IIRC there is exactly one variety of lentil that can supply B12, but otherwise it’s mass produced via bacteria fermentation. At a certain age, most doctors recommend a daily vitamin supplement anyway so it’s really a matter checking a few labels before you pick one to make sure your multivitamin matches your meatless diet.

I appreciate the well wishes, my doctor is already much happier with my visits 😂

A luxury is something pleasant or enjoyable but not strictly necessary. It’s not a matter of how much more enjoyable it is but just that it can be functionally replaced (Lambo -> Toyota Corolla; Designer bag -> any other bag; Meat -> Plant proteins). Unless there’s some rare medical condition that prevents eating anything but animal proteins, we have the means to replace it (as a massive commercial industry at the very least).

WRT alternative diets it really depends on what you replace it with. I believe there are technically some entirely vegan diets without supplements but if you’re buying your meat from the store you could just as easily buy supplements from the same place and not worry about it.

I went meatless recently and even as an unabashed meat lover it really wasn’t that bad. Vegan/vegetarian meat substitutes have advanced a ton in the past few years when I do get the craving, but I don’t notice a day-to-day difference. The main annoyances have been limited restaurant menus and rebuilding my recipe catalog.

As wasteful as our AI usage is it still has a function that couldn’t be substituted. There’s no other tool that could be used for, say, a certain subset of public health analysis or massive archival projects or image analysis.

Granted if we were using it in only those cases we’d need a fraction of the capacity. But the emissions we’d cut are much, much smaller than the savings from the meat industry. Last I checked all US datacenters (not just AI) were less than 3% of emissions. Building and running a computer isn’t as disruptive as constantly moving millions of tons of meat + feed + equipment and minutae.

Commercial meat is a luxury because it can be entirely replaced by other calories + nutrients + supplements. And this is just a discussion on emissions but the other benefits of going meatless are just as notable (eg: agriculture is the #1 cause of ecosystem collapse; large public health benefits)

The other emissions are providing necessary value and not strictly producing what amounts to a luxury product. Cars move people, clothes need to be made, resources need to be shipped across the globe, etc… Yeah you can have deeper discussions about how to trim them down but that’s a clean, easy 16% that could be won basically tomorrow.

Why do we need more of it? Since 1950 the USA has increased electricity usage 14x with slightly over 2x the population. With full electrification, our electricity demands are expected to increase by 90% in 2050 with only a ~10% population bump.

Surely we’ve gone beyond necessary consumption and hit diminishing quality-of-life returns. And all of this is considering just production, excluding the complications of replacing infrastructure, transportation fleets and upgrading the grid.

Those projections also don’t include gen-AI datacenters, which will consume ~12% of total usage by 2028. Electric trains are between 2-10x more efficient per passenger/kWh than BEVs. With a focus on more efficient transportation you could turn off those datacenters, skip the complex and expensive BEV infrastructure and come out with a much lower 2050 consumption.

This sounds like quite a rube goldberg machine to avoid simply supplying a predictable baseline with nuclear. If you try to out-surplus increasingly common climate catastrophes, you’re going to be in for a rude awakening.

Any surplus or pricing plan will be gamed by power hungry datacenters or other wasteful capitalist scam-de-jour. Like you said, demand is elastic so any spare watt will eventually be sucked up as the price curve is optimized. The combined fluctuations on supply+demand is not what you want for a stable grid.

I predict a scenario where storage has to shore up that instability; much more storage than people think. The potential for a zero-supply floor (independent of demand growth) with massive surplus peaks requires building out an equally massive buffer. What will that ecological damage will look like? Will our current projections and efficiencies hold true at that scale?

The cheap energy -> increased demand -> increased storage -> more surplus cycle will cement our reliance on cheap energy, which requires more stability which means more storage, etc…

Let me clarify here that renewables are important for planning a responsible energy future, but only chasing cheap energy isn’t the solution. It’s not possible for us to out-produce the over-consumption that got us here.

Can anyone explain to me why cost matters in these conversations? Do shrinking populations need more energy for any sane reason? If so, do we need it scaled that rapidly?

Do we need electricity to be dirt cheap for any reason other than we want to consume it? Is it just capitalism-brain insisting that tricking the market with profit incentives will save our planet?

Fair point, but it’s still a flat tax regardless of miles driven. Current Gen EVs see a lot less miles/yr in the US vs combustion.

So at 1.25x weight with that mileage you should only expect 1.5x the cost.

I’m not a huge fan of any cars but this is a pretty regressive scheme.

Then tax by weight and not engine type. Freight trucks already don’t pay their fair share in infrastructure costs.

Edit: EVs are about 18-24% heavier than their Ice equivalent. Still doesn’t add up to the proposed costs.

If you want anyone on the GOP to see it you have to put a misleading picture of a fetus on that trifold. Their vision is based on bullshit

Did you do the math on environmental impact of, say 2-3 ceramic sets vs the impact of one stainless steel?

I’m completely ignorant on the energy/material costs of both, but I know the impact of steel/iron can be pretty big.

Yeah its tough… At least you can block ads when browsing and pirate digital media pretty easily 🤷‍♀️

Oh huh, interesting… 📃✍️

Wouldn’t composting just release more greenhouse gasses? We need a more effective means of carbon capture, or maybe directly repurpose them as some sort of nutritional paste

This one yes I suppose, I guess its more symbolic. But I do see this comment on every protest so thought I’d clarify

Your city hall/capital building is empty on the weekend

Personal consumption accounted for 68.8% of US GDP in at the end of 2024, an all time high. Granted, ~45% of that is very hard to cut back on (healthcare, insurance, housing).

But even still, a drop of 10-15% would be devastating. If you could organize it, you could even skip payments on the big ticket services. Everyone skipping a month of bills at the same time would do serious, recession-level damage.

It’s not a direct fix for our problems, but you can play serious economic chicken when most of the economy flows through your wallets.

It’s literally illegal for these publicly traded companies to do anything that would be detrimental to their shareholders. The guy in oval office is telling them there will be consequences for not following his EOs (ie: lowering shareholder value). There’s not any decision to be made here (not that they aren’t laughing to the bank either way)

You proved it’s impossible to be a completely ethical consumer, but did you prove that it’s necessary to be a consumer at all? Or that all volumes of consumption are equally culpable?

People view boycotting as if enough homework will find them the fabled Free Market Unicorn©️, with sparkling udders they can ethically consume from to their hearts content.

Guess what: your coffee and chocolate are slave labor all the way down. Nestle owns all your water and 6 media conglomerates get your entertainment money no matter where you swipe your credit card.

But do you actually need to make those purchases in the first place? There’s nothing other than habit, comfort, and convenience keeping you from cutting most of it out of your life. It makes the ethical calculus so much easier.

Of course, how much austerity you can stomach in your modern life is a personal threshold. But every dollar you don’t spend is a dollar less to our corporate overlords. You could even donate it to a worthy cause for double the satisfaction (if you care to do that homework…)