Hot take but capitalism is not deliberately wasteful. No seriously, there’s no point in deliberately wasting time or money expending a resource that you have no use for. Now, does that mean capitalism is efficient with resources? No not really, at least not from a conservation perspective. But any company that consumes resources does so in order to provide goods or services to someone. And a large portion of those resources are to provide goods and services to consumers like you and me. Worried about water consumption? Here are the biggest water withdrawal sources in the US:
-thermoelectric power: directly tied to electricity consumption, about half of which is residential
-irrigation: different types of food use massively different amounts of water.
-public supply: goes without saying
Those 3 things are more than 90% of us water demand. If people could cut their power bills by 30%, stop eating meat and conserve water personally by say 50%, US freshwater withdrawals would easily go down by more than a third, if not more. And that’s with zero change in behaviors from billionaires or corporations (apart from producing less in general in response to reduced demand).
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%. We have agency and our actions are not insignificant.
Planned obsolescence, sure, and that’s a bad practice. That’s probably 0.5% of the world’s water consumption idk. Conspicuous consumption is on the consumer though.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m just saying the times when companies will deliberately make a product designed to fail quickly are pretty limited. If Dewalt makes a drill and it shorts out after a year, not only are people not going to buy that drill they are going to start avoiding that brand altogether. Planned obsolescence is basically limited to products where:
-there is an expectation of a short product life
-there are steady improvements to the products so people are excited to buy the next new thing once their current product dies
-there is some brand loyalty/lock-in so people won’t just buy a competitors product
So, this is most famously applicable to smartphones and similar tech. But you will notice that as smartphones start to plateau a bit and people aren’t as rabid about buying new ones, repairabikity, durability and long term support are becoming bigger issues. The big brands are advertising how many years they will keep their flagship phones supported, which you never used to see.
So: limited means your point about capitalism not being wasteful still stands? No. Planned obsolescence of any kind means your point is wrong. Capitalism causes waste.
That could be the end of the comment, but not only is your point disproven, but you’re wrong about limitations in industry as well.
Wait so your argument is that if capitalism is ever wasteful, capitalism as a whole is a wasteful ideology?
If a factory in North Korea produces more tractors than the farmers need in order to meet the Dear Leader’s quarterly quota, does that make socialism as a whole wasteful?
If I’m a vegan who rides my bicycle everywhere and lives in a tiny apartment, but occasionally like to treat myself to a hot bath, does that make me a wasteful person?
Also, all your examples are the one type of product I already said is susceptible to planned obsolescence, which is quickly iterating consumer tech. Again, fair point, but it’s a very small sector of the economy as a whole and already we are seeing movements toward more long-term durable/supportable products.
Incandescent bulbs are not an example of planned obsolescence, it’s just an older, inferior technology that is being steadily replaced with a more durable, energy efficient alternative in LED bulbs. Printers are screwy with the expensive ink cartridges but that isn’t an example of planned obsolescence either.
Finally, sorry, I’m not going to change my worldview just because you asked nicely.
No, your argument was capitalism isn’t wasteful. One counterpoint is enough to disprove that. If you want to say it’s less wasteful than some other system, that’s a different point and not what you put forth.
If anybody thinks they have a good point while ignoring evidence contrary to it, I think they look like an idiot. Are you doing that? I’m not asking you to change your idea for me, I’m saying you should change your idea because you can’t defend it. Or put your head back in the sand, whatever. But you’re not really interested in a conversation where your ideas are challenged and you have to consider something beyond “Nuh uh!”. (I would be, but you haven’t said anything remotely challenging.)
That’s semantic nonsense. If something is less wasteful than its alternatives, its common to refer to it is being efficient or not wasteful. When you say something is not wasteful, you are not saying that it is completely free from waste, you are just saying it is efficient.
Cartels are an example of a trust, which are illegal in America and pretty much anywhere else with a free market. Cartels and monopolies are bad, but an economic system with good antitrust enforcement will root them out. And a singular cartel that managed to enforce planned obsolescence on one particular product over 80 years ago doesn’t carry very much weight with me.
