I’ve read in an Article that meat production causes a lot of co² emission. Now I was wondering if we stopped eating meat completely, would that be sufficient to get under the threshhold of emissions what the planet can process? What is that threshold? Where are we now? How much does meat add to this?
“Everyone will just X” when X individually makes obvious sense for most people.
For some, it’s a matter of cost. The cheaper option tends to get a lot of adopters. Making the better option cost less is sometimes a matter of engineering and innovation improving the cost of the better option. Or sometimes it’s making the worse option cost more, sometimes directly through taxation or indirectly through regulations. Electric cars are pretty much on a self sustaining path at this point, where the economics of electric cars can be a much better financial decision for themselves personally, compared to similar ICE vehicles.
For others, it’s a matter of cultural influence, where trends in adoption just make things different. Tobacco use, especially actual smoking, is way down. Drinking alcohol is down, too. In my lifetime, helmet use for bicyclists and skiers is way up. These broad societal preferential shifts can happen without necessarily having big mandates from government.
And even if nudged somewhere by temporary government policy or price, sometimes people stick with that option long term if that’s what they learn to prefer. Seat belts kinda went this way, where seat belt usage rates went way up between 1980 and 2010, so that even after federal regulations were struck down by the courts and state level enforcement dwindled in the past decade, everyone still wears seat belts (including when visiting places where they’re not required).
And of course, the big influential force for changing behavior is government policy. As a society, we’ve pretty seamlessly moved off of things that were banned (leaded fuel, CFCs), even if the transition took a few decades (lead pipes, lead paint), or quickly adopted things that were mandatory (child car seats, bike helmets).
Emissions from food production is one of those things that can shift a bit from all of these factors. We’ve shifted away from beef towards chicken in the last few decades, and that alone has made a difference in greenhouse emissions. We might see more shifting down that line, just culturally. Or we might see some economic nudges from the fact that beef and dairy production are so costly for reasons correlated to their environmental impact.
But ultimately, meat doesn’t contribute nearly as much as driving does, for the typical American household. The real impact comes from how we design our cities, not on how we eat.
Wasn’t there this product (cfc i guess )they put in fridges that caused harm to the ozon layer. And every fridge producer just stopped using it after we found out its really not good? to be fair its not common to happen but it proves its also not impossible that “everyone just…” I think if there’s an easy solution, it is poasible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
That was done by multiple governments banning CFCs, which is the opposite of “everyone just.” The point isn’t that better things are impossible — a better world is absolutely possible. The point is there has to be real action to make it better, and that action often takes the form of governments stepping in to do the right thing.
I could argue “everyone just banned cfc” where everyone is not an individual anymore but governments. I see your point tho and you are right, action has to take place this way or that way for something to change. I just wanted to visualize sometimes things do happen because the initial thought of some scientist was probably “if we just stop using cfc, the ozone layer can be safe again”(symbolic for" they found out whats causing the problem") …is not a solution in terms of action but the action that caused the stop was initiated by exactly such a thought. So i wouldn’t categorically throw such thoughts in the wind…
I naively thought we were finally heading this way with climate change. It was always too little, too late, but there seemed to be a global movement by countries to finally take the right actions. Everything was coming together. But then the pendulum of politics swung the other way