this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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20 years ago you could have said "Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it's absolutely futile."
Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.
I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won't have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.
Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.
The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That's true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.
there is no causal link between any of those events, and increased demand decrease availability.
I don't really believe what economists claim, v but you don't even seem to know what they say in the first place
In the short term. Over the mid and long terms, highly profitable demand can induce supply in a free market system.
Solar and Wind electricity are both great cases in point. Once they became more cost-efficient to build and operate than coal plants, the demand for coal plummeted while the demand for new green installations surged.
I'm inclined to follow the data, at least at first glance. We're entering a CO^2^ production peak, in large part thanks to the cost-spread between installing/operating new fossil fuel plants and their green peers.
There are other factors at play. I can't get the mysterious explosion of the Nordstream II pipeline out of my head and what the consequences of climate change are of that. Then there's the closing of the Suez trade and the collapse in development of Balkan Crude. But the incredibly cheap alternatives - largely pioneered and industrially propagated by the world's largest socialist state - can't be ignored as having a huge influence on consumption habits.
Can animal-free meat follow the same path? Idk, maybe. But given the way the US developers and investors had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a modern green grid, I suspect we'll see meat alternatives take off abroad long before they become truly popular in the US.