Again, printers (well, really, printer ink cartridges) are a shady business, but the claim of planned obsolescence is pretty tenuous. Even the most extortionate ink cartridges will usually run until they’re dry. The only example of actual planned obsolescence in your link is of Brother toner cartridges that ask you to replace the toner when it gets low - which you can override with a menu option. So maybe you can get an extra 10-20% out of your toner cartridge with that setting with that brand… again, in the grand scheme of things this is a pretty small example.
You can nitpick inefficiencies in the massive, sprawling, international centuries-old system of capitalism all day, I’m sure. My fundamental point is that a system that is centered around producing goods and services at the highest margins possible is going to have a strong emphasis on eliminating waste wherever possible. When American Airlines found out that a lot of people weren’t eating the singular olive in the salads they served passengers, they removed it for savings of something like 100k in today’s dollars. Covid was a supply chain disaster, but that actually showed just how lean the supply chain actually was—goods were being produced at exactly the right rates for customer demand, so when those demands shifted slightly and some factories shut down due to unprecedented circumstances, there were some shortages.
Anyways, when I say that capitalism is not wasteful (or that it’s “efficient”, or “less wasteful”, or whatever), what I’m really saying is that is the least wasteful economic system when compared to the others. Certainly in the Soviet Union they used more resources to produce fewer goods than the United States (and less aligned with what people wanted and needed). If you have a real-world example of a system that can produce goods more efficiently than capitalism at scale, I would be interested to learn about it.
An enormous amount of our meat production ends up as waste. Again, just telling random people to become vegetarian doesn’t change this, unless the participants are concentrated enough to reshape how meat is produced and delivered. Even then, the US exports of meat range from 10% (beef) to 30% (pork) of gross production, with plenty of room to rise. Trade barriers, ecological limits, and land use policy go vastly farther to curbing animal methane emissions than politely asking people to stop eating meat.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you have any influence on the macro scale through consumer habits. You’re missing a forest of waste and misallocation of resources out of a personalized guilt trip.
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%.
That’s a fully made up statistic even before the advent of superusers like the AI farms. You’re straight up ignoring our enormous agricultural export markets, our municipal waste, and the impact of major pollutants.
Ok a few points. First off, I’m a power engineer. You’re completely wrong about transmission losses. Those are (almost) completely proportional to current, which is (almost completely proportional to load. So if you reduce grid power consumption by 50% you will reduce transmission losses by 45% or more (allowing for corona losses and current to ground etc).
Same thing with meat. It’s a supply and demand problem- the less demand for meat the less livestock, and proportionally less waste there. Livestock are expensive and people aren’t just going to raise them if they can’t sell them for a profit.
Agriculture and livestock can be exported, true, but that’s the same situation as before just on a global scale. Less global demand for meat, fewer livestock, less water usage. It’s really that simple. There are no “super-users” of meat, the 1% might eat more than the average person but not 10x more.
Municipal pipe leaks, sure, that does reduce the elasticity by up to half… with the caveat that in places that have serious water restrictions are much more vigilant because it really matters. Phoenix, AZ has a statutory limitation of 10% loss.
My stat is just some back of the envelope math based on my above statements.
As far as AI goes, it’s the same thing all over again. They (the AI companies) are offering a service to US, the consumer. We have the choice to not have AI generate pictures of snails wearing astronaut helmets. Actually AI is probably one of the things we need the least, relative to how much we use it.
The national cattle herd continues to hover at historically low numbers following bouts of drought across major beef-producing states, including back-to-back years of extreme drought across Texas. The national beef herd hit a 73-year low in January 2024 at 28.2 million head.
So herd sizes reduced due to extreme drought, and beef prices spiked. However herd sizes are already growing again… to meet demand. If there wasn’t sufficient international demand for cattle the here size wouldn’t be growing. Supply will always try to track demand, under extreme circumstances you can get supply chain issues and prices will spike or there will be shortages. But long term, outside of these disruptions the number of beef cattle will be proportional to beef demand it’s just common sense.
Ranchers are attempting to replenish their herds. No word on whether they’ll succeed, given the ecological headwinds.
In the meantime, the high price of beef creates a wide open market space for alternatives… assuming they can ramp up production to meet the lower income demand.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements like Impossible that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing without the environmental, ethical, or health concerns of real meat. Society collectively picking that at the meat isle would have make a tangible difference with no effort.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Society collectively picking that
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition,
We’ve had a surge of green energy investment in large part due to rising energy costs. Ironically enough, it’s the fossil fuel industry that created these skyrocketing electricity costs.
