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Comment by patientplatypus | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint:

Switching from an omnivorous to vegetarian diet could reduce a person's carbon footprint by about 30 percent, says Martin Heller, an engineer at the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan.

https://www.popsci.com/vegetarian-environment-health (I've picked this as the first hit on google, but if you want to find other sources go for it).

The point about vegetarianism is that eating meat is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO inefficient that climate change won't be solved until we ALL stop eating meat (or at least the majority of the planet).

Yes, there are corporate plutocrats that are destroying the planet. No, that does not let you off the hook. If you see a collective action problem and decide that, since it's hard, and other people suck, you don't have to participate, then you're just as much a part of the problem as the sucky people.

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Imagine your neighbor's house is on fire. You run outside and see him throwing dirt on his porch with his kid's plastic shovel. You gawk at this decision for a second, then run back inside and call the fire department.

When you come back out and shout the fire truck is coming, he yells at you for wasting time inside instead of picking up his other tiny shovel and throwing some dirt.

Except... the problem clearly won't be solved with twice the tiny-shovelfuls of dirt. It needs a qualitatively different type of action.

On climate change, you have two choices:

1. You can moralize about the sucky people who won't grab a shovel, essentially complaining that the problem isn't of the form you'd like; or

2. You can do the thing that's most effective.

You can also help your neighbor shovel dirt until the fire truck arrives. That's fine, it doesn't hurt. Just understand it doesn't make a difference.

Except there is no fire truck that’s coming. We still need to convince our governments to take action. And how can we do that if we individually are still throwing kindling on the flames.

You are completely missing the point.

Meat is already expensive, indicating people would eat more of it if they could afford it. If conscientious people reduce meat consumption, that supply will mostly just be consumed (at a lower price) by people that don't care.

The goal here should be to make things like meat, car fuel, etc. more expensive (via taxes, or otherwise properly pricing in the costs). It might very well be the case that some people that can afford these increased prices continue to consume exactly as much meat and fuel as they do now. So fucking what? The overall consumption will go down, which is what we need. Overall consumption will not go down significantly if you just convince some fraction of people to voluntarily reduce their consumption.

> The point about vegetarianism is that eating meat is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO inefficient that climate change won't be solved until we ALL stop eating meat (or at least the majority of the planet).

Any source to back the claim that climate change cannot be stopped unless we convert to vegetarianism?

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