Well, this is awkward.
Flattered as I am to be the inaugural recipient of the
@majorbloodnok award for decorous disputation, I'm afraid I must now pick a hole in your response to me, mjb.
It's a matter of several things, @danceswithcats, and degrees of scale is certainly a major one of them.
This is an error, which dismisses my argument by advancing it: you broaden my statement to diminish its force, and I feel compelled to correct that.
Of all economic sectors, agriculture, forestry and land use is the second greatest contributor to global greenhouse emissions after energy use,
contributing 18.4% of emissions. Of that 18.4%, livestock and manure is the largest contributor, emitting 5.8% of total emissions.
I'll come back to the detail of that 18.4% in a moment, but I want to point something else out. The largest sector for emissions, energy, overlaps agriculture to a huge extent. Within the energy part of the graph, 73.2%, you will see that food and tobacco make up a further 1% and energy in agriculture and fishing contribute a further 1.7%. However, that is not the whole story either, because the road transport section makes up 11.9%, shipping, 1.7% and chemical and petro-chemical, 3.6%.
The production of animal corpses for human consumption takes a vast amount of road transport: the bulk transportation of feed, including plant products and petro-chemical products, both of which are shipped around the world to forcefeed the tortured animals, plus the transport of the live animals to their industrialised murder and the transport of their dismembered flesh, usually refrigerated, around the world again, make for a sizeable chunk of the 11.9% of road transport, and significant slices of the emissions of aviation (1.9% of emissions), shipping (1.7%) and rail (0.4%).
It's hard to find clear statistics about what proportion of the global chemical and petro-chemical industries are made up by 'animal feed'. These are two of the most secretive, power-crazed and brutish industrial sectors in history and they lie routinely. However, in my search, I did find a projection that said that it would be 17% of the petro-chemical industry of India by 2030, and that it was a growth industry for that country. If we extrapolate that to say that the more established global PC countries might be ahead of the growing Indian PC industry we might reasonably suspect that chemicals to bulk up animals make up perhaps 20 - 25% of the 3.6% of total emissions produced by those two industries.
Now let's get back to the agriculture, forestry and land use section of the graph again, shall we? You see, although livestock and manure is only 5.8% out of the 18.4%, the other parts of the AgForLU chunk are not innocent veg and grains destined for a virtuous nut loaf. This is the fact that matters, and because it matters so much, I'm going to format it in a nice visible header 3, with lovely colour:
Yes, 63% of all the protein consumed by humans is of vegetable origin. It is also, incidentally, far better for you than having dead flesh completing its cycle of decomposition in your long, herbivorous digestive system, but that's tangential to my present argument. What is more important about this hugely key truth is that we have far more agriculture than we need. Not only the 'livestock' farming, but all the wasted plant agriculture that is thrown away to produce cow farts and cancer is using up water, energy, destruction of habitats, carbon emissions due to ploughing and land clearance, and producing toxic pollution which is undermining the Earth's ability to heal its wounds.
All plant agriculture is not equal, though:
Food grown directly for human consumption, rather than being fed through a 'value added' animal torture process, is the least harmful agricultural sector there is.
I could go on, but I think that has covered the key points. None of this stuff is secret, it's just routinely shouted down. My point is that, unless you are an alt-right climate change denier, there really is not much of an excuse for defending the consumption of meat, beyond a nihilistic hatred of the world and a desire to see the apocalypse in your lifetime.
I agree that it is important to observe certain courtesies in human discourse, particularly on the internet, but I do not think that those courtesies override an obligation to truth. I may be less ad hominen in my approach than
@vegan89, but, fundamentally, I agree with them:
it is wrong to advocate the eating of meat as a moral equivalence to veganism, here or anywhere else. That is, wrong in the sense of counter to the evident facts, as well as morally questionable. It is, however, understandable. Many, many memes and tropes defend meat-eating as a norm and a desirable right, and they are working:
meat consumption is increasing and I regularly have to cycle around the gang of servile slobs who queue on a busy road with the engines of their tosser tanks idling so they can get their dose of carcinogenic MacDonalds' 'drive-thru', but popularity does not make a practice right. It just makes it something that unthinking people accept, like warfare, bigotry or inequality.
Truth matters, even more than manners:
Sector by sector: where do global greenhouse gas emissions come from?
https://josephpoore.com/Science 360 6392 987 - Accepted Manuscript.pdf
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
Meat Industry: How Big Is The Meat Industry & Why Is It Bad?
Peace out.
DWC