, but there's a straightforward path to 1.8C. Experts no longer think the old worst case scenarios are plausible. Yes, 2.6C is nothing to scoff at, but it's in the realm of adaptable.
It won't stop there either.
This right here, the absolutely preposterous idea that giving up kids is somehow climate action, is exactly the nonsense that a climate activist should never tolerate.
You think climate action is everybody stopping having children?! You think extinction of the human race is the only option?!
"Of course not!" You say, so clearly we must have some children. But how many? If we drastically reduce our population, we will continue with the same broken systems, same energy systems, etc.
Only by keeping society running do we have the energy to switch our society's engine to zero carbon energy sources.
It's insulting to tell people not to have children, it's not realistic, but worst of all, it's not a climate solution to not have children.
"Don't have kids" is just Malthusian nonsense from a prior environmental era, uncritical thinking, pure slop.
And it greatly harms actual climate action when this extremely stupid idea gets associated with the climate movement. Stop. Just stop.
Most of all, when people say "don't have kids for the environment" it actually really hurts environmental action. Pretending that self-sacrifice is inherently environmental action, that we will save the world through sacrifice, is just one of those weird ways that Christian religion has worked its way into people's every day life.
We save the climate by stopping ALL emissions, and then also in the later half of the century actually sequestering CO2 at a pretty consistent rate. We don't get to that by halving the population, that's not a solution in any way. It's not going to be easier to get to zero emissions with half the population, if anything it's going to be harder. And we definitiely won't be sequestering CO2 in the later half of the century if we're dealing with all the challenges of reducing the population by any significant amount.
I'm willing to wag my finger at you, not about sacrifices, but falsely equating climate action with sacrifices. Climate action is one thing and one thing only: reducing emissions and eventually reversing some of them. It is not sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice.
Wholeheartedly agree
Imagine you're a hyper-partisan and you learn that 'the other side' is spreading messaging amongst themselves encouraging each other to not have children. You're going to be doing backflips, because it's just the collective suicide of an ideology.
No, they don't. If that was true, we'd have prehistoric values. (It would mean you could turn matters of culture into genetic arguments, which is fun, I see the temptation, but it's just not true.)
It's similar with most views and values. Your children will mostly share all of them with you once they reach a certain age. It's something I can even feel happening with my own parents as I age, rather to my distaste. hahah. Anyhow, yeah - there's about a zillion studies on this topic and you can find that parents values are most predictive of those of their children.
And of course with values and other characteristics, even if parental views/values are highly predictive, there's going to be some variance. But you still end up with the fact that if a bunch of people remove themselves from the gene pool, any definingly common characteristics of those individuals are also going to be disproportionately removed from society as well.
In looking up some literature on it, it turns out that some studies have even studied and found what I alluded to of people trending ever more towards their parents values as they age. [1] They call it 'delayed activation'. But anyhow, yeah they found the exact same thing where our values become even more alike as we age. Pretty interesting stuff! And I think it makes the age aspect quite critical. I assumed I was one of those exceptions referenced above, yet reality had other plans in mind, in spite of my protestations.
[1] - https://sci-hub.si/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Telling people not to have kids may not be realistic, but... it's also happening already.
Look at the time scales of action. Look at what needs to done. Advocating population reduction has nothing at all to do with climate action. Please stop.
You're just taking some idea that sounds vaguely "environmental" and extreme, and attributing it to somehow being climate action. It won't reduce emissions to stop climate change.
However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.
No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."
Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.
I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.
We need to get to zero by 2050 then have interventions to sequester CO2 at a low level.
But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.
Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.
Do you have kids?
sabotage achieved
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/31/turkmeni...
But sure, go for it. Logic be damned.
Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.
Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.
Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.
Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years
Relying mostly on technology that doesn't yet exist seems absurd to me. We have an incredibly hard problem to solve and maybe a narrow window of action, we should use all the tools we have at our disposal: rapid deployment of available solutions, sustained research into better ones, adoption of more frugal lifestyles, development of alternative sociological, political and economical frameworks.
You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.
I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.
I hope you are wrong that nothing requiring sacrifice can ever be accomplished.
We simply did not evolve as a species to make large personal individual sacrifices today in order to benefit billions of strangers decades in the future. Never going to happen.
The options here are technology saving us, or eco-totalitarian governments controlling a huge portion of the world’s population. Nothing else will work.
None of the above implies that everyone can achieve a current day Western lifestyle or that current Western lifestyles are sustainable. But average people are going to continue seeking it out, it’s just human nature. Activists who expect people to “just” give up that search are not being realistic.
I know you want to paint me as selfish or, like the next commenter, a mislead/naive armchair activist and I understand why that perspective makes things feel simple and either under control or full down-with-the-ship fatalistic. Both of those sound soul soothing in their own way.
Collectively we are in a pickle and I think inaction and poor stewardship is probably not the best we can do to get out of it. If you want to throw your hands in the air and give up because "rich people gonna rich" or you want to let it all happen because you think we should be grateful for the easy life this road has given us even though we stepped on everyone along the way then I understand and that's what you have to do. However, I'd rather we don't give up and instead all figure out how to work together and make things better since we're all in the same boat even if not everyone wants to be.
It would be easier if we all worked together. Humans aren't like that at all so that will never happen but that's not a good enough reason to convince me to shirk the responsibility of trying anyway.
This is ignoring that _not_ solving global warming will make everyone's life worse regardless.
If you’re eating vegan cheeses and whatnot you’re probably not doing so hot. Or impossible burgers. Or any other manner of “invented” food that is not essentially basic agrarian or hunter-gatherer.
Conversely, wildlife play important ecological purposes and can be hunted sustainably.
Wild life can also be useful in processing things we cannot eat and grows in abundance (grass) into things we can eat (cows).
Everything in moderation…
The economies of scale work differently for billions of mouths vs one mouth.
Wildlife hunting has zero emmisions! Even lower emmisions than agricultural products! If you are serious about lowering emmisions, lets push that!!!
This is like claiming seafood is very expensive to produce, and then give imported caviar as an example.
I recommend you check any healthy eating table for vegans and vegetarians. Bread, beans, rice, legumes aren't exactly billionaire luxuries.
People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.
We need to use AI to solve for global warming.
Is there a more appropriate use for AI?
The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.
You're confusing acceleration with velocity. Poor people are far from the greatest per capita contributors.
In other words, live a privileged person's life in an expensive city, risk malnutrition with a complicated diet, and don't ever leave the country (on a plane).
As if the sources of climate change are you and me, and not industry in any way. It feels more like a way to say, live like me or almost literally burn in Hell.
We had the means to avoid this (strict vegan diets, ground based mass transit, dense development & re-wilding, energy transition) but people made money doing the opposite. And more people made money sabotaging solar+battery pricing in the US.
So we get to watch the world burn down around us.