Earth' Recent CLimate Spiral 2.0

[The Grand Nudger]

 In general this push to produce more and to always be more is also set to stop at some point. In many countries population will have to stagnate and then start to decrease after a given level. This should give us plenty of room to rethink our models of production, consumption, transportation etc.

We need to rethink them either way.  
 

    For instance is it not simply better to consume the stuff that are produced locally, by local farmers and consume them hours or days after they have been picked up?

Better from the climate perspective, and also..possibly, by product quality standards - yes.  I can be seriously aggressive on this so I wanted to take a moment, right here, to say that there are reasons we've organized production this way - and those reasons may or may not trump any environmental or quality concerns...in the end.  Local pockets might contribute less co2 and they can clearly deliver a quality product...but they've also lead to mass starvation and product contamination.    
 

   I’m asking this because I saw how some Israeli agricultural engineers are messing up with tomatoes so that they still look and taste good up to a month after they have been picked up. Here I have unmodified “pink” tomatoes. They are not that expensive, their shapes can be a little twisted etc. but I know these are better.

Any well-bred tomato picked ripe is shelf stable for about that long.  This is something that doesn't comport with our experience as consumers because we fail to account for how much time has elapsed between the tomato being picked, and when -we- picked it up at the store.  That knowledge deficit is extremely marketable. People can be convinced that your tomatos are better because they last longer. They don't, but the consumer doesn't need to know that and it puts money into my pocket...so....you just nod your head and agree.
 

    But that doesn’t work for all crops. I think apples for instance need to be a little protected so they end up being good looking and without any hole in them. And I also saw mandarins that had turned green because of whatever chemical or hormone has been used on them.

Being good looking™ is the major problem for carbon neutral food, and it's a consumer problem.  So...not easy to solve on this end.  
 

   And concerning meat, I think happy animals that are being raised in the open air are much tastier than the ones who are grown indoors.
 
   And on eggs and dairy products: Some people are looking for ways to replace these with insects for instance because the Methane emission that are related to the production of these animals are very high. Also plastic is simply the best packaging method for dairy products. So people are looking for ways to decrease the consumption of these products.

Don't even get me started on how this whole bit about livestock and methane is just a product of fossil fuel companies coopting the green transition and laying blame on someone else for what they've cleanly and squarely done.  Absent synthetic fertilizers, we'll need more livestock, not less.  Good luck using bugs to fertilize crops.  In general, we try to keep them as far the fuck away as possible.  
 

   Finally, too many people means too many carbon footprint. Some people say that if we were 4 Billion instead of 8 on this planet, than we would not need to be so vigilant about everything as we have to today.

This is another misconception.  It's not even the case -now- that the number of people directly correlates to emissions.  A scant few percent of people on the earth account for the majority of the pollutants on the earth.  It's clearly not an issue of how many of us there are - and supposing we lost half our population we'd better hope it was the right half that contained that fraction and that the remaining half didn't keep pumping more of the same into the atmosphere because we'd just be buying time until we had to address it - and we should address it even if there were no climate crisis.  
 

   Still things are moving in the right direction. In the second half of the 90’s people started to sue tobacco companies because they were lying about their products and creating fake science to support the view that “there is no proof cigarettes create cancer”. In continental Europe it still took us a decade or so to move young people away from tobacco products. And today the same Industry is trying to gain new customers by promoting E-cigarettes among young people.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Ma..._Agreement
 
In the end, social interest did triumph over corporate interest and I can see that a similar trend is happening with Big-Oil companies now:
 
 https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-sides-y...50150.html
 
The only thing is that we need to move much faster now. Also, the Fossil fuel industry is much bigger then the tobacco industry. So they may be tempted to do too little too late, but there might be a point in which even they are going to realize that they are going to die If they keep doing things the way they always did.

Nope.  You'll die, not them.  That's the point of being rich.  Think of them as preppers, but with money, in a disaster they're continually creating.
 

See: in the 90’s Big-Oil refused to admit Climate Change existed. And the main argument was that action against climate change would cost the economy a lot and that the effects of climate change would not disrupt the economy a lot. This was the main rhetoric. I was / we were described as “climate alarmists”.
 
In the most recent COP’s oil companies are being invited. That’s because nobody can keep paying the bills of so many disasters and say this is economically sustainable. [/Hide]

That's an interesting way to describe the fossil fuel industries capture of the process. It's not a good faith effort, and that's why people have started grumbling about trying to hold them accountable ala the tobacco companies. Some of the two-faced duplicitous shit they peddle makes me blush, and I'm a seasoned bullshitter.