One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I think it's a bad idea to gamble our future on the hope that unproven technologies will save us from this disaster. We consume so much more than we need to have a good life. I believe we should drastically cut back consumption now and then let the technologies that may allow us to consume more prove themselves before we scale back up. But like many things, it's easy to pander with innovating our way out of this problem. It's more convenient for people to not have to change when they can buy into greenwashed technology ideas. The saddest part to me is that much of our excess consumption isn't even making us happier. Seems to be making us unhappy, really.
Not only that, but even the idea itself has become weaponized. Corporations seem to be pushing the agenda that if consumers could <X> then our problems will be solved, where X is {recycle, reuse, reduce, sort the trash, eat less meat, use less plastic, be smarter, be more efficient, breed more selectively, vote, drive less, bike more, take transit, read food labels, get educated, etc.}
And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world.
Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
I agree. Telling the world to consume less while the population continues to grow doesnt work. Especially when the majority of pollution comes from corporations who have a financial incentive to continuing operating the same way.
If people don't give things up, the tragedy comes to pass. It's not the fault of engineers and scientists to not cover for the general public's unsustainable lifestyle that they've become accustomed to.
If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.
How many of these people “deeply concerned” with climate change are living it in their lifestyle? Very few in my experience. They don’t invest in solar panels for their home, geothermal HVAC, severely curtail their lifetime travel habits, etc. they might buy a prius or a tesla, but a dubiously “green” car is right in line with their actual commitment to the environment.
How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off? We can't pass a carbon tax in the US, imagining China or India doing that with much lower standards of livings is insane.
How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors.
Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems.
Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.
Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
> People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.
I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.
I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.
I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.
I don’t understand why this is downvoted. This is exactly my perception as well: techno-optimism is dangerous, and there really is no excuse for the amount of pointless conspicuous consumption that occurs in modern life.
So techno-optimism is dangerous, but social/political optimism is not? At least we somewhat know how to make technology, but I don't think anyone knows how to force this social change on the world.
I don't think there are a lot of excuses being made. Consumption is a problem but solving that is probably more difficult than deploying technological solutions.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.
We have to do everything. There's no either/or... we HAVE to reduce consumption, we HAVE to find lower-carbon alternatives for everything we continue to consume, and we HAVE to create technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously.
The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work.
Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.
FWIW, I am not saying we shouldn't try to innovate and I do very much want us to invest in science and technology that could be helpful.
I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.
You’re not wrong, but hoping people will choose anything other than the default thing is going to result in failure. If you lay out cities for cars, people will use cars. If you build massive urban areas in places that stay in the 90s with high humidity, people are going to blast the AC. If disposable things are cheaper than longer lasting things because there’s no cost to throwing it away, people are going to do it.
People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.
Exactly - it's not a smart bet to make on technology on behalf of billions of humans who stand to suffer or perish if technological progress does not keep up. Sure, the neolib Steven Pinkers of the world have been right so far that we're not sleepwalking into a malthusian trap, but you only have to be wrong once to spell incalculable consequences for humanity and the planet. The greatest challenge of this century will be moving human activity globally to operate within the safe planetary boundaries, of which we are currently exceeding 5. Our global society is certainly playing with some very risky dice right now.
I don't see any alternative, people will not accept lower living standards, except possibly minor inconveniences. There may not be a single magic pill but there are multiple technologies in concert that can be utilized to slow this down and possibly stablize things (e.g. there are multiple alternative energy sources)
People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
I think it's pretty reasonable to bet on people being incredible stupid and stuck in their ways; concluding that we have a better chance of innovating out of it than changing human behavior is a pretty worthy hedge.
We could just try to subsidize carbon neutral energy and establish a carbon tax.
People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now.
This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy.
The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.
Scientists have had a pretty good record on this, compared to the general public, industry, and policymakers. I am happy to not throw them under the bus.
I echo this -- since when does "cautious, high-training writers timidly announce massive change" become worse than "cynical, manipulative industry experts conceal worst outcomes" or "distracted, low-skill readers dismiss unpopular warning" ?
Similar to last year, too, the media takes that emphasis, reports it as absolute reality, and then starts the campaign of fear ("red alert") on the public, arguably, to whittle down their critical thinking skills for the sake of political gain.
The whole thing is circuitous to a painstaking degree.
