I don't see this making any sense at all. Why would eating less meat result in more palm oil consumption? For me this sounds like a complete nonsense justification for not reducing the amount of meat in one's diet.

Because you still need some kind of food to replace that meat with?

The point being that not all foods are ethically made. It's not as easy as meat == always the only immoral food choice and not-meat == always good. By reducing meat consumption, if you replace it with other non ethically sourced foods, are yo really helping? And if those new foods take advantage of human workers and slavery, is that better than an animal's suffering?

They aren't saying "Well plants can also be bad, so just stick with meat." It's "if you switch blindly without any research, you may actually ending causing more suffering for people and animals in the world than if you had stuck with meat."

Edit since I can't reply to posts below mine. It's not just about calories. I really think this sentence was overlooked from the parent post way up:

"What is more moral, eating a steak from a cow that was killed for its meat by decently paid, respected workers - or - eating a chocolate bar made with palm oil whose products were farmed using slave and child labor?"

Research conditions of cacao workers if you think this example is a joke or being made up.

Sorry for being impatient and calling your argument nonsense; the main problem I see with that is the fact that these issues are orthogonal. You won't be trading meat to palm oil chocolate and unethical bananas. Portraying these two as issues that should be weighed against each other is not representative of the actual outcomes, and thus feels to me like unnecessary spreading of uncertainty.

According to the suffering and environmental damage line of reasoning, the reason meat is strictly worse is because if you grew plants instead of animals you'd have 8x as many calories to eat. I might be off, it may be some other factor, but I do know it's much larger than 2x.

Why are you comparing average meat to the most unethical plant foods? Only an insane troll would stop eating meat to replace the calories with the worst possible plants, and obviously average plants are much less bad than average meat.