But the real run away investment has been in socialist states that dictate the market. Not market states that leave investment to the whims of investors.
It would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years
Then get off your ass and do it. You’ve clearly got the genius to run a multi billion dollar expansion. Give Sysco a call. Let them know you’re going to revolutionize the agricultural industry by the end of the decade.
Don’t waste time talking to me. Go go go! The world is at stake!!!
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice. Western societies currently demand animal meat over plant meat by a wide margin, even though plant meat can oftentimes be cheaper. To be clear, I think subsidized/free low-carbon emission food for the hungry would be awesome, but it’s not what was being argued. My point was that good alternatives exist currently at either price parity with real meat, or are sometimes even cheaper, and they are not chosen by consumers over animal meat.
The last segment of your comment is odd, sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire by their bootstraps if they happen to comment on how effortlessly multinational corporations seem to acquire investment capital.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush to be distributed with existing low cost transportation and supply systems, then it is to find investment capital for large-scale power production with thin profit margins and an inefficient multi-year long waiting list of connection approvals, and where any new public infrastructure needed to support any new private energy project must be paid for one the projects in line (the first one willing to put up the cash, making them all wait to see if someone else will go for it).
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice.
They regularly by cheap heavily subsidized ground beef and fried pork/chicken because it is cheap. In many cases, meat is cheaper by weight than equivalent vegan options (particularly fresh vegetables) entirely because of our land use policies and agricultural subsidies. Put alt-meat on the shelf at a price point below trad meats and you’ll see consumers shift accordingly. Right now, ground beef sells for under $5/lb while Impossible Beef sells for around $7/lb.
sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire
Again, you frame this as an individual choice rather than a public policy. Homeless people aren’t homeless because they failed to become millionaires. They’re homeless because the cost of housing exceeds their income. If you handed everyone in the country a $1M check, they’d still be homeless, because private real estate would price itself above these newly-minted millionaires ability to buy in. By contrast, if a municipality or state expands the stock of public housing, nobody needs to increase their income in order to house the homeless.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush
Great. Then go out and do it. Get Impossible Beef under the Possible Beef price point. Then watch how quickly the public adopts the alternative.
Quorn (an excellent vegetarian meat alternative grown from a fungus) has been around since the 1980’s, and is at price parity with animal ground beef. It has never been more popular than animal meat. Seitan made from vital wheat gluten at home is $1.80 a pound, and can replicate a side of ham, beef, or roast chicken with different flavorings. It is not popular among non-vegetarians or vegans in the west, even the impoverished, despite its low cost. The most expensive Tofu is cheaper than ground beef with comparable protein content, and can be an excellent tasting alternative. Lentils can fill in for ground beef (though not comparable in taste to meat alternatives) and provide far more protein content per dollar than ground beef can provide.
I agree that factory farming combined with subsidies are artificially making animal meat affordable enough for mass adoption, and that if those practices were ended, people would be forced to switch away from it as a main source of food. This is a similar quandary to gasoline.
But even with those subsidies, there are vegetarian options that are currently cheaper than real meat, yet are not chosen by the consumer.
The issue is not purely economics, but cultural. People could, right now, choose the cheaper, healthier, ethical, and environmental option, but they do not. Another user here in this thread literally told me they would not consider switching away from meat because the alternatives were not perfect replacements, and were not inclined to try impossible even after being informed it has advanced to be a 1-to-1 replacement. It was not economic. In their own words:
“Meat is delicious. We’ve been eating meat as long as the human race existed and I don’t think there is anything you can say or do that would get the majority of the population to give it up. I don’t think it’s an identical product and am unlikely to switch. There is nothing I enjoy eating more than a prime rib, and there just isn’t going to be a plant based replacement for that.”
Consider that the wealthier people in the world could afford to choose a slightly more expensive meat alternative, but they do not. The middle class can afford a slightly more expensive meat alternative, they do not. The poor could opt for cheaper plant meat alternatives, they do not. Anyone could choose to simply eat less meat, or cut out red meat at the very least (the most emissions) in favor of chicken or fish, but they do not.