> The report also references for the first time “historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism”
Unfortunately these are not scientists. This just one example, but they are ideologues and activists first who wear science as a skin and bully scientists into submission. We saw how disastrous this was for Covid response with how science was treated as religion ("Believe Science"). The first thing we must do is eject the ideologues and re-establish the scientific method and rigor if we are to have any chance of actually solving climate change.
So what about that? I ignored it. The climate is warming at a dangerous rate for human civilization and focusing non-core one liners is a distraction from the real issue.
Science, like religion, seems to generate martyrs, but religions treat their martyrs better. Everyone cheers Ignaz Semmelweis because his viewpoint about hygiene eventually won, but nobody wants to apply the lesson about trying out the experiments of kooks.
Are we really at the point where we are going to claim that the IPCC aren't scientists? This seems to be little more than reactionary backlash at a sound observation of the social impact of climate change on communities (and the report does a great job of elaborating which communities and what impacts.) Must we "eject" every scientist who observes a social impact that someone disagrees with? Should the IPCC stop the discussion the human impact of climate change to avoid offending certain sensibilities?
Not in the slightest: the difference is that while individual scientists are just as human as the rest of us, the scientific process is built around public review and validation. In the case of climate change, you can look at things like the IPCC reports from the early 90s and see that they hold up quite well 30 years later whereas the various professional deniers have shifted from each spurious claim to another as the previous one becomes nonviable.
When I read specially people from USA complaining that China is now the number one polluter I'm like duh, shouldn't they be? They have in absolute terms most population and they are also taking care of massive cut of manufacturing...
It's not very surprising. They are dealing with an incomplete knowledge of a very complex system, and getting surprises as more knowledge and real world metrics challenge previous assumptions.
Probably it was a surprise that the biggest temperature anomalies happens near the Arctic, with all that permafrost waiting for thaw, that is not something happening evenly all over the globe.
And by now is not just us that worsen the problem now, we already achieved some tipping points and triggered and empowered some positive feedback loops. Reaching net zero (or worse, what was defined as net zero in COP26) is not enough, not even if magically it is achieved now.
We may keep adding pressure to a not so well understood complex system on which we all depend on or try to lower or if possible revert the pressure. So far we are betting really everything that the system will be able to stand much more pressure, and if it blow up, we will be able to fix or mitigate the damage. Maybe we deserve the outcome of that policy.
The Arctic is thawing very rapidly. Thawing permafrost is loaded with organic matter that is generating methane (several factors greater impact than CO2) and spewing it into the atmosphere. As more methane is released the temperature increases faster, spurring an exponential spiral that is greatly outrunning the previous "doomsday" models.
These sea level rising and other global weather impacts are no longer predictions. It is unfolding very fast. The artic circle is literally a giant cow fart from hell right now.
The clathrate gun hypothesis this is referencing has been largely discredited. I'm not familiar with the science, but I trust the researchers who say there are good thermodynamic reasons the clathrate deposits in the arctic will probably not suddenly destabilize. That being said, we should be absolutely be terrified of this because we're not certain clathrate destabilization is off the table. Plus, thawing permafrost is a nearer-term and more realistic methane monster barreling toward humanity.
Please consider laying off the Deep Adaptation doom reading and pick up a phone to bully your representatives and industry leaders into decarbonizing their operations. Even if there is a climate apocalypse the only way any of us survive is through collective and community effort.
Nothing in my comment was in reference to the clathrate hypothesis. My comment was about methane production that is actually occurring due to ancient organic matter that is/was frozen that is now fermenting as the permafrost thaws. In the Arctic circle the land is belching out huge quantities of methane right now. Pockets have formed and exploded, sending bedrock flying a half mile in each direction. Lakes are bubbling out methane profusely. You can poke a hole in the ground and lite a fire.
This weekend I read about how our food supply chain is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gases. As much as automobiles. That changing it could have a massive impact.
But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
There's a difference between telling people what to eat and incentivizing things that give off a lot of greenhouse gases.
With automobiles, the governments are trying to incentivize greener solutions. With food, things like subsidies incentivize processes that give off a lot of greenhouse gases. Should the government incentivize differently for food than for cars? By incentives I mean things like subsidies. Tax dollars.
What makes cars different from the food supply chain when tax dollars are being spent on subsidies?
