Behavioral Economics, Beef, and Climate

Recently I've written a number of posts related to the behavioral economics of food choices, beef consumption and climate impacts.

Picture This: Putting Beef and Climate into Perspective. This post summarizes some of the the arguments found below and illustrates the tradeoffs and numerous arbitrary choices we make on a daily basis and their climate impact. 

Nudging Back: Turning Off Your Camera May Be Good for the Climate.  Beef seems to get a bad rap regarding climate impact and there is a lot of attention being paid to reducing beef consumption. In this post I discuss how many other arbitrary behaviors (based on recent research related to internet usage) we could change that may even be more impactful than dietary changes. This may be especially true when you consider how hard it is to change behavior and the relevant costs and tradeoffs involved. 

The Ethics of Dietary Nudges and Behavior Change Focused on Climate and Sustainability. In this post I discuss some recent research related to nudges used to impact food choices favoring vegetarian vs. meat based options. It is important when designing for behavior change that choice architectures reflect the science and honestly represent tradeoffs that are relevant to the context and particulars of circumstances and place and the importance of ethics when it comes to scaling what works.

Canceling Science and Monetizing Outrage. In this post I discuss a recent NYT article's treatment of scientist Frank Mitloehner whose research focuses on the impact of beef related GHG emissions and how changing business models brought on by digital media can bias public perceptions and amplify misinformation. 

The discussion in the posts linked above actually get much broader than beef. For more related posts see all posts with the  behavioral economics tag.