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I agree the future is built on small businesses. But to have the most impact on the environment we could all just stop eating so much meat.
by caust1c 9y ago
I agree the future is built on small businesses. But to have the most impact on the environment we could all just stop eating so much meat.
- landryraccoon 9y ago> we could all just stop eating so much meat. Sounds promising. Maybe you can build a small or medium sized organization around trying to make that happen.
- apoverton 9y agoImpossible Foods is a startup working on this mission. They have a really tasty product too. http://impossiblefoods.com/about/ http://impossiblefoods.com/about/
- bobsman123 9y agoBut it’s not meat, so I won’t eat it. I need to eat 4000 calories a day and a lot of that needs to come from meat.
- auxym 9y agoHeck, even replacing beef by chicken or farmed fish is a lot less resource intensive.
- b4lancesh33t 9y agoTravelling less is much more important. Skip that vacation to Europe or Asia if you really want to have an impact on your footprint. Just one such trip dominates the impact of eating meat.
- devmunchies 9y ago> Just one such trip dominates the impact of eating meat. impact of eating meat for how long? one year? I know that going vegan for a year is better than getting an electric car.
- wavefunction 9y agoYou could do both though.
- tertius 9y agoThe end your argument leads to suicide. Let's do what's needed not what to utmost but useless.
- DamonHD 9y ago"... four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less)." http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/m...
- DamonHD 9y agoBTW, compared to many of my peers I have done all four. http://www.earth.org.uk/ http://www.earth.org.uk/ I'm definitely not strictly veggie: I just wolfed down a nearly free burger when offered! And though I haven't flown for years, I may need to visit China once or more over the next couple of years.
- username223 9y ago> having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year) I.e. one (or one thousandth, given his carbon footprint) less Zuckerberg? I could get behind that. Heck, I supported NPG back when I thought humanity had a chance.
- thinkloop 9y agoI prefer figuring out how to incorporate the externalities instead of banning/quitting things. Meat at twice the price would probably solve the problem.
- EGreg 9y agoYeah good luck achieving that using pure capitalism. Unless you liberate all the farm animals by buying them out. You need regulations to prevent factory farming!
- taysic 9y agoWe can start by removing subsidies. Amount US taxpayers spend yearly to subsidize meat and dairy : $38 billion To subsidize fruits and vegetables : $17 million US retail price of a pound of chicken in 1935 (adjusted for inflation) : $5.07 In 2011 : $1.34 Pounds of chicken eaten annually per American in 1935 : 9 In 2011 : 56 Revenue collected by US fishing industry per pound of fish caught : $0.59 Portion of this figure funded by taxpayers as subsidies : $0.28 https://meatonomics.com/2013/08/22/meatonomics-index/ https://meatonomics.com/2013/08/22/meatonomics-index/
- tertius 9y agoComparing current day consumption to a single year in the past reeks of bias.
- taysic 9y agoWhat kind of bias? I copy pasted a cluster of lines from that page, but the sources themselves are well documented, mainly from the gov itself. Anyway here's another source that shows that meat consumption has dramatically increased since the 1920s, though that wasn't my central point: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/visualizing-a-nation-of-meat-eaters http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/06/27/155527365/vis...
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- odiroot 9y agoWe could stop flying, driving and buying electronics from Asia. Are you willing to do it?
- cubano 9y agoWhy would we do that when are bodies are specifically evolved for eating both vegetables and meat? I, for one at least, consider along the millions of years that evolution tried a version of homo sapiens that couldn't eat meat, and it was selected against...why would we now attempt to overturn the apparent wisdom of that selection?
- majewsky 9y agoQuoting from the collective wisdom of HN here: Because it doesn't scale.
- rdiddly 9y agoOh crap, you summed up my long-ass comment in 4 words! "I've been disrupted by a leaner competitor!"
- vintageseltzer 9y agoI don't think they're saying we should stop eating all meat — just that it should be significantly reduced. That's pretty much a no-brainer for our health, for the environment and to reduce the suffering of millions of animals at the hands of the industrial livestock industry. Personally, I used to eat meat multiple times a day, and now I only eat it once or twice a week. It has really improved my life. I think everyone should try it.
- n4r9 9y agoThis is the classic "appeal to nature" fallacy. On top of that, we don't know much about the diet of ancient humans, including how often they actually got to eat meat. Natural selection isn't wise, it's just an uncaring response to the environment. The environment has changed dramatically.
- tertius 9y agoIt's not wise no, but it puts us where we are. Generic engineering is all the tool that we have to fight ur and we're not so good at that.
- rpedela 9y agoPreaching abstinence has never worked. It didn't work for sex and it is not going to work for meat-eating. The right question/attitude is how can we have an abundance of meat while protecting the environment? One possible solution is lab-grown meat and if that doesn't work then we need to invent some other solution that produces abundance with minimal cost to the environment.
- walshemj 9y agoand why do you think that? a lot of the so call gig economy employees are "small businesses" or at least that's what ubber et all say