It takes far more fertilizer and irrigation to produce food for mass-produced meat. Well-maintained pasture has diverse plants year round soaking up a small amount of CO2 versus land for corn that is plowed under. And land for ethical meat often has trees to shade the animals. Mass-produced meat requires highly intensive cleaning of stalls. And for things like beef, it is still unclear whether one diet or another produces more methane, which is a huge portion of the climate impact.
Then there are things like what is done with the manure. In a well-managed factory farm, it is digested. But there are tons of stories about polluted rivers near factory farms that make it clear that often isn't the case. Those polluted rivers result in algal blooms, which is a whole other matter.
Basically, a statement like "more resources to ethically produce meat" confuses the price to a farmer of producing meat with a calculation that incorporates all the externalities, which is a whole lot less clear.
What? It is pretty clear cut that humans eating plants directly requires growing a lot less plants than humans eating meat, which ate those plants. Animals don't grow on sunlight, so they are basically a reactor for turning plants from one type of food into another. And the laws of thermodynamics tell us they aren't 100% efficient, so... eating meat requires more plants to be grown than eating plants themselves...
Had the herbivores been harvested from the wild this would all be true. In practice the herbivores are fed not just grass but beans, grains and other produce. Which has to be grown just like the vegetables eaten by vegetarians. Since the 'conversion factor' - the efficiency by which an animal transforms 1 kg of fodder into 1 kg of edible animal - varies from about 2 (insects) via 5-7 (chicken) via 9-11 (pig) to 14-18 (cow) it becomes clear that it takes a lot more grains, beans and such to feed a carnivore than it takes to feed a vegetarian.
After meeting a couple of "relaxed vegetarians", who said something like "I'm vegetarian, but if there is no vegetarian option, I can eat meat too" my partner became pseudo vegetarian: she allows herself to eat meet one weekend per month. As myself, I became indoors vegetarian, as we do not consume meet indoors.
EDIT: I'm honestly curious. It doesn't bother me too much, and I'm sure I've made comments that I thought were valuable but in hindsight were probably just me wanting to be present. It's mostly the consistency of such comments from you that fascinates me.
But it's honestly fucking weird that you are tracking my comments.
That said, I did write a bunch of code that actually allows me to track a user's comments. But I wrote that mostly so I can get updates if infrequent but great commenters post something. Perhaps that is a bit weird.
There is no such meat in the beef or chicken industry. There are sustainable methods to raise and provide enough meat for the demand and there are ethical methods (e.g. cage free, free range) that are absolutely not sustainable given the demand for meat. There is no overlap.
If demand is lowered by the population at large consuming a lot less meat, then it's perfectly reasonable to produce meat ethically and sustainably.
Chickens/eggs, etc.
The utilitarian in me wants to see the existence of the pig as an ethical net positive overall.
Eating meat can actually be a moral act. If the animal you eat lead a better life than it otherwise would have because of the care you provided in raising it, it's a net good. To put this in perspective, imagine you were impoverished and living a miserable existence and someone offered to let you live in comfort and luxury, and promised to take care of your offspring, but in exchange you had to agree to euthanasia at age 30. That might not be attractive to you from a first world perspective, but a lot of people would take that in a heartbeat.
Reducing meat consumption is by far the easiest way to reduce your carbon footprint.