We could, we just won't. People have been trying to promote that for the past several decades and meat consumption globally has just gone up. The book Clean Meat devotes a chapter to this; historically every culture has consumed more meat when they could afford it. Most people just like it.

We almost hunted whales to extinction for their oil. That didn't stop because we persuaded people to quit using oil in their lamps. It stopped because someone invented kerosene. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., and then in thirty years it was gone.