Cross-posting a 2023 Hacker News thread:
Everyone has different perspectives and values, so what do you personally think is the most important problem in the world right now? Is it something that one, or a group of early enthusiasts, can work on?
The original quote is from Aaron Swartz:
Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? It’s easy to start working on something because it’s convenient, but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on? Why don’t you do that instead? Such questions are hard to face up to (eventually, if you follow this rule, you’ll have to ask yourself why you’re not working on the most important problem in the world) but each little step makes you more productive.
Animal agriculture is a massive contributor to some of the largest problems in the world
It’s at least ~15-17% of climate emissions and is enough to make us miss climate targets on its own even if fossil fuels are immediately stopped
~73% of the world’s antibiotics go to animal agriculture, leading to antibiotic resistance diseases. It’s directly attributed to at least 50% of all zoonetic diseases since 1940
It’s one the most dangerous and exploitative industries to work in. There are multiple human right watch reports on working conditions in just the US (“When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting” and Blood, Sweat, and Fear). And this is not limited to the US, here’s just a handful of reporting from The Guardian Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe, ‘The whole system is rotten’: life inside Europe’s meat industry
The rates of factory farming globally are far higher than most people think. It’s around 74% of all globally farmed land animals, and 90% of total global farmed land and marine animals. It’s around ~99% for the US. The number of animals slaughtered each year is immense at ~80 billion land animals / year, >100 total animals per year. The sheer number of individuals who go through that makes the level of suffering hard to parallel
And that’s just some of the harm the industry does, but I don’t want to ramble too long without talking about how to go about solving this
There is more we as individuals can do here than we can for 90% of other issues. With the laws of supply and demand, simply reducing our collective demand makes the industry smaller. That’s doable at the induvidal level: simply reducing (and ideally eliminating) our individual meat, dairy, etc. consumption can have a real impact. This is more achievable than people think. For instance, Germany has seen a 12% decline in per capita meat consumption over the last ~10 years. We don’t need wait for any institutions to make changes before that can work by doing collective action
There are also some systemic changes we can push for in the near-medium future to help make that happen faster. For instance, just making plant-based foods the default tends to increase plant-based consumption by several orders of magnitude. NYC hospitals implemented plant-based defaults and made their plant-based consumption rate go up to 51% of meals and reduced the average cost of a meal by 59 cents. If that sounds interesting to anyone there are campaigns with real successes to get more institutions and companies to implement those. There groups like the Better Food Foundation, Greener By Default, the Plant Based Treaty is running a Related Campaign, No Milk Tax which has gotten hundreds of chains to drop their plant milk up charge, among others
Love the detailed answer with all the links, thanks!
this simply isn’t true.