Demand for red meat increases with the economic wealth of a nation. Only India bucks that trend somewhat due to having a culture of vegetarianism. My point is that despite having access to viable alternatives, even if made so similarly that it is hard to tell the difference, people choose not to adopt them, even though a collective consumer choice would drastically help our chances at surviving climate change.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
Civil engineer who works with municipalities on repairing pipe infrastrucure. I’m in Canada, so YMMV, but they’re ON it with leaking pipes. We’re typically brought in to design new watermains when the old ones reach ~5-10% leakage.
If you don’t like anecdotal evidence, here’s a paper from 2000- This was at the start of when municipalities began examining for this, and even then they only found losses of 20-30%. A personal reduction of 20-30% isn’t that hard.
Hot take but capitalism is not deliberately wasteful. No seriously, there’s no point in deliberately wasting time or money expending a resource that you have no use for. Now, does that mean capitalism is efficient with resources? No not really, at least not from a conservation perspective. But any company that consumes resources does so in order to provide goods or services to someone. And a large portion of those resources are to provide goods and services to consumers like you and me. Worried about water consumption? Here are the biggest water withdrawal sources in the US:
-thermoelectric power: directly tied to electricity consumption, about half of which is residential
-irrigation: different types of food use massively different amounts of water.
-public supply: goes without saying
Those 3 things are more than 90% of us water demand. If people could cut their power bills by 30%, stop eating meat and conserve water personally by say 50%, US freshwater withdrawals would easily go down by more than a third, if not more. And that’s with zero change in behaviors from billionaires or corporations (apart from producing less in general in response to reduced demand).
My point is that about 2/3 of water usage in the US is to provide food, electricity and water to the 99%. We have agency and our actions are not insignificant.
Planned obsolescence has entered the chat. And that’s just one of probably dozens of counterpoints. Conspicuous consumption is another one.
Planned obsolescence, sure, and that’s a bad practice. That’s probably 0.5% of the world’s water consumption idk. Conspicuous consumption is on the consumer though.
You shouldn’t just ignore points that are counter to your argument to preserve your current ideas.
I’m not ignoring it, I’m just saying the times when companies will deliberately make a product designed to fail quickly are pretty limited. If Dewalt makes a drill and it shorts out after a year, not only are people not going to buy that drill they are going to start avoiding that brand altogether. Planned obsolescence is basically limited to products where:
-there is an expectation of a short product life -there are steady improvements to the products so people are excited to buy the next new thing once their current product dies -there is some brand loyalty/lock-in so people won’t just buy a competitors product
So, this is most famously applicable to smartphones and similar tech. But you will notice that as smartphones start to plateau a bit and people aren’t as rabid about buying new ones, repairabikity, durability and long term support are becoming bigger issues. The big brands are advertising how many years they will keep their flagship phones supported, which you never used to see.
So: limited means your point about capitalism not being wasteful still stands? No. Planned obsolescence of any kind means your point is wrong. Capitalism causes waste.
That could be the end of the comment, but not only is your point disproven, but you’re wrong about limitations in industry as well.
Printers, incandescent light bulbs, cars.
I had a Nest thermostat before they were bought by Google, which then closed the API and forced people to control it through Google’s ecosystem. And soon you won’t even be able to do that: https://www.tomsguide.com/home/smart-home/google-announces-end-of-support-for-1st-and-2nd-gen-nest-thermostats-what-you-need-to-know
Hue bulbs discontinued support for their first generation bridge https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/philips-hue-is-killing-off-support-for-the-original-hue-bridge/
https://www.androidcentral.com/wearables/older-tizen-os-galaxy-watches-to-loose-support-in-2025
I’ve been through this bullshit a bunch. Maybe you’re lucky you haven’t, but the examples aren’t nearly as limited as you claim.
Please update your ideas instead of doubling down on ideas you can’t support.
Wait so your argument is that if capitalism is ever wasteful, capitalism as a whole is a wasteful ideology?
If a factory in North Korea produces more tractors than the farmers need in order to meet the Dear Leader’s quarterly quota, does that make socialism as a whole wasteful?
If I’m a vegan who rides my bicycle everywhere and lives in a tiny apartment, but occasionally like to treat myself to a hot bath, does that make me a wasteful person?
