No it isn't, the idea that strict vegan diets would have stoped climate change is just nonsense. Run the numbers. "Strict vegan diets" is the attitude of US activists telling the developing world that they need to change their behavior before the US activist is willing to accept driving less or adopting dense urban infill housing.

"Making money" is the incentive system of society. Technology has now aligned society's incentive systems to promote climate action.

People who refused to acknowledge the reality of human society, refused to acknowledge that the profit system exists whether they want it to or not, are responsible for focusing action on ineffective means of change.

I've been vegetarian for 7-8 years and think it'd be great if everyone stopped eating meat, but expecting even a single person to stop who hasn't already expressed interest in it is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. We should not base our strategies for fighting climate change on hoping all of humanity will take a sudden 180° turn on their natural instincts to eat meat.

In medicine there’s this well known axiom that if an intervention regime would technically work, but is something that the patients tend to not follow through, then the intervention regime doesn’t work.

No that's not how the world works. Most of climate change happens not because some decrepit old man lives on his yacht but poor people in third world countries get their first air conditioners. As they should.

The only way is through. Most of are not going to be living the suffocating life you think we should. We will grow, innovate and accelerate out of this.

The everyone-should-try-harder mentality doesn't work either unfortunately. It would be great if everyone rode bikes and went vegan but that's never going to happen so we have to stop making people feel bad for buying gas cars and eating cheeseburgers because it just causes division which ultimately hurts progress.

At least we've discovered that trying to get people to behave differently at scale without the presence of an *immediate* emergency is a failed endeavour... So maybe now we can stop that nonsense and focus all of our energy on technological solutions?

The means to do it would be things like uranium steel mills and concrete plants (via hydrogen production) or any of the huge number of industrial uses of heat. The amount of coal and oil burnt to produce industrial heat is mind-boggling.

People are meat eaters. If I was to run a campaign to keep the green movement unpopular, I’d promote enforced veganism as one of its core ideas.

Technology is more feasible than politically driven "degrowth" or any of the other proposals.

It was oil companies that created the notion of a "carbon footprint" as a way of deflecting blame from them to individuals and now you're falling right into their propaganda with "strict vegan diets" etc. And regardless, we have no alternative but technology to solve the issue because, are you just going to maintain the CO2 status quo in the atmosphere?

I’m guessing the things you listed are the sacrifices /you/ are willing to make but omit the ones you are not willing to make. Do you travel by plane? Do you use AI? Do you have kids? Do you own a car? Etc etc.

You really had to throw veganism into the mix there…?

I think that vegan diets never took off primarily because the vast majority of people do not want to follow vegan diets. Money factors such as subsidies are secondary. There are also potential health impacts. I followed a vegetarian diet for a few years when I was younger because of ethical concerns, and I felt healthier once I started eating meat again. This is just anecdotal evidence of course, and many people argue that you can be as healthy or even more healthy vegetarian as you can be omnivorous. But it's a potential psychological factor arguing against the likelihood of mass adoption of veganism.

Mass transit and dense development are potentially doable, but at this point the suburban sprawl + car model has been popular in the US for decades and it would feel like a downgrade for many people to live in smaller places in more heavily urbanized environments. I think that many Americans don't even have a clear idea of what it would look like to raise kids in a multi-story residential building in a city without it seeming like poverty.

Also, in some parts of the US, mass transit and dense urban living run into the problem of anti-social behavior including street violence. Many of the people in the US who care the most about stopping climate change also oppose the kind of intensive policing that would be required to keep crazy dangerous people off buses and clean up troubled neighborhoods enough that the average person would feel safe living there. Violent crime rates have largely been going down since the early 90s, but are still much higher than in Europe. One of the reasons for the high rates, through definitely not the only reason, is the availability of guns, but getting US right-wingers to accept gun restrictions is probably even less probable than getting US left-wingers to accept major crackdowns on street crime.

Apparently between technology and soul crushing authoritarianism at an unprecedented scale, you would much rather the latter than the former.

I didn’t ask for the world to have 8 billion people in it, and I sure as hell won’t be stopping enjoying fairly basic luxuries like consuming protein just because others tell me to do so.

If we need to make such drastic changes to human consumption, have people considered if we have a overpopulation problem?

I mean, nearly all of my produce, meat, and dairy from a handful of small, local farms. They're all organic, focus on "happy animals", all that. I'll shift to a strict vegan diet once everyone else abandons their giant mega-agriculture lifestyle.

Just like it isn’t possible to get politicians to stop spending other people’s money, it isn’t possible to stop enterprises from making as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on a global scale (it may work locally!)

Thus, technology-will-save-us is the rational choice. Drill all the oil, build the biggest datacenters and speedrun to fusion before the collapse so we can sequester the carbon back into the ground and still have energy left to run Haber-Bosch, ideally with hydrolysis instead of natgas.

Disclaimer: I used to be heavily in the sustainability camp in my younger years

"strict vegan diet" AKA supporting industrial byproducts made into ultraprocessed food made on the other side of the globe rather than consuming vegetables, fish & meat produced locally and ecologically.

> strict vegan diets

sabotage achieved

We need to use AI to redevelop AI datacenters in order to cancel the harms.

We need to use AI to solve for global warming.

Is there a more appropriate use for AI?

Ah yes, the profit motive kept us off of strict vegan diets. Right, sure.

The issue with the global warming advocates is that they seem to believe that in order to solve global warming we need to make everyone's life worse. That was already a non-starter. It's just terrible marketing.

You say it's for the benefit of "decrepit old men," but the fact is that more and more of the globe is being lifted out of poverty and living more comfortably than ever before. The unfortunate fact is that global warming is an unstoppable force now, humans would have to go extinct for it to waiver.

I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I am saying that your framing is exactly why no one listens to global warming advocacy. We are powerless against it, not because of governments, but because people are living better and no one is going to sacrifice that; and even if they did the math doesn't add up to reverse course. The people that say we should all be sacrificing are often the richest among us that don't even know what sacrifice entails, contrary to your point.

what's your proposed path to "strict vegan diets" exactly?

Like "stop consuming" was a realistic idea lol.

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We’re so far past this, technology is 100% the only hope and always was. Getting stuck in the mentality that we can shame our way out of this for a decade was (and continues to be) a colossal waste of time.