Pretty telling how change happens in the blink of an eye as soon as it’s financially convenient.
It becoming financially convenient was a result of decades of intentional policy. It’s now snowballing once it got there
It would have taken far longer to get here without government involvement if applications like space travel were the only reasons for earlier research and manufacturing
Oh I’m aware. I fully expect the same thing will happen to meat once we have cheaper meat substitutes. Yes, a ton of research money went into it but in the end, price is what matters for global adoption.
It is worth noting that you can already beat meat on price with things like beans, lentils, chickpeas, etc. Plant-based meats specifically are just more expensive because they’re building the economies of scale and putting some of their research costs into the price. Plant-based meats are also already cheaper than animal meats in some parts of the world
But yes, once that becomes much prevalent, sales will likely increase substantially
As a related note: this is also encouraging that a number of coffee chains are now dropping their non-dairy milk up charges after pressure from activists. Once they got Starbucks to do so, it’s spread to tons of chains. Even the worst plant milks are way better across all environmental metrics compared to dairy (yes even water weighted by scarcity), so it’s going to be good for the environment
In my case it’s just easier to work towards not eating meat as the plant substitutes are almost immediately rejected. The impossible burger I ate went through my system in a span that was so quick my gastroenterologist figured my body went “nope”
Same. I just wanna work towards requiring less of it and enjoying real plants that aren’t masquerading as something else.
Black bean burger patty? Let’s go!
Molded soy isolate thing engineered to seem like beef or shrimp or cheese or whatever? Gut rebellion.
It’s pea protein isolates for me. I went from “I need to poop” to “JESUSCHRIST GET OUTTA MY WAY NOW” in seconds from that fake meat.
Yeah, it’s hard to convince most Americans to replace meat with plant based protein. Once a 1:1 replacement exists, it’ll consume (ha) the meat industry rapidly like we’re seeing with energy.
most Americans
I’d argue “many people” is more appropriate
I was just talking about that same comparison yesterday! There are some big business interests in keeping older industries going. Whether it’s oil and gas, meat, or whatever. It takes a ton of political pressure over time to make change, but the truly biggest driver is cost. Once the alternative becomes cheaper, it will snowball.
That’s quite the understandment.
Non renewables have been subsidized for a century but now that renewables have become so cheap, the protection racket could no longer hold the technology back.
That’s… that’s how change… works?
The observation is that capitalism isn’t any good at efficiently allocating resources
I’m not sure how that’s true since we wouldn’t be here in the first place without capitalism. Its the only known system efficient enough to get this far, that we know of anyway.
Nevertheless, going back to my original point… Moving on to better technology only works once its feasible enough, no matter what the economic system is. Ideology doesn’t negate the reality of resources.
We need to be moving before technology becomes profitable. This is one of the major downsides of capitalism. We temper it somewhat with government investment and regulation, but buy-in-large, the profit motive is what drives practically all economic questions.
We simply do not have time.
We need to building more energy storage, like yesterday.
It just hasn’t made much financial sense to build it, because fossil fuels were cheap, now we’re slowly getting started.
If the profit motive wasn’t the motive above all else, we could get a whole bunch more done in the fight on climate change.
We can’t wait for capitalism. It’s just not fundamentally aligned with our preservation, it’s aligned with profit motive.
We’re lucky it’s becoming more profitable. But we’re still massively reliant on fossil fuels. It’s way, way, way, way not fast enough.
And yes, capitalism is the problem. If governments weren’t so afraid of being criticised for how they run something we’d bring back more state run organisations and just start building, even if it runs at a “loss”.
Or at the very, very least, we should be directly contracting private companies to build and maintain the infrastructure, but WE own it. Not them.
Conclusion, capitalism isn’t the only economic system we can imagine. We already temper it. We used to even temper it more than we do now (post-world war II in the anglosphere, as an example, until the neo-libs privatised practically everything).
The neo-liberal experiment has been a colossal failure.
Capitalism isn’t the end of history.
A recent study performed by actuaries, not environmental scientists, predicted a possible 50% global drop in GDP by 2070-2090. 50%! Scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades, but you know it’s bad when actuaries are doing the same thing. When the alternative is certain collapse, the alternatives become priceless. No matter what happens at this point, global society cannot exist in its current form in the future.
Shame that AI and data centers are offsetting all that good.
For the moment in the current AI boom, but not expected to in the long run. Just make the progress less fast. Still not ideal, of course, but don’t get into the mindset that we can’t make any progress at all when we still can and are doing so
From the article
Ember’s report shows that clean generation growth is set to outpace faster-rising demand in the coming years, marking the start of a permanent decline in fossil fuel generation. The current expected growth in clean generation would be sufficient to meet a demand increase of 4.1% per year to 2030, which is above expectations for demand growth.
Hopefully AI means more investment into renewables, as well.
Just in time for Trump to try and reignite coal! 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
More than half of the increase in solar generation in 2024 was in China
thanks for heavily investing in solar, based china.
Not Merica, drill baby drill. Roll dem coal
Good! More oil for us to burn! /S
Bad time to be trying to sell a lot of power I guess