Also, all your examples are the one type of product I already said is susceptible to planned obsolescence, which is quickly iterating consumer tech. Again, fair point, but it’s a very small sector of the economy as a whole and already we are seeing movements toward more long-term durable/supportable products.
Incandescent bulbs are not an example of planned obsolescence, it’s just an older, inferior technology that is being steadily replaced with a more durable, energy efficient alternative in LED bulbs. Printers are screwy with the expensive ink cartridges but that isn’t an example of planned obsolescence either.
Finally, sorry, I’m not going to change my worldview just because you asked nicely.
No, your argument was capitalism isn’t wasteful. One counterpoint is enough to disprove that. If you want to say it’s less wasteful than some other system, that’s a different point and not what you put forth.
Light bulbs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
Printers https://www.christopherroosen.com/blog/2022/7/4/printer-toner-planned-obsolescence
If anybody thinks they have a good point while ignoring evidence contrary to it, I think they look like an idiot. Are you doing that? I’m not asking you to change your idea for me, I’m saying you should change your idea because you can’t defend it. Or put your head back in the sand, whatever. But you’re not really interested in a conversation where your ideas are challenged and you have to consider something beyond “Nuh uh!”. (I would be, but you haven’t said anything remotely challenging.)
That’s semantic nonsense. If something is less wasteful than its alternatives, its common to refer to it is being efficient or not wasteful. When you say something is not wasteful, you are not saying that it is completely free from waste, you are just saying it is efficient.
Cartels are an example of a trust, which are illegal in America and pretty much anywhere else with a free market. Cartels and monopolies are bad, but an economic system with good antitrust enforcement will root them out. And a singular cartel that managed to enforce planned obsolescence on one particular product over 80 years ago doesn’t carry very much weight with me.
Again, printers (well, really, printer ink cartridges) are a shady business, but the claim of planned obsolescence is pretty tenuous. Even the most extortionate ink cartridges will usually run until they’re dry. The only example of actual planned obsolescence in your link is of Brother toner cartridges that ask you to replace the toner when it gets low - which you can override with a menu option. So maybe you can get an extra 10-20% out of your toner cartridge with that setting with that brand… again, in the grand scheme of things this is a pretty small example.
You can nitpick inefficiencies in the massive, sprawling, international centuries-old system of capitalism all day, I’m sure. My fundamental point is that a system that is centered around producing goods and services at the highest margins possible is going to have a strong emphasis on eliminating waste wherever possible. When American Airlines found out that a lot of people weren’t eating the singular olive in the salads they served passengers, they removed it for savings of something like 100k in today’s dollars. Covid was a supply chain disaster, but that actually showed just how lean the supply chain actually was—goods were being produced at exactly the right rates for customer demand, so when those demands shifted slightly and some factories shut down due to unprecedented circumstances, there were some shortages.
Anyways, when I say that capitalism is not wasteful (or that it’s “efficient”, or “less wasteful”, or whatever), what I’m really saying is that is the least wasteful economic system when compared to the others. Certainly in the Soviet Union they used more resources to produce fewer goods than the United States (and less aligned with what people wanted and needed). If you have a real-world example of a system that can produce goods more efficiently than capitalism at scale, I would be interested to learn about it.
Electricity usage is largely inelastic without structural changes. 60% of our electricity is lost in transmission, for instance. Individual consumption habits won’t change that.
An enormous amount of our meat production ends up as waste. Again, just telling random people to become vegetarian doesn’t change this, unless the participants are concentrated enough to reshape how meat is produced and delivered. Even then, the US exports of meat range from 10% (beef) to 30% (pork) of gross production, with plenty of room to rise. Trade barriers, ecological limits, and land use policy go vastly farther to curbing animal methane emissions than politely asking people to stop eating meat.
And water is even less elastic than electricity. Municipal pipe leaks in your neighborhood will have a bigger impact on your street’s water consumption rate than any amount of conservation or efficiency within the home.
You’re fooling yourself if you think you have any influence on the macro scale through consumer habits. You’re missing a forest of waste and misallocation of resources out of a personalized guilt trip.
That’s a fully made up statistic even before the advent of superusers like the AI farms. You’re straight up ignoring our enormous agricultural export markets, our municipal waste, and the impact of major pollutants.