>But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
You don't. I don't know where you get the idea that "leaders won't even talk about it", because I've been bombarded with articles about the GHG costs of agriculture for over a decade. It's everywhere.
And frankly, a lot of it is borderline deliberately misleading. Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth. You'll hear endlessly about how "potent" methane is, even though all climate models and serious scientific advocacy orgs have already taken this fully into account.
It goes on. The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
It's awfully convenient for the fossil fuel industry (responsible for three times as much GHG as everyone else combined) that climate change discussions are constantly diverted to the one topic which not only doesn't involve fossil fuels but also alienates practically everyone. I can think of no better way to sink Miami than to let the screeching vegans run the climate advocacy movement.
You bring up some points worth talking about. For example...
> Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth.
The reason this is discussed in percentages is that developed countries put out more GHG that developing countries. So, the percent from the food supply chain is a smaller percentage but still a large amount.
There are also different GHGs. Those from our food supply chain, outside of CO2, last in the atmosphere less time and have a greater impact. This means that lowering them has a shorter time to seeing the impact.
> The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
If you follow the money you'll find that big AG is far more well funded than "plant-based". I recently learned that 60% of cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry alone. Big AG is massively funded.
Digging into the details rather than the surface discussions is illuminating.
Here's an example from a decade ago showing the opposite is true — there have been a bunch of industry money spent churning out false claims but the actual scientists' predictions have help up quite well:
one huge problem is that the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted climate change as an official narrative. (it used to be called 'global warming' and then it was changed to 'climate change' after detractors started pointing out that we still had lots of cold weather just like before).
And once the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted something as an official narrative, virtually no dissent will be brooked. Everyone must adopt the official line. That means that I cannot trust what the monolith says about anything related to that official narrative. If there is good science that shows that the official narrative is wrong, then the scientists' careers will be ruined and that dissenting science will never come to light.
Also, even more scary is the fact that once scientists see that the media will treat with positive press all science that supports any official narrative, most scientists will start fudging their science to support the narrative.
Doubleplusungood!
Plus, the earth is an ice planet. We are actually overdue for an ice age. Plus, we have no power over "less developed" nations, which by the way, happen to be the vast majority of the population of this planet.
So I just disregard anything at all about climate change/global warming.
Interesting. Why do you think the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted climate change as an official narrative? Was there a preponderance of scientific evidence preceding this adoption, or some other motive?
From my perspective, the dominant corp-gov-media narrative is that the economy (as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and/or GDP) must always become bigger, faster, and anyone who suggests actions that run contrary to this goal are not taken seriously by the corp-gov-media monolith, including those concerned about climate change.
Readit News
And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world.
Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.
How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors.
Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems.
Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.
Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.
I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.
I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.
I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.
It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously.
The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work.
Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.
I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.
People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.
Three step process to get there:
1. Identify the optimal "climate path" for every need- transportation, consumer goods, etc...
2. Disincentivize all other paths via penalties (taxes & regulations)
3. Incentivize the climate path via subsidies
It will take large scale government action first. Technological solutions will come as a result of the new financial rules of the game.
Techno-optimism is saying “don’t worry, we don’t need to change anything, technology will save us!”
People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
Deleted Comment
People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now.
This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy.
The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.
https://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/1498317086157774866
Similar to last year, too, the media takes that emphasis, reports it as absolute reality, and then starts the campaign of fear ("red alert") on the public, arguably, to whittle down their critical thinking skills for the sake of political gain.
The whole thing is circuitous to a painstaking degree.
Unfortunately these are not scientists. This just one example, but they are ideologues and activists first who wear science as a skin and bully scientists into submission. We saw how disastrous this was for Covid response with how science was treated as religion ("Believe Science"). The first thing we must do is eject the ideologues and re-establish the scientific method and rigor if we are to have any chance of actually solving climate change.
Are we really at the point where we are going to claim that the IPCC aren't scientists? This seems to be little more than reactionary backlash at a sound observation of the social impact of climate change on communities (and the report does a great job of elaborating which communities and what impacts.) Must we "eject" every scientist who observes a social impact that someone disagrees with? Should the IPCC stop the discussion the human impact of climate change to avoid offending certain sensibilities?
2) But... it's "PER CAPITA" pollution that is the _actual_ problem.
3) ???
