The link between cardiovascular disease and general consumption of animal products (in comparison with diets with reduced or zero animal products) is by now extremely well established I believe. I believe in this case meta-analyses and large studies should be very informative (although understanding root causes is also important). All cause mortality also observed to be reduced, although to a lesser degree.
Just from a cursory search, you can find tons of studies supporting this. It is not a controversial statement at all in scientific nutrition and medical fields.
I think it's significant however that unhealthy plant based diets show increased mortality, so it's important to pay attention to what you eat in any case.
It's also worth keeping in mind conflicts of interest and cultural aspects. I think probably there are strong interests in the side of animal products, although this is partisan in the US (and surely there is some lobbying from the opposite direction as well). Also I think culturally there's strong preference for animal products, in particular meat and beef consumption, almost everywhere. Of course, science is supposed to be resistant to conflicts of interest (and it is usually mandatory to disclose funding conflicts of interest), but not all studies are the same. Those conflicts being mostly in the other direction give me additional confidence there isn't a strong bias from those sources.
Also I always like to mention you should supplement a plant based diet, with vitamin B12 and usually a few other vitamins.
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Also, for the more literally minded, it's obviously not simply due to the atoms from your food source having come from animals most recently that they're unhealthy, so it's also obviously theoretically possible to produce healthy animal-based foods (if only by transmuting their atoms with nuclear reactions), it's the particular proteins, fats and other compounds typically found tend to interact in unhealthy ways with our system.
But that said it's also very significant (in favor of plants) that animals often suffer a lot in the production of those food products, and whether or not you consume them you have the responsibility to diminish their suffering.
Current society largely (but not completely) relies on experts building highly complex systems. This includes not only public infrastructure like waterworks, buildings and information systems, but also say the very bread you eat (to get it at a low price and high productivity[1]), the computer we're reading this in (mind-numbingly complex system), the internet. It's a feature of capitalism (really, a feature of many administrative systems and product interfaces) that the consumer thankfully doesn't have to be too much of an expert on say computers (say theory of CPU architecture, pipelines, assembly, etc..) to buy a laptop or use software. The consumer only needs to be able to tell which competitor product is best for his use (although often, as he should, relying on expert reviews). We are good at hiding complexity behind interfaces as well, packaging complexity and hiding away its intricate inner workings. All of this enables life in a complex society.
I think it's misguided or hypocritical to completely distrust experts specially when it comes to public policy, public administration and science, given how much we rely on experts for everything else. It's not even much of a choice, I believe: the fact that we rely on those complex mechanisms inevitably will make certain failures that often demand public attention also complex. Say a food company synthesizes a highly complex (and not present in most natural products), but good tasting, substance. Then we kind of need equally complex review of its impacts on human health. A highly complex computer network will need highly knowledgeable (and correspondingly highly complex) solution to certain bugs that might appear, specially in cases like cross-domain failures where complexity encapsulations fail for various reasons. Think how unlikely it would be that every discipline has been exploited to extremely high complexity, but just by chance we could get away with simple solutions for public-facing and public policy problems.
I like simplicity, and I even like the idea I wouldn't often require experts to understand a public or scientific issue of public concern. But I don't think I'm willing to give up most products of complexity, including computers, medical procedures and diagnosis, and more -- and even if I were willing (I might be able to live with say an early 2000s computer :) ), I don't think it's realistic or feasible to really do that. In part because of collective agreement, in part because of for example the sheer population we have to contend with today. Earlier methods of agriculture for example probably can't sustain that many people. We should therefore apply Einstein's wisdom: try to make things as simple as possible... but no simpler. And trust experts when sensible, when the problem at hand is complex enough to be beyond our comprehension (but still important).
Of course, experts can be wrong, but that is something we just have to contend with (like we have to contend with the possibility all the weird procedures we do to produce food or acquire and purify water -- which are managed by experts -- may go wrong, even with significant efforts to otherwise). We can, and probably should, demand explanations (which may be hard to understand for the general public) of the experts and they explain their reasoning. We can examine and expect that their scientific field is healthy, there is consensus and there is a good level of academic integrity. But we should not approach their well informed opinions on important issues from a baseline of arrogance and distrust, because likely they do know much better, in certain cases.
[1] Modern agriculture is highly complex. This includes special seeds, harvesting machines, soil science, weather prediction, and so on. Each of those is in turn highly complex requiring experts to exist at current performance.
