Why didn't people just assume he was joking about half the population of the earth dying being a good thing? Have we really gone so far down the rabbit hole that people are taking
A Modest Proposal as a dead serious suggestion?
In either case, while losing all our cattle would be good environmentally in a lot of ways, it's also unthinkable to a subset of the population, is what I was getting at. But that's also where some of those people are headed. To put it another way, Fido isn't going to be living a happy life in a fallout bunker either, and is equally dependent on a working biosphere with a diverse bounty of life. Global Warming is going to kill a lot of people's dogs, but by the time that becomes clear enough to trigger a reaction in the more relaxed, the dogs are already doomed.
In any case, the aftereffects of mass starvation due to Climate Change would prevent any significant attempts at reversing the problem, since we would be bleeding the valuable raw resource providers needed for that kind of infrastructure. It could potentially be done, but I don't think it would be, particularly if the rich do the same kind of sociopathic stuff they've been doing for the past half century and just try to fuck off to Mars or to some fallout shelter with a poppy mascot and robot butlers. Leaving the middle class stranded alone with a lower class that's no longer able to go after the real culprits and is hopping mad. It's not good juju at all, that.
Also, what Hector said. A big part of our existing hydroponics labs would probably get busted up by butthurt mobs with the mentality of "IF I DON'T EAT, YOU DON'T EAT" because people are very unlikely to think about the survival of the species unless it means they get laid.