Ok a few points. First off, I’m a power engineer. You’re completely wrong about transmission losses. Those are (almost) completely proportional to current, which is (almost completely proportional to load. So if you reduce grid power consumption by 50% you will reduce transmission losses by 45% or more (allowing for corona losses and current to ground etc).
Same thing with meat. It’s a supply and demand problem- the less demand for meat the less livestock, and proportionally less waste there. Livestock are expensive and people aren’t just going to raise them if they can’t sell them for a profit.
Agriculture and livestock can be exported, true, but that’s the same situation as before just on a global scale. Less global demand for meat, fewer livestock, less water usage. It’s really that simple. There are no “super-users” of meat, the 1% might eat more than the average person but not 10x more.
Municipal pipe leaks, sure, that does reduce the elasticity by up to half… with the caveat that in places that have serious water restrictions are much more vigilant because it really matters. Phoenix, AZ has a statutory limitation of 10% loss.
My stat is just some back of the envelope math based on my above statements.
As far as AI goes, it’s the same thing all over again. They (the AI companies) are offering a service to US, the consumer. We have the choice to not have AI generate pictures of snails wearing astronaut helmets. Actually AI is probably one of the things we need the least, relative to how much we use it.
How do you explain the highest rate of beef demand in history running to with the lowest herd size in 20 years?
What does that even mean
Has nothing to do with consumption rates
So herd sizes reduced due to extreme drought, and beef prices spiked. However herd sizes are already growing again… to meet demand. If there wasn’t sufficient international demand for cattle the here size wouldn’t be growing. Supply will always try to track demand, under extreme circumstances you can get supply chain issues and prices will spike or there will be shortages. But long term, outside of these disruptions the number of beef cattle will be proportional to beef demand it’s just common sense.
Ranchers are attempting to replenish their herds. No word on whether they’ll succeed, given the ecological headwinds.
In the meantime, the high price of beef creates a wide open market space for alternatives… assuming they can ramp up production to meet the lower income demand.
We now have 1-to-1 plant based meat replacements like Impossible that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing without the environmental, ethical, or health concerns of real meat. Society collectively picking that at the meat isle would have make a tangible difference with no effort.
Which still need to be scaled up to meet a national (much less global) demand. Again, this isn’t an individual issue. A large public program to produce and distribute substitutes at below meat cost would go as far as the prior efforts to replace coal with cleaner alternatives.
Requires industrial production, distribution, a below replacement price point, advertising, and adoption by the retail fast food industry.
This isn’t an individualist process. No more than building a long line of $50M/unit wind turbines or $200M/unit solar farms is determined by how many people switch their electricity retailer.
The only only thing preventing it from scaling up quickly is lack of demand.
Energy infrastructure has much higher transition costs due to infrastructure, as well as constant oil lobbying to prevent and slow that transition, which is very effective at preventing a transition since most individuals cannot afford to transition without government help.
Contrast that to plant based meat, which as no investment costs on the part of the consumer even without government help, thus limiting the real-meat industry’s ability to hamper plant-based competition with lobbying. If demand for real meat plummeted from consumers choosing to buy less of it collectively, and instead began wiping out plant-based meat from stores, it would be trivial in the grand scheme of things to scale up production within a handful of years. And with demand that high, getting investors to fund startups for new competition in that space would also be easy. Stores would quickly stop putting in such massive orders for real meat that simply rots in the store, or has to be priced so low to sell that it’s no longer economically viable for farmers to produce.
For plant-based meats, the transition is entirely in the hands of consumer choice.
That’s nakedly false. We have no shortage of hungry people who would happily accept cheap food.
We’ve had a surge of green energy investment in large part due to rising energy costs. Ironically enough, it’s the fossil fuel industry that created these skyrocketing electricity costs.
But the real run away investment has been in socialist states that dictate the market. Not market states that leave investment to the whims of investors.
Then get off your ass and do it. You’ve clearly got the genius to run a multi billion dollar expansion. Give Sysco a call. Let them know you’re going to revolutionize the agricultural industry by the end of the decade.
Don’t waste time talking to me. Go go go! The world is at stake!!!