I think not only compromise, but more importantly communication. Like it or not, the other half of the country is also part of the country, and you cannot claim to be in support of the public without covering half of the public. The first line should be consensus, and when consensus isn't possible a carefully balanced compromise should be attempted.
If the left or the right disagree on even language and core cultural issues, they both need to find ways to communicate and evolve that allows for a peaceful coexistence. The notion the other party is a stupid or evil adversary incapable of enlightenment is poisonous, it forbids communication. Even if your adversary is indeed stupid and/or evil, it is far better to talk to them and if not change their mind, explain yourself in a language they understand (that includes a language they don't find outrageous or absurd!), leaving open the door to seeing your point of view. Even if they want to destroy you, it is a much better strategy to show you're not all that bad than escalating or just giving up. Of course, there are always voices that profit from discord, and human nature is perhaps attracted to antagonism. But we shouldn't let that go out of control, for the benefit of everyone.
If we're wrong about something, it's to our profit to learn from an adversary. This is the main lesson I think we should be taking -- even if being wrong is painful or sometimes isolating. Also logically, don't isolate those who think a little differently from your cultural heterodoxy, for the case they might have good reasons you just don't understand yet.
I think the old customs of being, and of course appearing, respectful were in part norms created for this. By behaving respectfully you're showing a willingness to learn and be wrong. By shouting, offending and imposing your opinion you're demonstrating you might be closed to other possibilities even if they are wrong, sometimes for very misguided reasons like ego, pride, or power. It's clearly then particularly important to act respectfully with those who are your adversaries or with whom you disagree (since perhaps you'll be more inclined to hear those who you already mostly agree with).
In summary: communication, compromise and respect.
Remember when there was a bipartisan bill to fix immigration that had a good deal of compromise in it, and it was all set to pass until Trump told the republicans to tank it so that Biden wouldn’t get credit for it?
I disagree with the framing "You are a bad person" (although I think I understand the sentiment), because it implies they can't change (or understand the error). It seems better to leave it at "You did something very harmful, destructive for society".
Yes, there is a lot of bunk AI safety discussions. But there are legitimate concerns as well. AI is close to human level. Logically they become dangerous, specially if given autonomy and bad goals. Many of the accredited researchers recognize this.
There is some level that you can discuss AI safety without AI expertise (specially as of a few years ago where everything as so uncertain), but I think currently you need a lot of awareness of physical and computational limits. Taking those limits into account, we're clearly very close to human level intelligences that can scale in unpredictable ways (probably not "grey goo" ways), but potentially dangerous ways under various scenarios, including manipulating our digital lives if there are humongous AI systems controlling everything as we are in danger of getting into as a society.
I think there's also a lot of elitism toward humanities implied that you should try to get past too. Humanities have a lot of insights about human nature, even if not all of it is reliable. See philosophers like Derek Parfit.
(in case you're wondering, I've implemented a few AIs mostly RL algorithms)
The thing I always get caught up on, when making comparisons between computers and humans wrt autonomy, is that the computer reaches the output state from the input by a clock cranking the CPU forward, ie it's a function that runs when the environment around it forces it to run. To put it in the LLM context, between words and after a Stop token, the "intelligence" is dead - frozen - suspended until the next function call.
How can a machine, then, possess anything like self-directed behavoir, when it never has a sense of self-preservation? Basically this is my axiom, that sense of self requires fear/awareness of mortality and the good sense to avoid those things that end you.
Perhaps you could concoct a machine that runs in an infinite loop with no off switch, I guess my question for you is, in what way can a machine have autonomy?
And my distinction between living and dead might be, a living system acts out of self preservation, consuming or modifying its environment to survive/thrive, while a dead system is simply acted upon by the environment its embedded in, like a crystal growing due to molecular force and temperature gradient - or an adding machine being cranked by a higher being.
It is very obvious you have never read the book Superintelligence or any literature on the subject because you try to post here shower thoughts. But here is the thought of the most highly rated h-index computer scientist in the world to help out:
https://yoshuabengio.org/2023/06/24/faq-on-catastrophic-ai-r...
Do you want Terminator? Because this is how you get Terminator. A blockchain-based distributed giant AI could go rogue and it would be very difficult to stop it.
Wouldn't it be reliant on the nodes of the blockchain continuing to run it?
