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Comment on Meet the AI vegans: They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point

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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Eh. Factory farming is a significant contributor to greenhouse gases, particularly through methane released by large livestock herds.

But the industry is so saturated with subsidies and shielded from liabilities and exempted from taxes and so comically wasteful in its surplus production that there hasn’t been any material benefit to veganism as a social movement. You can take a moral position (and you should, eating meat is awful for a variety of reasons). But there’s no actual correlation between an increase in vegan eating habits and a decrease in agricultural emissions. All we ever get is more meat thrown in the trash.

The real curb to agricultural production has been raw materials constraints - limits on arable land, potable water, and slaughterhouse workers - that have (directly or indirectly) emerged from a changed climate. Outside these limits, all we’ve really achieved is “Grapes of Wrath” style surplus destruction to keep retail prices up.

If a factory farm can produce another dead cow, it does, even if it can’t reliably bring the carcass to market. The profit margins are set so artificially high that they’d be fools not to do so. Only herd die-offs resulting from heat waves, water shortages, and a lack of below-market migrant labor seem to dissuade them from trying to expand.

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DarthFrodo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
20 years ago you could have said “Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it’s absolutely futile.”

Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.

I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won’t have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.

Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.

The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That’s true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.

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- commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier.
  
  there is no causal link between any of those events, and increased demand decrease availability.
  
  I don’t really believe what economists claim, v but you don’t even seem to know what they say in the first place
  
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  - UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    increased demand decrease availability
    
    In the short term. Over the mid and long terms, highly profitable demand can induce supply in a free market system.
    
    Solar and Wind electricity are both great cases in point. Once they became more cost-efficient to build and operate than coal plants, the demand for coal plummeted while the demand for new green installations surged.
    
    I don’t really believe what economists claim
    
    I’m inclined to follow the data, at least at first glance. We’re entering a CO^2^ production peak, in large part thanks to the cost-spread between installing/operating new fossil fuel plants and their green peers.
    
    There are other factors at play. I can’t get the mysterious explosion of the Nordstream II pipeline out of my head and what the consequences of climate change are of that. Then there’s the closing of the Suez trade and the collapse in development of Balkan Crude. But the incredibly cheap alternatives - largely pioneered and industrially propagated by the world’s largest socialist state - can’t be ignored as having a huge influence on consumption habits.
    
    Can animal-free meat follow the same path? Idk, maybe. But given the way the US developers and investors had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a modern green grid, I suspect we’ll see meat alternatives take off abroad long before they become popular in the US.
    
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MTK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
So just the “Appeal to futility” logical fallacy? I’m convinced!

Every change starts somewhere. Yes, 0.001% of the population can be vegan and it most likely won’t save a single slaughterhouse animal. But 1%? That’s already significant enough to make at least some change, and 10%? That’s already setting market trends and modifying industries, 50%?

You get my point. You joining the current vegan population is significant! The vegan population is estimated to be 9% in india and mexico, 5% in Israel, 2% in the UK, 1.5% in the US, and estimated to be a total of 1%-3% of the global population. This is a movement that has probably saved more lives and more gas emissions than many others have.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  So just the “Appeal to futility” logical fallacy?
  
  At some point, you have to recognize factory farming as a public policy decision rather than a retail choice. And the response has to be organized and political, not individualistic and consumerist.
  
  You joining the current vegan population is significant!
  
  It’s significant for popular politics, sure. But a vegan community that satisfies itself with attaching blinders when they pass through the Bad Foods aisle at the grocery store is going to end up in the same place as the climate activist who only owns a bike.
  
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  - MTK@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    At some point, you have to recognize factory farming as a public policy decision rather than a retail choice
    
    It is both, and both affect each other. False dichotomy?
    
    a vegan community that satisfies itself with attaching blinders when they pass through the Bad Foods aisle at the grocery store is going to end up in the same place as the climate activist who only owns a bike.
    
    Strawmaning what being a vegan is. It is far from just turning a blind eye.
    
    The difference between the US and India is that if you go around trying to butcher cows in particularly devote areas of India, you’re subject to serious political reprisals.
    
    You know that they eat plenty of other animals right? If you go there, meat and animal products are a very big part of the local food.
    
    I can’t take these arguments seriously.
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    It is both
    
    It’s induced demand. Increased capacity invited consumption.
    
    You know that they eat plenty of other animals right?
    
    Per capita they’re heavily constrained. They have three times the population and one third the land area. They can’t slaughter animals to match US consumption patterns even if they try.
    
    That’s incentivized a culture of veganism as normal and virtuous, as a consequence. And it has allowed the population to expand to 1.3B without experiencing rates of malnutrition common to more rural countries (Kenya, Argentina, and Haiti, for instance) where enormous stretches of land have been dedicated to feedstock.
    
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  - zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    And the response has to be organized and political, not individualistic and consumerist.
    
    Right. This isn’t an argument against veganism; it’s an argument for vegans getting organized.
    
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commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
thank you. no matter how many times I point out the inefficacy of consumer choices or how I word it, I end up with bad faith and fact-avoidant responses like you got.

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- zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Veganism is a philosophy, not a boycott.
  
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  - commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    so you recognize that this:
    
    being vegan is one of the most significant reduction to greenhouse emissions that is within your personal choice
    
    it’s not actually a good argument for veganism?
    
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