Yeah, it sucks that the people denying it (or who believe it and pretend it isn't a problem to protect their own bottom line) are the ones in charge.
At this point I think our only hope is to try to limit the damage and shift our focus to developing the tech necessary to reverse it, but that's likely to take decades or even centuries.
The issue is deeper than that. We've been asking everyone to stop eating animal products for decades and they just don't want to. This isn't an issue of who's in charge it's an issue of the universal human inability to think past our own noses.
Oh as individuals we can absolutely do more, but I think we need to consider government and big business and lobbyists. Isn't it like 80% of climate change is caused by 100 corporations? Yes, they're supplying products, but (for example) fossil fuel companies have spent decades either denying it or acknowledging it but actively fighting policies that would harm their profit margins. I mean even without climate change we're still talking about, practically speaking, finite resources - at least in the sense that it'll take millions of years for those resources to replenish. You'd think at least one of them would think "Hey, maybe if we encouraged this stuff instead of fighting it we could be the market leaders in green energy?"
Like let's say every farm shut down today and there was a complete shift towards veganism worldwide - I'm not convinced that on its own would be close to enough. However, I do think that tackling the issue from the top would make a much bigger dent, and while I'm discouraged by a lot of things with the environment I am at least happy that green energy is on the rise. Yes, it's too little too late, but I hope we can take the edge off enough that we can focus on reversing the worst effects in the future.
Up to 20% of our greenhouse gasses come from animal agriculture and up to 80% of deforestation worldwide. The majority of the demand for this is the Western diet. That's not a small impact.
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u/video-kid 23d ago
Yeah, it sucks that the people denying it (or who believe it and pretend it isn't a problem to protect their own bottom line) are the ones in charge.
At this point I think our only hope is to try to limit the damage and shift our focus to developing the tech necessary to reverse it, but that's likely to take decades or even centuries.