And if the crypto-economy is doing well enough that node-runners are economically incentivized to continue running, then is the rogue AI even that harmful?
> Since nations are competing, and we're talking about exponentials here, the cost for cutting off exponential economic growth too soon is likely to become irrelevant to the future, which every nation is going to strive to avoid.
I question this definition of relevance. To me, relevance is having a healthy, happy, sustainable society and culture. It's not accumulating goods and energy consumption in a self-destructive and planet-destroying way. The sooner nations realize this, the better.
It's entirely relevant when your country can't control is own future, as that will extend to its citizens. Just because we're in a relatively stable period of history with regards to one nation seeking to conquer another (somewhat bucked by Russia) doesn't mean that will necessarily persist.
A well regulated and lawful country where your rights are respected both internally and internationally is a luxury of a powerful nation and a stable system of narions. The former is what I'm saying is is important with regard to growth, because the latter can't be assumed to always exist in the future.
There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.
Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.
The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.
And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:
Yes, but my worry is that what looks like a trend is but a small part of a larger cycle. We've seen what happens when complex political alliances fail with WWI (even if they were more a web than an overarching umbrella), and Ukraine problem was not just that it was unaligned, but that it was choosing to align itself.
How sure are we that the trends we see during periods of somewhat large economic growth (on average, overall for most nations) will continue when that environment is not the same? As more and more countries enter the end/modernity stage of economic bootstrapping (and China and India did), what pressure does that out on nations already at that level?
More than NATO I think trade agreements keep the world together (and drive membership of NATO) as codependency might as well be formalized. If some of that codependency goes away, and countries decide to protect and encourage local sectors (which might be more feasible in a low growth environment, I'm not sure), do the other relationships stay the same?
I'm not claiming to have answers, but I do have a lot of questions and see a whole lot of unknowns.
How the global political landscape might change in a post-growth world is the stuff of thousands of speculative fiction and cinema plots.
You're looking outward at multinational alliances based on today's (mostly) nation-states. Another consideration is how those states themselves might fare. It strikes me as quite possible that larger states (the US, China, India, Indonesia) might well fragment, and even mid-sized powers (Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico) could splinter. The political situation in the US has been described as a "cold civil war" for some years (see: <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-wa...>). Russia has been fighting to retain or regain ceded Soviet territories since the mid-1990s. There are separatist movements of various shades in Spain (Catalonia, Basque region), Belgium (Waloonia), the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland), Canada (Quebec), India (multiple), Indonesia (multiple), Israel (Palestine), the Philippines (multiple), just as a list of more developed and stable nations. (I'm omitting Africa entirely, a huge list of itself, most of the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, largely as those deviate from the Western / OECD conditions fairly markedly.) China is of course unified, but has ethnic strife (Uygers and Tibetians), reintegrated regions (Hong Kong), and contested territories (Taiwain, Arunachal Pradesh, South China Sea, ...).
There've been outright separations: Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Balkans gonna Balkanize...). And reunifications, most especially of Germany.
The map of Europe has hardly been constant, and even as recently as the mid-19th century is largely unrecognisable today: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=P9YnYRk8_kE>
Another factor to consider is that the same trends which would likely lead to degrowth will also make massive military campaigns far less viable. This affects not just the field of battle, but the entire logistical pipeline as well as the capability to build and resupply weapons, vehicles, ships, and ammunition. I'm reminded that the introduction of the sweet potato to New Zealand utterly reshaped that region's tribal landscape: the cultures with potatoes could march and campaign further than those without. (If I recall, this is discussed in one of Jared Diamond's books.) More recently, introduction of muskets to the Maori led to another technological-superiority disruption: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars>. Reintroduction of horses and the introduction of firearms to Native American cultures had similar effects.
Other thoughts:
- NATO exists not only as a bulwark against the USSR / Russia, but to protect access to Middle East oil and gas on which Europe depends in the extreme. Falling significance of both could alter that calculus.
- International shipping relies on safe seas and ports. Transoceanic trade blossomed under the British Navy and has flourished under American naval protection. Piracy exists only in small backwaters now (notably Somalia, though small-craft boardings are not unheard of particularly in central and Latin America, and S.E. Asia), and overt shows of force are not exceedingly common, but there are regular patrols off the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden, that I'm aware of. Rogue states including Iran and North Korea have attacked or commandeered vessels. Much as with shooting down commercial airliners, this is immensely disruptive to trade, and can result both in wide diversions of shipping routes and cessation of trade to unfriendly ports. Submarine warfare by both Axis and Allied forces was devastating during WWII, and both costs and countermeasures were extensive. NATO plays a role here as well.
