I was going to reply to your other comment calling me lazy but bioemerl already beat me to it. Partial solutions are just workarounds. They are inconvenient and people will not bother to implement them without a good incentive to do so. If meat was significantly more expensive then I might be forced to implement change. I have already switched from beef to pork in some of my meals due to price. We as a specifies respond way better to economic incentives than we do to guilt about a nebulous and still relatively controversial issue such a climate change. It’s unreasonable for you to expect people to put in a lot of time an effort to completely rethink their dietary routine just because it causes excess climate change.
For you and bioemerl: What does that look like to you? What kind of major shift would need to happen for a change to occur, in your mind?
Im pretty price driven so for me it wouldn't take that much. If meat went much past the $10/lb range I would eat a lot less of it. At the current price of chicken that would mean 5-10X price increase. If prices were to stay the same then its a much bigger hurdle. I would need to learn more easy/med difficulty meal recipes and change the my taste pallet. I don't think vegetarian meat substitutes are something I want to put in my body (Vegie dogs/burgers/tofurky) therefore I'd be looking for recipes for foods that have always been vegetarian and can be made outside a lab. If i knew more recipes that I like, were easy to cook, and were filling without loading up on carbs I think that would go a long way. It would help if someone wrote a cook book of Of this quality and covered techniques and science of vegetarian cooking. Better availability would also help. Fresh veggies are really expensive at the supermarket , I know that they can be about 3x as cheap because that's what my local ethnic food shop sells them for but its kind of far away and is inconvenient to get to. Veggies are also very seasonal so when they are ripe I eat a lot but most of the year ripe vegetables are impossible to obtain. Interestingly enough even in peak season I often still cant get ripe vegetables at the grocery store. I have to either go to the Health food store or farmers market because having a local supply chain is too much work for chain grocery stores.
I already mentioned what needs to happen for meat carbon neutrality to exist. For society at large we need to move away from all forms of burning/reacting carbon-based resources for energy, production of materials, and so on. Where we do absolutely require carbon-based resources that carbon should be extracted from the air as much as it is from the ground, to ensure carbon neutrality in the long run. This means solar power, alternate plastics, and a whole host of other things. In the short term we need research on the engineering of the environment, things like blocking out part of the sun to cool the earth and offset the global warming that has happened. Using systems that exist purely to pull carbon out of the atmosphere paid for by taxes and damages from the companies/consumers that use things that release carbon. Ultimately, I don't think we need to do anything, because I view human society as a very large, very intelligent, very quirky decision making system. I trust that, in the long run, the decisions society makes are far more reasonable than the decisions I can make, and are based on thousands and thousands of little systems, ideas, and thoughts all working together to form an emergent machine that spans our entire planet. In this way, society will solve the issues it faces as time passes, and we just have to do our best to do what we think is natural for that to happen. If you believe we should stop eating meat, do it. If you do not, don't. Society will take your decisions and actions and at the end of the day come to the decision that is correct even if we may not agree or see that for years to come.
What if we twist the values of children so that they do not make decisions based on the natural opinions of the world around them, but instead a government program intended to get them to think, act, or be a certain way? Bad things. Bad things will happen if we do this. We have done this, and are somewhat doing this now, and it is presently already a bad thing. We shouldn't encourage more of this sort of crap to happen. If people naturally think the environment is important, and teach their kids along those lines, than that's all there is to it. You can't make something like that happen though.What about educating people as kids about importance of it?
I remember being lied to and told that marajuana was a horrible evil thing that always ruins lives and makes us all evil people, that doing any form of drug is horribly wrong and that to do anything but be sober is a horrible sin. Kids don't absorb complex information at the level needed to teach them in a way that is nuanced and good for society in the long run. That's information, and that's fine. You aren't advocating for education, you "are" (I assumed your post was) advocating to push the viewpoint "using things that pollute is bad, and we shouldn't use things that pollute". There is a massive difference between the two, and a school that teaches this subject properly will have students coming out with views that are not "we shouldn't pollute no matter what". Should we educate kids on all the topics you mention? Yes! Should we "teach" them that drugs are bad, recycling is good, diet is good, and so on? No! The former, the dispersal of topics, discussion, and honest flow of opinions between people is healthy and good for society. The latter is setting the stage to tell people what they should think is right or wrong, rather than allowing them to come to their own decision on the matter. This is propaganda, the pushing of a viewpoint. If it was "Meat substitutes exist, and are said to be good for X reasons, and have Y consequences" I am perfectly good with it. The way you phrase it crosses the line. I was in high school not long ago. It was a fucking breeze, and I had massive amounts of free time to research and learn what I want. Will some kids have a tougher time? Probably, but your description of this world where people are incapable of learning, incapable of learning things of their own volition, is absurd. The notion that we should teach them the right ideas because of that is just plain wrong. Will some people not bother to research, study, and so on? Yeah, but that ignorance is their choice to make, not ours to make for them. I live for these sorts of conversations. The idea of you being angry at me doesn't really matter. I do not care who you are, what you feel about me, or what you think of me, so long as you are honest and willing to try and discredit what I am saying without being concerned if I think you dislike me because of it.Don't you remember all of the "Drugs are Bad" and tons of other campaigns like that?
That aside, and excuse snide tone earlier, what's wrong with guiding? What's wrong with telling kids (of appropriate age, I don't want that twisted) the dangers, consequences or in some of the cases the benefits of
I would not mind a few hours of "kids, that might not be as tasty as meat, but this is important for X, Y and Z reasons and each of you can chip in and help the climate!"
Or is this that twisted learning that students should find, deduce, research and decide on their own… in-between loads of homework and trying to actually have some life.
I don't mean you as much disrespect as you will likely read from my words, especially if its caused by misunderstanding my previous post and taking it in such radical direction, but I don't get how you got that idea.
If I agreed with you (or just don't want to bother with a response to a section) I won't reply. No reason to say anything when there is nothing to say. Is your argument here really going to rest on "I don't really care if it's propaganda"? I don't even have to say anything outside of just repeating your argument here. Propaganda is not a good thing, and if you are exposed to it, or are exposing people to it, you should attempt to end that thing. It is a stain on the ability for people to think freely and develop their own opinions, ideals, and so on. It doesn't matter if you care, what matters is the people who will be hurt, the ideas that die, when propaganda is accepted and freely spread. Unless you are willing to argue that propaganda doesn't do this, or that what you mention is not a form of propaganda, then you have no valid argument. So your opinions and thoughts of highschool being super busy are based on your very unique situation?while you might live for that type of conversations to me it seems like you are going to go for contrarian angle no matter what I will say.
I live and had a quality lessons on the above topics. Propaganda? Perhaps, but I don't really care. Just like I don't care for illicit drugs.
On the other hand I was in school where I didn't even realize that I'm attending AP everything sans history and maths on a level that ended around calc II for CS majors.
Don't present argument, present researched and understood fact. This is how they do it in every other classroom from evolution to astronomy. "The earth has seen X degree rise due to warming in the last year" "It is suspected by these institutions that this X degree rise will cause Y effects." "These activities are known to release X amounts of carbon dioxide." It's that simple. No statements about what you should do, or what you should think, just the facts and definitions that are required to come to your own conclusion on the topic.3. Presenting at least two sides of argument