Ego wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2017 12:28 pm
..I could quote a dozen experts who say it is the change any one individual could make that would have the greatest impact.
They're wrong. Maybe they know it, and are making the best possible suggestion to drive the kind of change that can actually happen now. Maybe some of them are actually that short-sighted.
But they're clearly wrong. The impact of living vegan has only a tiny fraction of the impact of having no children. And then, having all of us 7 billion people stay alive is infinitesimally smaller than 3/4 of the population just killing ourselves. Of course that last one isn't going to be presented as an option, but the problem is: where do you make the cutoff of what is considered an option? ~10 years ago, the option was having a Prius in your driveway instead of a Suburban. Now, it's being vegan. Meanwhile, (I believe/assume) the population is growing much faster than our green efforts, and we're getting more and more fucked.
Your questions and challenges of why more people are vegan are still just as valid.
I think the framing is important. To try to answer your question, it's a simple variance of what factors influence a person's decisions. Those factors/priorities then apply to multipliers. For an individual who's very self-centered (like me and a lot of other INTJs), our personal preferences/health/etc. has a higher weighting than environmental concerns. Or, essentially, we don't care.
A big problem here is that being vegan is being framed as the one thing to do to check the box of "I'm saving the world". When, if I understand correctly, it won't, it will just make it so the world could support, what, 25% more human vegan population than meat-eating. But, at our other rates of environmental impact, and with them growing rapidly worldwide, we're already way past either of those population numbers.
It seems to be a strategy of expecting that the next steps and next steps will be ones that have more and more impact. And it seems that in reality, the growth of impact of next steps would need to be a very unlikely amount of exponential.. unless huge population reduction comes up very soon.
This all is part of why when SOME of us meat eaters are challenged by vegans, including that assumption/message of veganism being the one box a person has to check to save the world, our reaction is along the lines of "ohhh, fuck off". (especially for me, where I believe, even while eating a lot of chickens, that my current environmental impact is about 1/10th of the average American... So, when someone who owns both a big house AND a van they could live in, drives a ton, was about to
book a helicopter to shorten a hike, and so on said to me "A person can't call themselves an environmentalist if they aren't vegan", I #1-get annoyed and #2- questioned their ability to think clearly, and became dismissive of their opinions.
Anyways, aren't these types of things already quantified? For example, starting from a basis of exactly zero (ie vs. killing oneself right now or having never been born):
- eating meat vs being vegan adds X tons of ghg emissions per lifetime
- driving a car ## miles/year ads Y
- Living in a house or apartment ads...
- Working certain types of jobs ads...
- having a child ads... (using expected birth rates, expected changes in impact, etc)
As a self-centered INTJ meat eater, knowing these kind of numbers is more or less the only thing that could tip the scales and convince me to become vegan (if they get to a point where their multiplier of my environmental concern overrides the reasons I want to eat meat).