I can't believe I forgot to mention Russia as a fragmented state (relic of the USSR). Elephant (or bear) in the room, and all that.
And whilst I'm adding commentary: the legacy of colonialism and arbitrary drawing of borders by colonial powers (the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East in 1918, and the highly-inorganic map of Africa, which seems to be slowly rationalising though not entirely smoothly) resulted in exceptionally arbitrary borders which bear little relationship to communities and cultures on the ground.
One might make a similar argument about state borders within the United States, most especially west of the Mississippi, where straight-ruled lines ignore rivers, divides, cultural, and economic clusterings.
The weighted-Voronoi diagram "United States of Craigslist" map reveals an alternate organisation based on the nearest localised Craigslist instance:
That's to be expected, the global variation over the last 2 decades has been about .2-.3 celsius. That's very difficult to notice, and basically completely swamped by local variations (what is called weather, not climate).
The thing is climate change is an almost perfect example of the boiling frog parable. It occurs over several decades, just enough to cause skepticism or feelings of "it's not changing so quickly".
This rate however is probably almost without precedents geologically, save for extreme events like giant eruptions or something. It's hard for life to adapt this quickly, on top of the many other habitat pressures we've introduced. Also, there will be significant consequences for humans (which could be catastrophic and hard to predict if we don't limit warming to say 2C).
What frustrates me is that there's still significant resistance to not destroying our own home...
> It occurs over several decades, just enough to cause skepticism or feelings of "it's not changing so quickly".
It's also important to realize that this isn't all "natural" skepticism and there's plenty of money being thrown around to spread FUD about the causes, severity, and consequences of climate change.
Except it isn't blind and it isn't belief? A hypothesis that has been amply supported by decades of evidence of many forms is hardly a subject for "blind belief".
Consider the economics. There are HUGE companies with a history of influencing legislature, lobbying an lying to everyone, whose existence depends on us to continue not caring about climate change. People like us can hardly imagine the amount of money they are throwing at us in the form of marketing, lobbying, astroturfing, etc. They are literally making money off us not taking action.
Otoh, I cannot think of a single billion dollar company that got where it is by being climate friendly.
Media companies get views by being sensationalistic and spreading paranoia. Governments love that too, since it means another excuse they can use to enact more authoritarian policies. The Internet has taken that to the next level.
I'm not a fan of Greenpeace and I haven't checked their number here .. but it passes the "it'd be at least that much" test for order of magnitude:
Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate change science and policy solutions, from 1997-2018.
My main quibble is that as I've been around geophysical energy and mineral exploration since the 1980s I'd argue that Koch and Co. started funding anti-climate change think tanks and policy groups a lot earlier than 1997.
They've been prepackaging all manner of FUD talking points and passing them out to media groups for almost 50 years.
They torpedoed any chance of decent widespread public transport in the US, simply to keep the demand for individual freedom loving liberty driven gas guzzling high and profits flowing.
It's remarkable how easily led by the nose central north americans have been.
Based on the posts by denialists here repeating literally 30 year old paid for talking points—that we’ve had exposed in court filings—as of they were new or profound…?
> Also, there will be significant consequences for humans (which could be catastrophic and hard to predict if we don't limit warming to say 2C)
I have trouble visualizing what form the catastrophe would take. The worst I can imagine is global famine, is that what we are talking about here? Or rather local famine, acting as catalysts to civil unrest, wars etc?
Basically, I think the climate debate gets fuzzy here. Granted, just like you say, it gets hard to predict, but given that, what makes certain temperatures a threshold for disaster?
If oceans get too hot, fisheries will collapse and wreck coastal communities. Sea level rise will make storm surges worse and make "once in a lifetime" events more common.
This instability will drive a migration of people inland, essentially as ecological refugees.
Given that it's such a small change... Surely this is not a problem for our generation. It definitely does not appear to be a problem that's worth destroying financial opportunities on a massive scale and enabling totalitarian governments in the current era.
The way I see climate change activism is that elites want to fix the climate at the expense of the lower classes of society... In a time when wealth inequality is at an all time high and without the consent of the lower classes. This is incorrect.
