True. Do we resign ourselves to continue that trend into the future, or do we learn our lesson?
The human being is an odd creature with certain behaviors that have been noted since Ancient Greece. One of those behaviors is that the young consider themselves immortal (figuratively speaking) and tend to discount their elders when they are harangued about health issues.
So, it’s not “resignation” as much it is an acknowledgement of reality. Trying to alter human behavior is a difficult proposition. Take a look at attempts to keep young people from having sex until marriage, for one example.
I wish that were true. If you’re poor, the most calories per dollar is going to come from frozen dinners at the dollar store. What you’re describing is how my family eats, with a heavy emphasis on legumes.
Hmmmmm. The discussion should be “number of meals” not “calories”. If you want your biggest bang for your caloric buck, just buy a bottle of corn oil.
That said, it would take some work to convince me that a week’s worth of dollar store frozen dinners is less expensive than a week’s worth of taters, rice, and beans, with a few other inexpensive vegetables thrown in.
Cooking like this require more time and equipment, not to mention a workable kitchen space. It requires that a person not live in a food desert. These things aren’t available for many of the working poor.
If you have a home (of any sort) and you’re working, then you have access to a grocery store; you’re going to work, after all; eventually the bus will go past a grocery store. Plus, I suspect the number of people who can cook a frozen dinner but not boil a potato is very tiny.
And of course if you have no job or home, you have a lot more problems in your life than not having access to “preventive medicine”. Those folks are kind of beyond the scope of your original article.
Smart policies can easily reduce consumption by making those foods cost more, and can drive companies to make the foods healthier if they’ll profit from it. No doubt what I’m proposing will be fought tooth and nail by agribusiness.
Well……..part of my point is that the foods that have that shit in them are already more expensive than taters and beans.
We don’t need to tell China anything; they’re doing far more to avoid climate devastation than we are.
That’s largely because they’ve already devastated so much of their country. They are FAR FAR FAR and away more polluted than we are. We can spend nothing, and it will take them billions and decades just to get back to where we are today.
I’ve been in Bejing on a bad day. It is not like anything any American has experience with.
And…….they also have more coal fired plants in development. Enough to match the entire US coal-fired output as it currently exists.
How about we show the world what it looks like to commit our unmatched resources to being part of the solution? “This is hard” is not a reason to shy away from what might be the undoing of the human race.
Nobody said “it was hard”.
If it were only hard, that would be fantastic. The problem is that it’s many times MORE than just “hard”, bordering on “not humanly possible.” I don’t care how “hard” it is to go faster than the speed of light, we’re not doing it by 2030 (if ever) no matter how much of our “unmatched resources” we commit to doing so.
We’re not going to have a solution to this problem until everyone gets on the same page. Part of that “same page” means that the people who think that THIS:
….can be substantially altered in 10 years without causing massive death and destruction admit that there’s no short term solutions here.
Time to think out of the box.
