An enormous amount of our meat production ends up as waste. Again, just telling random people to become vegetarian doesn’t change this, unless the participants are concentrated enough to reshape how meat is produced and delivered. Even then, the US exports of meat range from 10% (beef) to 30% (pork) of gross production, with plenty of room to rise. Trade barriers, ecological limits, and land use policy go vastly farther to curbing animal methane emissions than politely asking people to stop eating meat.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you have any influence on the macro scale through consumer habits. You’re missing a forest of waste and misallocation of resources out of a personalized guilt trip.
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%.
That’s a fully made up statistic even before the advent of superusers like the AI farms. You’re straight up ignoring our enormous agricultural export markets, our municipal waste, and the impact of major pollutants.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements like Impossible that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing without the environmental, ethical, or health concerns of real meat. Society collectively picking that at the meat isle would have make a tangible difference with no effort.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Society collectively picking that
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
Ok a few points. First off, I’m a power engineer. You’re completely wrong about transmission losses. Those are (almost) completely proportional to current, which is (almost completely proportional to load. So if you reduce grid power consumption by 50% you will reduce transmission losses by 45% or more (allowing for corona losses and current to ground etc).
Same thing with meat. It’s a supply and demand problem- the less demand for meat the less livestock, and proportionally less waste there. Livestock are expensive and people aren’t just going to raise them if they can’t sell them for a profit.
Agriculture and livestock can be exported, true, but that’s the same situation as before just on a global scale. Less global demand for meat, fewer livestock, less water usage. It’s really that simple. There are no “super-users” of meat, the 1% might eat more than the average person but not 10x more.
Municipal pipe leaks, sure, that does reduce the elasticity by up to half… with the caveat that in places that have serious water restrictions are much more vigilant because it really matters. Phoenix, AZ has a statutory limitation of 10% loss.
My stat is just some back of the envelope math based on my above statements.
As far as AI goes, it’s the same thing all over again. They (the AI companies) are offering a service to US, the consumer. We have the choice to not have AI generate pictures of snails wearing astronaut helmets. Actually AI is probably one of the things we need the least, relative to how much we use it.
Electricity usage is largely inelastic without structural changes. 60% of our electricity is lost in transmission, for instance. Individual consumption habits won’t change that.
An enormous amount of our meat production ends up as waste. Again, just telling random people to become vegetarian doesn’t change this, unless the participants are concentrated enough to reshape how meat is produced and delivered. Even then, the US exports of meat range from 10% (beef) to 30% (pork) of gross production, with plenty of room to rise. Trade barriers, ecological limits, and land use policy go vastly farther to curbing animal methane emissions than politely asking people to stop eating meat.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you have any influence on the macro scale through consumer habits. You’re missing a forest of waste and misallocation of resources out of a personalized guilt trip.
That’s a fully made up statistic even before the advent of superusers like the AI farms. You’re straight up ignoring our enormous agricultural export markets, our municipal waste, and the impact of major pollutants.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements like Impossible that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing without the environmental, ethical, or health concerns of real meat. Society collectively picking that at the meat isle would have make a tangible difference with no effort.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
Ok a few points. First off, I’m a power engineer. You’re completely wrong about transmission losses. Those are (almost) completely proportional to current, which is (almost completely proportional to load. So if you reduce grid power consumption by 50% you will reduce transmission losses by 45% or more (allowing for corona losses and current to ground etc).
Same thing with meat. It’s a supply and demand problem- the less demand for meat the less livestock, and proportionally less waste there. Livestock are expensive and people aren’t just going to raise them if they can’t sell them for a profit.
Agriculture and livestock can be exported, true, but that’s the same situation as before just on a global scale. Less global demand for meat, fewer livestock, less water usage. It’s really that simple. There are no “super-users” of meat, the 1% might eat more than the average person but not 10x more.
Municipal pipe leaks, sure, that does reduce the elasticity by up to half… with the caveat that in places that have serious water restrictions are much more vigilant because it really matters. Phoenix, AZ has a statutory limitation of 10% loss.
My stat is just some back of the envelope math based on my above statements.
As far as AI goes, it’s the same thing all over again. They (the AI companies) are offering a service to US, the consumer. We have the choice to not have AI generate pictures of snails wearing astronaut helmets. Actually AI is probably one of the things we need the least, relative to how much we use it.