I absolutely agree with you whenever I can I like to stay in a Paleo Diet because it makes me feel a lot better than any other diet I have tried.
However, whenever I read comments about the environment on HN I always get this Malthusian feeling from them. Their story always revolves around the fact that we are consuming resources today that future generations won't get and that we are essentially dooming the future of humanity by polluting with CO2 and consuming meat. It's essentially Malthus' argument in disguise.
I always approach these kinds of arguments with extreme caution because you are essentially betting against humanity's ability to innovate. And before anyone jumps at me yes, global warming is real and it will have a real cost on society. But before you advocate for one radical policy or another consider whether the actual cost of global warming from that activity actually justifies it economically.
Yes, that's why I mention dishonesty in my original post. Most people who argue hard for not eating meat because of climate change actually have deeper motives (animal welfare/not causing animals suffering), and will use whichever argument, no matter how flawed, to push their agenda. I know this because I used to belong to these circles.
By methane production (a comon bogeyman for animal rights activists to push for banning meat use), all of agriculture together makes for only 1/4 of total methane production, the rest is transportation, manufacture and such. Of that 1/4, cows are responsible for cca 1/3-1/2 of it.
As an interesting side note, rice production also generates large amounts of methane (because of anaerobic conditions in rice paddies): cows generated 189 tons of it from 1996 to 2001, while rice production has generated 112 tons in the same period. So rice productions generates 2/3 as much methane as cows:
I agree with you about the Malthusian argument, it's similar to how gloomy people were about our ability to feed ourselves before we invented artificial fertilizer - I believe that the best improvement for future of our planet will be some clean energy revolution - most likely working fusion. Once we'll have that, most of problematic emissions will be taken care of.
Also, considering the rapid progress in genetic science, I wouldn't be surprised if we will be able to create biological machines such as a standalone chicken's digestive and reproductive tract - you would have it in your kitchen, and feed it scraps; from them it would produce eggs. And you could optimize your nutrition by adding specific nutrients to scraps, such as omega3 fat acids.
Big oil drives development in emerging economies, that's a better justification than eating animals than some blind progress one.
I think the best argument for veganism is simply what right do we have to take another creatures life purely for our matter of taste. I wasn't directly talking abkut veganism though in the parent.
