Vanity activities

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts of the equation for the more important heuristic of happiness.

A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.

In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?

> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact

Mmm, yes and no.

It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.

If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.

If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.

The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.

Won’t that work better without killing & eating them young?

The amount of cattle required to maintain pasture is way fewer than we have right now. From a CO2 perspective factory farmed cattle tends to look a little better than "free-range" mostly due to reduced land use changes (but it is obviously worse from a cruelty perspective). Finally, we can still have farm animals without eating them!!

They're not free because they consume your time, which is valuable.

Yes, but only if you would spend that time on something that is more valuable (according to your happiness+ heuristic).

You might be right, but I was taking that as a given since the article made that claim. I think the general point (of taking smaller actions in lieu of more effective but costly ones) matters more so than the individual "vanity activity".

Right, but I think that was the author's point: many of these activities are seen by their participants as "productive", rather than just "this makes me happy". That was a specific point of the post.

The amount of livestock that we actually would need in that case is probably around 5% of what we actually have (in the US). So it’s still valid if half of all people became vegetarian, and the remaining amount cut their meat consumption to “special occasions only”.

Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

> Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

Yes and no.

We'd also cut down massively on the amount of food we have available for humans.

What would be better is if people stopped eating soya.