First, we have to fix inequality problem so that the pain of the transition will fall more or less evenly on everyone's shoulders... Then once this is the case, everyone should have more time to think about climate problems and we can expect broad support.
Of course, 'we' will all be long dead by then. I feel totally fine and morally justified in leaving this problem to a future generation. Most people in my generation have way too many concrete personal problems concerning their own survival in a week's time to worry about abstract problems such as the survival of the human race in a few hundred years.
...Not to mention that in a few generations' time, if we focus on maximizing access to opportunities, through the resulting innovation, we will probably end up with extremely efficient renewable energy which will be able to fight climate change far more effectively with no sacrifices necessary.
It seems literally like a no-brainer to me to just let the free market do what it does best in terms of innovation. Shut down government money printers and dismantle policies that are harmful to the free market and which centralize opportunities and create tech monopolies to control the masses. That's not the way. It needs to be done honestly.
What's the point of even allowing the human race to survive if it turns the global economy into a squid game and only the most dishonest, manipulative people will remain?
It's interesting you chose the boiling frog parable because it's a fallacy. Skeptics contend that climate change will not precipitate an abrupt catastrophe; rather, humanity will simply adapt to it.
To illustrate, the Earth's temperature has already risen by approximately 1 degree since the inception of industrialization, yet our lives have arguably improved significantly during this period. Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree? This seems improbable, and yet it is a viewpoint advocated by certain climate change alarmists who propose concepts like degrowth.
I've seen people claim that slowing down or stopping economic (or even reversing, but I admit this position is rarer) progress was an acceptable tradeoff to counter global warming. Almost all solutions proposed by climate alarmists follow this pattern, albeit to varying degrees.
The analogy was that 100 years from now, people would see our current era as we see the industrial age. That is, unless we stop progressing.
Formulated differently, if degrowth had been followed in the industrial age, we would still be living in the industrial age (but the Earth would be a degree cooler).
Well, the capabilities (or lack thereof) of the person(s) doing the categorizing is rather important as well.
For example, I am a conspiracy theorist, and the number of nasty things that have been said about "me" by literally delusional Normies over the years gets a little annoying after a while. It would be a real shame if these chickens were to come home to roost at a particularly inconvenient time.
Anyways, I wish you and your Rational crew best of luck with your climate problems!
Mostly it’s obvious you’re just tired of being consistently called out on your nonsense. It hurts your unearned feelings on superiority. A trait conspiracy theorists have been repeatedly shown to have I might add.
Like I said: you’ve made it an emotional core of your identity.
> Which notable people think we should go back to a pre-industrial age?
It's being suggested quite clearly in some of the most unexpected places. One of the most curious things about the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, is that a great deal of the funding for some of its largest exhibits comes from one of the Koch brothers. Specifically there is the floor sized exhibit on human evolution which repeatedly emphasizes a subtext of adaptation, adaptation, adaptation as the driving force behind development of modern humans. The proponents don't care if this adaptation can also take the form of a misery-soaked return to pre-industrial society in 500 years, they won't be around to deal with it.
But they know that it's an asymmetrically structured argument that is difficult to counter using the language of progressive politics, in which adaptation is also emphasized but of course in different contexts.
> Would we willingly forsake the past century of human progress to revert the global temperature back by that single degree?
Eh. I see what you are saying but have we felt the full effect? Do any of us have a perception of what was lost that would let us even make such a determination?
It's not alarmism to say we should take action to prevent out extinction. By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".
There has literally NEVER been a problem anywhere near as large as climate change, including World War 2. If being concerned about literally the largest problem to have ever existed is 'alarmism', then your position is simply that it's impossible for anything bad to ever happen.
> By your logic, people who call emergency services when a building is on fire are "alarmists".
By my logic, people who call emergency services when the room temperature rises 1 degree are "alarmists". The building is not on fire. We are not headed towards extinction, not even close. How do you explain that the world has gotten significantly better over the last century despite warming over one degree?
My position is that this "extinction" fear you speak of makes absolutely no sense. And any attempt to prevent warming through economically harmful policies will likely have a greater negative impact on humanity.
Sure, but I'd rather live in paradise than burn my house. In that sense nothing's a big deal, but it is for me. I believe we all deserve good lives.
