Each individual is facing the following choice in life:
- sacrifice to save the planet, and fail
- or not
People want to immediately jump to “if everyone would just …”
Nobody is looking at an “everyone does X” button. People only have their “I do X” button available.
So that is literally the answer to your question. Very few people would sacrifice the civilization to eat a cheeseburger. But nobody has that choice or that power in their hands. Their choice is eat the cheeseburger or not, and the survival of civilization stays rigidly the same between those two choices.
Why do people eat food they know isn’t good for their health? Why do people continue to buy products from companies that have proven to only sell bad products or engage in scumbag practices?
They all have the same answer.
Same reason we use electricity despite not being 100% green energy and thus being even worse for the earth?
If you actually wanna guilt this question then the fuck are you doing using your coal and gas powered electricity to do it?
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, because the capitalists have seen to it that you will never be permitted to make an ethical choice that would dare compete with what they expect you to choose.
Being a moralizing prick doesn’t send any message, what gets people to change is making that change easy, that’s why instead of being terminally online fuckwads, british vegangelists spread the good news by hosting free kitchens, volunteering to take people grocery shopping on their own pound, teaching vegan cooking classes, and all other sorts of actually addressing literally any of the actual concerns people have about going vegan instead of being a condescending snob about it.
So honestly, in your opinion, one of the only ways a vegan can change people’s minds is to take them shopping and PAY for their food for them. Amazing, this is a new level of shitty push the blame away behaviour. Pathetic.
You’re saying that trying to motivate people positively to move on from meat is “push the blame away” behavior. But I think tut-tutting individuals who eat meat is pushing the blame away.
While there are some people who believe that eating meat is an absolute moral wrong no matter where or when it takes place in human history, a lot of people who feel eating meat is immoral feel this way because of what the meat industry does, both to the animals and to the planet. Five thousand years ago, people weren’t supporting the meat industry and all its wrongs by eating meat.
So considering it to be pathetic to try to effect real reduction in people’s meat consumption because the methods shift blame away from the individual meat eater seems really ironic to me, as well as completely counterproductive, if your goal is less meat consumption in the world.