10% isn’t nothing, but even eliminating all meat production won’t drive that to 0. Electric power generation is almost as high as transportation, so what is the push to electric vehicles really doing other than blame shifting? It seems like the bigger sectors would have a lot more low hanging fruit to drop emissions by more than the entire agriculture sector.
If people need to eat less meat, then there needs to be more meat free food options that taste as good or better than meat, are as filling as meat, get people enough protein, and aren’t frankenfoods pretending to be meat (like the impossible burger).
I agree. I personally think we need the intervention to look similar to the way we changed smoking habits. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach that includes massive propaganda about the dangers of climate change, made visible in imagery on the meats, alongside massive tax increases on meat products and banning advertising of them. Banning branding and forcing generic branding would be useful too, that worked extremely well across europe for smoking. Spoiler warning for shock imagery:
spoiler
Meat free products are a big part of it. But growing that industry has to come alongside ending the old one, it won’t grow to fill the gap without also making it competitively viable. If governments got behind ending meat in this way you’d see massive investments going into the alternatives as it would be obvious to the financial class that it will be a growth market.
There needs to be bigger intervention then. 8 billion people aren’t going to suddenly decide to take it upon themselves to stop eating meat tomorrow.
The EPA reports that all agriculture accounts for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
10% isn’t nothing, but even eliminating all meat production won’t drive that to 0. Electric power generation is almost as high as transportation, so what is the push to electric vehicles really doing other than blame shifting? It seems like the bigger sectors would have a lot more low hanging fruit to drop emissions by more than the entire agriculture sector.
If people need to eat less meat, then there needs to be more meat free food options that taste as good or better than meat, are as filling as meat, get people enough protein, and aren’t frankenfoods pretending to be meat (like the impossible burger).
I agree. I personally think we need the intervention to look similar to the way we changed smoking habits. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach that includes massive propaganda about the dangers of climate change, made visible in imagery on the meats, alongside massive tax increases on meat products and banning advertising of them. Banning branding and forcing generic branding would be useful too, that worked extremely well across europe for smoking. Spoiler warning for shock imagery:
spoiler
Meat free products are a big part of it. But growing that industry has to come alongside ending the old one, it won’t grow to fill the gap without also making it competitively viable. If governments got behind ending meat in this way you’d see massive investments going into the alternatives as it would be obvious to the financial class that it will be a growth market.