The best adaptation to burning your house is the rational thought "Perhaps I should not burn my house". :)
It dreads me to think we so much lost contact with living well that many don't care anymore. I think the first step in the journey would be to stop the destructive culture of desperate consumerism, greed, consumption, overwork and ill-being. Maybe that's something we should be prioritizing alongside climate change, as a species. Living well in our homes, and as a community.
Living well requires energy and lots of it. There are billions of people who aspire to use far more energy than they are currently using, in order to live better. Who are we to say that they can't use as much energy as we do/did? (I know you're not saying that directly, but it's hard to imagine how half the population could bring themself up to even the median energy consumption without dramatic increases in climate changing forces.)
I think this is a false conundrum. We should use as much energy as we sustainably can, without destroying ourselves, if that improves our well being. But not more. And we should also make sure that all humans have good conditions. I think the essence of what makes a good life is surprisingly inexpensive in terms of resources. I believe that planning well, we can achieve a good compromise for everyone involved, with a larger focus on those more in need.
Moreover, energy consumption isn't so significant as emissions per Watt. Our capacity for solar energy could sustain even energy growth without significant emissions. We already have the technology to make the transition.
To reiterate, whatever we do, sitting back and watching the world burn (in an almost literal sense) is not a reasonable option!
Even solar panels aren't emissions-free. They take 1-3 years to payback the emissions used to create them, which is a great trade (a decrease full-lifecycle emissions as compared to do) for people who would already be consuming the power they'd create, but is still an increase in full-lifecycle emissions when created to supply power to someone who wouldn't otherwise have access to that power. Anyone who is without stable electricity today should gain access to it, by all means, but that is a net increase in emissions as compared to today.
Stable supplies of food (and fertilizer and machinery to grow and process it), clean water, refrigeration, transport, (somewhat ironically) HVAC, lighting, and some amount of outputs of manufacturing are desired by all.
I'm sure there are some emissions we still don't know how to avoid relating to solar manufacturing, but typically we look at energy return on energy invested (EROI). As the supply chain becomes less carbon intensive, less the energy to produce panels themselves produces emissions. The most carbon intensive countries are countries like US and China -- I'm sure just the emissions they cut back could compensate a lot of energy growth for developing countries. This is only a temporary spike. And being the large industrial producers, as they transition the emissions per Watt will go down significantly.
Again, it's not clear what your proposal is. Ignoring the problem is a bad idea. Doing the best we can to rapidly (of course, not so rapidly we couldn't handle it) transition to renewable energy is what we should be doing. Doing it now is the best time to be doing it. And are doing it! Just some countries are lagging behind somewhat, including the US and China. A big part of the problem is not recognizing the scale and importance of what we're facing. With reason and compassion in our hearts, we shall find the best solution for all :)
Cosmically, I don't think we matter, and that person is right. Even if we don't destroy ourselves in this century, the Earth will eventually be roasted to a crisp by the Sun expanding. Not that it makes me feel any better, just trying to consider what that perspective is.
I would advise others methods to convince the loved one the reality of your love. As for yourself, well, this is some aspect where the brain decides on your behalf, consciousness can be damned.
Just from a cursory search, you can find tons of studies supporting this. It is not a controversial statement at all in scientific nutrition and medical fields.
Some studies:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537864/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33951994/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-30455-9
I think it's significant however that unhealthy plant based diets show increased mortality, so it's important to pay attention to what you eat in any case.
It's also worth keeping in mind conflicts of interest and cultural aspects. I think probably there are strong interests in the side of animal products, although this is partisan in the US (and surely there is some lobbying from the opposite direction as well). Also I think culturally there's strong preference for animal products, in particular meat and beef consumption, almost everywhere. Of course, science is supposed to be resistant to conflicts of interest (and it is usually mandatory to disclose funding conflicts of interest), but not all studies are the same. Those conflicts being mostly in the other direction give me additional confidence there isn't a strong bias from those sources.
Also I always like to mention you should supplement a plant based diet, with vitamin B12 and usually a few other vitamins.
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Also, for the more literally minded, it's obviously not simply due to the atoms from your food source having come from animals most recently that they're unhealthy, so it's also obviously theoretically possible to produce healthy animal-based foods (if only by transmuting their atoms with nuclear reactions), it's the particular proteins, fats and other compounds typically found tend to interact in unhealthy ways with our system.
But that said it's also very significant (in favor of plants) that animals often suffer a lot in the production of those food products, and whether or not you consume them you have the responsibility to diminish their suffering.