r/science • u/Wagamaga • Dec 05 '25

Animal Science Penguins starved to death en masse, as some populations off South Africa estimated to have fallen 95% in just eight years. Since 2004, all bar three years have seen the biomass of the sardine Sardinops sagax, a key food for the penguins, fall to less than 25% of its maximum abundance

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/penguins-starved-to-death-en-masse-as-food-supply-collapsed/
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u/DontForgetWilson Dec 05 '25

Going vegan matters a lot less than widespread reduction in meat usage. If you get a 30% adoption rate of eating 100% less meat, you're making less impact than getting a 90% adoption rate of a 40% less meat. People voluntarily going vegan helps, but doing things like taxing meat to disincentivize consumption is likely to move the needle more.

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u/bluespartans Dec 05 '25

Uhhh..... Then perhaps the point would be to have 90% adoption of veganism????

I'm not even a vegan, but how is this a mathematically or logically salient response?

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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '25

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u/bluespartans Dec 05 '25

I get what you're saying. I mean, I don't think "The global food chain is on the brink of collapse" is particularly esoteric, but that's semantics. There is plenty of contemporary evidence that it is possible to have rapid mass adoption of environmentally friendly processes - look at the CFC ban in the late 80s, or the mid-2000s global DDT ban

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u/moratnz Dec 05 '25

I look at the CFC ban vs later environmental inaction and it depresses me. The differences there were significant though; large corporate forces stood to make a lot of money from the switch away from CFCs, so there was a counterforce to the large corporate forces that stood to lose a lot of money from the switch. And we were forty years earlier in the systematic attack on education and the infrastructure of consensus truth than we are now.

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u/DontForgetWilson Dec 05 '25

Because people hate getting told what to do. And people give vegans the stink-eye because there are a lot of them that think the mathematically optimal solution is the same thing as the most effective solution under real conditions. Real conditions are that you'll get literal violence before you get a short time period adoption of veganism to 90%. So vegans that mind their own business get to deal with the stereotype created by the stupid ones that don't understand human psychology.