But then we stop right before the truth is that the 1% are the biggest polluters on the planet.
https://phys.org/news/2020-09-richest-emissions-poorest-anal...
https://inhabitat.com/1-of-global-population-causes-50-of-al...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/05/carbon-t...
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
Probably it was a surprise that the biggest temperature anomalies happens near the Arctic, with all that permafrost waiting for thaw, that is not something happening evenly all over the globe.
And by now is not just us that worsen the problem now, we already achieved some tipping points and triggered and empowered some positive feedback loops. Reaching net zero (or worse, what was defined as net zero in COP26) is not enough, not even if magically it is achieved now.
We may keep adding pressure to a not so well understood complex system on which we all depend on or try to lower or if possible revert the pressure. So far we are betting really everything that the system will be able to stand much more pressure, and if it blow up, we will be able to fix or mitigate the damage. Maybe we deserve the outcome of that policy.
These sea level rising and other global weather impacts are no longer predictions. It is unfolding very fast. The artic circle is literally a giant cow fart from hell right now.
Please consider laying off the Deep Adaptation doom reading and pick up a phone to bully your representatives and industry leaders into decarbonizing their operations. Even if there is a climate apocalypse the only way any of us survive is through collective and community effort.
100% fact.
But, people don't like change that touches their food and leaders just won't even talk about it. How do we get people to be open to changes in stuff like this?
Dead Comment
i propose cockroaches and grasshoppers in lieu of chicken and beef. anyone else have suggestions?
With automobiles, the governments are trying to incentivize greener solutions. With food, things like subsidies incentivize processes that give off a lot of greenhouse gases. Should the government incentivize differently for food than for cars? By incentives I mean things like subsidies. Tax dollars.
What makes cars different from the food supply chain when tax dollars are being spent on subsidies?
You don't. I don't know where you get the idea that "leaders won't even talk about it", because I've been bombarded with articles about the GHG costs of agriculture for over a decade. It's everywhere.
And frankly, a lot of it is borderline deliberately misleading. Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth. You'll hear endlessly about how "potent" methane is, even though all climate models and serious scientific advocacy orgs have already taken this fully into account.
It goes on. The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
It's awfully convenient for the fossil fuel industry (responsible for three times as much GHG as everyone else combined) that climate change discussions are constantly diverted to the one topic which not only doesn't involve fossil fuels but also alienates practically everyone. I can think of no better way to sink Miami than to let the screeching vegans run the climate advocacy movement.
> Articles will choose to highlight the fact that about a quarter of global emissions are due to agriculture — but if you stick to developed countries, it's a tenth.
The reason this is discussed in percentages is that developed countries put out more GHG that developing countries. So, the percent from the food supply chain is a smaller percentage but still a large amount.
There are also different GHGs. Those from our food supply chain, outside of CO2, last in the atmosphere less time and have a greater impact. This means that lowering them has a shorter time to seeing the impact.
> The "plant-based" lobby is well-funded and manages to insert themselves all over the conversation while other industries like cement/steel/landfill/heating/shipping get little to no political or regulatory attention.
If you follow the money you'll find that big AG is far more well funded than "plant-based". I recently learned that 60% of cholesterol studies are funded by the egg industry alone. Big AG is massively funded.
Digging into the details rather than the surface discussions is illuminating.
Here's an example from a decade ago showing the opposite is true — there have been a bunch of industry money spent churning out false claims but the actual scientists' predictions have help up quite well:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
And once the corp-gov-media monolith has adopted something as an official narrative, virtually no dissent will be brooked. Everyone must adopt the official line. That means that I cannot trust what the monolith says about anything related to that official narrative. If there is good science that shows that the official narrative is wrong, then the scientists' careers will be ruined and that dissenting science will never come to light.
Also, even more scary is the fact that once scientists see that the media will treat with positive press all science that supports any official narrative, most scientists will start fudging their science to support the narrative.
Doubleplusungood!
Plus, the earth is an ice planet. We are actually overdue for an ice age. Plus, we have no power over "less developed" nations, which by the way, happen to be the vast majority of the population of this planet.
So I just disregard anything at all about climate change/global warming.
From my perspective, the dominant corp-gov-media narrative is that the economy (as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and/or GDP) must always become bigger, faster, and anyone who suggests actions that run contrary to this goal are not taken seriously by the corp-gov-media monolith, including those concerned about climate change.