> Vegans aren’t trying to clean up the food industry, they want to end it
If we’re going to talk about ignoring nuance, making statements like that isn’t doing any favors. Animal agriculture =/= the entire food industry. Plant agriculture exists as well
> Many vegans recognize it as a choice, like the abortion issue, they aren’t against any abortions they only choose not to themselves have an abortion
The problem with that characterization is that things can really only be a personal choice with no effects on any one else when we’re talking about non-sentient beings. Without that presumption the assertion makes less sense. For instance, most in the west generally don’t conceptualize killing a random healthy dog as a personal choice.
Even if we set aside the creatures themselves, the environmental factors alone make it difficult to conceptualize as a pure 100% personal choice. Is it a personal choice to let an industry keep us from climate targets on their own?
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
And the issue on that end is quite fundamental. It takes a lot of feed to raise non-human animals. They lose most of the energy using it to perform body functions, move around, etc. Even best case production just comes out worse than worst case plant production for humans
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
If you tried to use something like grass-fed production instead, you’d find it generally does not scale and ends up with increased methane production
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall
methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
> Vegans aren’t trying to clean up the food industry, they want to end it
If we’re going to talk about ignoring nuance, making statements like that isn’t doing any favors. Animal agriculture =/= the entire food industry. Plant agriculture exists as well
> Many vegans recognize it as a choice, like the abortion issue, they aren’t against any abortions they only choose not to themselves have an abortion
The problem with that characterization is that things can really only be a personal choice with no effects on any one else when we’re talking about non-sentient beings. Without that presumption the assertion makes less sense. For instance, most in the west generally don’t conceptualize killing a random healthy dog as a personal choice.
Even if we set aside the creatures themselves, the environmental factors alone make it difficult to conceptualize as a pure 100% personal choice. Is it a personal choice to let an industry keep us from climate targets on their own?
(emphasis mine)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
And the issue on that end is quite fundamental. It takes a lot of feed to raise non-human animals. They lose most of the energy using it to perform body functions, move around, etc. Even best case production just comes out worse than worst case plant production for humans
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
If you tried to use something like grass-fed production instead, you’d find it generally does not scale and ends up with increased methane production
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401