And any discussion that tries to frame them as somewhat equally important issues is dishonest and either malicious or delusional.
My guess, as I've expressed earlier in the comment chain, is that it's emotionally easier for people to bike-shed about the 0.01% of their environmental impact, than to actually tackle things that make up 20%.
And no it's not only beef (which is a stand-in for meat and diary), another low hanging fruit is also transport, like switching your car for a bike.
But switching from meat and diary to a vegan diet would reduce up to 20% of your personal environmental impact, in terms of CO2.
And about 80-90% of rainforest deforestation is driven directly or indirectly by livestock production.
So it's simply the easiest most impactful thing everyone can do. (Switching your car for a bike isn't possible for people in rural areas for example.)
You make a good point. A problem is only a real problem if you can’t find a bigger thing that makes it look small by comparison. For example, the worldwide concrete industry creates more co2 than beef does so there is no reason to stop eating beef if you enjoy it.
Now I know that some might say that “all of this is cumulative” or “the material problems that stem from entrenched industries is actually a reason not to invent completely novel wasteful things rather than a justification for them” but in reality only two things are true: only the biggest problem is real, and the only problem is definitely some other guy’s doing. If I waste x energy and my neighbor wastes y amount, a goal of reducing (x+y) is oppressive whereas a goal where I just need to try to keep x lower than y feels a lot nicer.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publication...
Seeing as these models being wasteful is integral to the revenue of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, the more people that tell them that the right business strategy is to start perpetually building data centers and power plants, the less incentive they have to build models that run efficiently on consumer hardware.
Skip meat for one day, use AI for a year, come out ahead.
I’m not the one that brought up moralizing or food. I can’t really comment on your relationship with your diet but it kind of seems like you saw somebody mention power usage and unprompted shared “well I don’t eat meat or cheese or yogurt” so I guess keep that up while you use enough energy to power your home to write some code slower than you would without it?
https://www.infoworld.com/article/4020931/ai-coding-tools-ca...
I gave a little more detail to my point about climate impact here
