Make vegan food free and people will naturally eat more of it.
Exactly. Most people don’t actually care that much about vegan food vs meat. Drop all government subsidies for meat/dairy/eggs and transfer them to vegan food. Make it the cheapest thing at the grocery store (or better yet, free like you said) and people will effectively go vegan without even caring about veganism.
Lol idk if that’s true, and most vegan alternatives should already be cheaper. Growing Soya/Beans/Peas or whatever is already subsidised. The capitalists can just make more money off vegans because they’re essentially a captured market who have no choice but to buy vegan food.
People in the West who have by far the highest carbon footprint per capita: “There is nothing I can do to offset my environmental impact. Don’t you see? This system is forcing me to enjoy luxuries that destroy the planet for everyone.”
I’m not saying capitalism has nothing to do with it, but saying there is no personal responsibility to reduce your own carbon footprint is dumb as hell. Here’s two things you can do right this second: stop eating meat and stop driving (take public transit instead) and boom you’ve cut your carbon emissions by at least half.
The nearest public bus route to my house is a 40 minute drive away.
A train track does go through town and there is a station served by a long-distance Amtrak train that services this stop twice a day, once in each direction. It’s really designed for people at either end of the route to travel its entire length, so it comes through here, roughly the middle of the route, at oh-fuck-thirty AM and PM. It can stop here, but doesn’t unless someone has bought a ticket to get on or off here. Most of the time it rolls right through town. If I were to buy a ticket on that train, it would have to come to a stop, idle for a bit, then accelerate back to cruising speed. How far do you think i could drive my sedan for the carbon emissions I would have caused stopping and starting a train?
Honestly, I implore you to try out cycling. It has even less environmental impact than public transit, and can be surprisingly fast and effective even in car-centric shitholes (if you don’t skip leg day and can sort of keep up with traffic on the intersections). I was dubious of that at first but now I’ve stopped using my car or public transit to get around town completely and just always hop on my bike.
Not really feasible in my area; You know that old people “why don’t the kids go outside” the outside they built: meme? Yeah it’s that. There isn’t a grocery store that is safe to bike to. Much outside the neighborhood and you encounter 45MPH or higher speed limits and such. For a good long while I did my local travel on a small motorcycle that made 70 miles per gallon. I now work from home so I have no daily commute.
The speed limit doesn’t matter per se. You’re just hanging out on the shoulder (or on the right of the rightmost lane). I regularly cycle along a 110 km/h road (60 mph) (and people speed too), and it’s ok if you ignore the noise (I just put on my ANC headphones as I know I’m safe on the shoulder). The only time you might actually mingle with traffic is when overtaking people in a right turn lane at a stoplight/intersection (but you don’t really have to).
I do agree that american built environment is insane and needs to be torn down and rebuilt completely from scratch, though.
A person who cared about their contribution to climate change to the point it was a genuine priority and affected their decisions would move. A person who didn’t would find ways to rationalize staying without much difficulty.
People are moving into this area in droves.
Kinda lib response tbh. By your logic we should all be in some sort of violent revolutionary organisation because we can never solve climate change under capitalism. *If you really cared * you’d be learning how to manufacture anti aircraft batteries so we can take on their armies.
It’s a question of priorities. We all ‘care’ about the environment. But frankly, most people care a lot more about other things, and simply find ways to manage their climate anxiety rather than address the climate issue. OP’s behavior isn’t the way it is because they don’t care about the environment or because they have no other options, but because they have other priorities.
That’s true, and well put, commitment is important but it’s something best done in small steps, I also try not to blame people for insufficient commitment especially when so much of our day is already stolen from us.
