Yeah, i know. But meat is becoming more and more popular for some reasons that probably lie beyond the scope of my grasp.

It's delicious

Our childern are fucked if WE don't act to change some fundamental ways of living. We don't have to give up all aspects of our modern living, but we have to stop treating the planet's limited resources as if they are limitless...right now. The global 'free' market isn't set up to do this, rather, it's set up to exploit. Meanwhile, we sit around and listen to blabbering politicians who believe that Noah's Ark is a fact and that Darwin was a heretic.

We need to act now on a large scale. This isn't just about avoiding meat, or recycling, or driving a fuel efficient car (even though all of those help). The global economic system doesn't punish CO2 polluters and doesn't reward CO2 eliminators. In the US, most of our electricity comes from coal, the dirtiest fuel. We have to stop that now and yet there isn't an economic incentive to make it happen. (Note: When you hear people talk about clean coal, they're talking about reducing heavy metals and sulphur emissions, not CO2.) Coal is the worst fuel.

China is building 1 large coal fired electric plant per month to sustain their economic growth. No matter how much we recycle, it's hard to offset that scale of CO2 emissions growth and the Chinese aren't going to stop building these power plants any time soon.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel corporations spend about $150,000,000 per year to convince us that manmade warming is a theory and clean coal is real. The alternative energy research funding in the US is largely controlled by the US Department of Energy which historically is more interested in building nuclear bombs than solving our energy problems.

We have a way out of this mess which is to massively invest in solar power. The goal should be to develop solar power systems that produce energy at a lower cost than coal. If it has to include subsidies to get started, fine. The energy from the sun exists. We could put people back to work and also provide a future. It's a hard, expensive project but a challange to save humanity is a good thing. It sure is better than fighting endless war. But, we don't have the will. Someone has convinced us that fighting endless wars over increasingly scarcer resources is a better path. WTF?

So sorry to rant on like this. I'm done now.

"meat is becoming more and more popular for some reason"

That made my day...

We should be investing largely in all possible forms of alternative energy.
Solar energy but also nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion has huge potential and if we would have an abundance of cheap energy, wich is a completely realistic scenario with nuclear fusion, we could also solve the problem of water shortage, since purifying water costs usualy lot's of energy.

Thing is that we should have been acting much earlier. Now the whole train of climate change is already set in motion, like so many other environmental problems. There are so many species that are going to be extinct anyway, no matter what we'll do now to try to prevent it. Tigers and tuna's are already a thing of the past, like the dodo and the dinosaurs. There's too little bluefin tuna's and tigers of any subspecies left in the wild to realistically sustain a stable population and then there is that mysterious but most likely pesticide-related bee-problem....Oh, and if that bee-problem escalates we're in real deep shit btw.

Something like over 75% of the people who responded to this poll voted that its not too late. I would love to hear some of them chime in with their reasons for voting this way. What this thred could use is a little optimism.

Been pondering for a while what/how to bring changes about.

I said I would stop ranting so I'll just add a few comments:

polytrip wrote: "We should be investing largely in all possible forms of alternative energy.
Solar energy but also nuclear fusion."

The problem with fusion is that we are out of time. In a lab setting, we are capable of achieving near breakeven in a fusion reactor today. That isn't close to where we need to be to generate fusion power commercially. No one knows what technology would work to generate fusion power commercially and the timescale for fusion research is so long that even the research won't be finished by 2050. Add to this the fact that fusion generates lots of fast neutrons and fast netrons turn powerplants into mush. No one knows how to build a fusion generation plant that would last long enough to make a profit. It may not be possible.

What are all you negative nancy's doing to help besides posting in this thread.