Hungry impoverished people often don’t buy animal meat out of lack of funds, not willful choice. Western societies currently demand animal meat over plant meat by a wide margin, even though plant meat can oftentimes be cheaper. To be clear, I think subsidized/free low-carbon emission food for the hungry would be awesome, but it’s not what was being argued. My point was that good alternatives exist currently at either price parity with real meat, or are sometimes even cheaper, and they are not chosen by consumers over animal meat.
The last segment of your comment is odd, sort of like telling a homeless person without any prospects to go become a millionaire by their bootstraps if they happen to comment on how effortlessly multinational corporations seem to acquire investment capital.
I believe it is objectively easier to scale up factories that manipulate grain into a meat-like mush to be distributed with existing low cost transportation and supply systems, then it is to find investment capital for large-scale power production with thin profit margins and an inefficient multi-year long waiting list of connection approvals, and where any new public infrastructure needed to support any new private energy project must be paid for one the projects in line (the first one willing to put up the cash, making them all wait to see if someone else will go for it).
They regularly by cheap heavily subsidized ground beef and fried pork/chicken because it is cheap. In many cases, meat is cheaper by weight than equivalent vegan options (particularly fresh vegetables) entirely because of our land use policies and agricultural subsidies. Put alt-meat on the shelf at a price point below trad meats and you’ll see consumers shift accordingly. Right now, ground beef sells for under $5/lb while Impossible Beef sells for around $7/lb.
Again, you frame this as an individual choice rather than a public policy. Homeless people aren’t homeless because they failed to become millionaires. They’re homeless because the cost of housing exceeds their income. If you handed everyone in the country a $1M check, they’d still be homeless, because private real estate would price itself above these newly-minted millionaires ability to buy in. By contrast, if a municipality or state expands the stock of public housing, nobody needs to increase their income in order to house the homeless.
Great. Then go out and do it. Get Impossible Beef under the Possible Beef price point. Then watch how quickly the public adopts the alternative.
Quorn (an excellent vegetarian meat alternative grown from a fungus) has been around since the 1980’s, and is at price parity with animal ground beef. It has never been more popular than animal meat. Seitan made from vital wheat gluten at home is $1.80 a pound, and can replicate a side of ham, beef, or roast chicken with different flavorings. It is not popular among non-vegetarians or vegans in the west, even the impoverished, despite its low cost. The most expensive Tofu is cheaper than ground beef with comparable protein content, and can be an excellent tasting alternative. Lentils can fill in for ground beef (though not comparable in taste to meat alternatives) and provide far more protein content per dollar than ground beef can provide.
I agree that factory farming combined with subsidies are artificially making animal meat affordable enough for mass adoption, and that if those practices were ended, people would be forced to switch away from it as a main source of food. This is a similar quandary to gasoline.
But even with those subsidies, there are vegetarian options that are currently cheaper than real meat, yet are not chosen by the consumer.
The issue is not purely economics, but cultural. People could, right now, choose the cheaper, healthier, ethical, and environmental option, but they do not. Another user here in this thread literally told me they would not consider switching away from meat because the alternatives were not perfect replacements, and were not inclined to try impossible even after being informed it has advanced to be a 1-to-1 replacement. It was not economic. In their own words:
Consider that the wealthier people in the world could afford to choose a slightly more expensive meat alternative, but they do not. The middle class can afford a slightly more expensive meat alternative, they do not. The poor could opt for cheaper plant meat alternatives, they do not. Anyone could choose to simply eat less meat, or cut out red meat at the very least (the most emissions) in favor of chicken or fish, but they do not.
Demand for red meat increases with the economic wealth of a nation. Only India bucks that trend somewhat due to having a culture of vegetarianism. My point is that despite having access to viable alternatives, even if made so similarly that it is hard to tell the difference, people choose not to adopt them, even though a collective consumer choice would drastically help our chances at surviving climate change.
Civil engineer who works with municipalities on repairing pipe infrastrucure. I’m in Canada, so YMMV, but they’re ON it with leaking pipes. We’re typically brought in to design new watermains when the old ones reach ~5-10% leakage.
If you don’t like anecdotal evidence, here’s a paper from 2000- This was at the start of when municipalities began examining for this, and even then they only found losses of 20-30%. A personal reduction of 20-30% isn’t that hard.
https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2008/nrc-cnrc/NR25-2-40E.pdf