> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.

This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.

In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.

A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.

There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.

I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.

This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.

The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.

Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.

Vegans have never and will never appreciably reduced global emissions.

Global meat production is only increasing.

You're delusional with main character syndrome?

Take a look to a soybean plantation for example, biodiversity totally destroyed. Also, are you doing a physical main work?

But someone still has to eat up all those cows before their methane mucks up the environment.

And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.