Except smoking is actively harmful to your body. Meat is much more controversial. Actually, it's not a controversy at all to many practitioners and doctors promoting a low carb lifestyle. There is a lot of scientific evidence to support eating meat of all kinds being incredibly healthy!

So comparing eating meat to smoking seems pretty ridiculous.

Also if you look at government reports on greenhouse gas emissions animal agriculture only accounts for < 3% of U.S. emissions. It's a factor for sure, but not worth our primary focus imho.

It's not 3 but 9%.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Except I am only comparing the effect dramatic pictures had on sales. (Not that much). I'm not equating the two in terms of health or legislation that should be brought forth. Implying I am seems pretty ridiculous. :p

Rising meat prices, for whatever reason, would tend to reduce consumption.

It depends on the type of marketing those pictures were. Pictures used in anti-smoking campaigns were of the humans consuming them and the related health issues that ensued. They weren't of manufacturing cigarettes.

If you showed a bunch of in shape healthy people on low carb diets I'm not sure that would cause meat sales to decline.

If you mean slaughter, well maybe it would have an effect on sales, maybe it wouldn't. But it's not comparable to the anti-smoking ads.

Low carb is... maybe possible without meat, but it's very challenging. I'm actually in the middle of trying to figure out how to make it work myself.

>Even though smoking is in the same category as processed meat (Group 1 carcinogen), the magnitude or level of risk associated with smoking is considerably higher (e.g., for lung cancer about 20 fold or 2000% increased risk) from those associated with processed meat – an analysis of data from 10 studies, cited in the IARC report showed an 18 percent increased risk in colorectal cancer per 50g processed meat increase per day. To put this in perspective, according to the Global Disease Burden Project 2012, over 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to high processed meat intake vs. 1 million deaths per year attributable to tobacco smoke.[1][2]

It's not as cut and try and you may think.

[1]https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/repo... [2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

Off-topic but I believe you meant "cut and dried" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cut-and-dried).

Hah, yes! It seems my brain stopped working today.

Not to disparage the environmental argument, but for a movement in which a majority of its members also lean socialist I see a lot of arguments that in practice boil down to "Only the 1% should be able to enjoy meat/own personal transport/fly on vacation/etc."

I mean, I don't care if you aim for either "Luxury for all" or "Luxury isn't sustainable" but at least be consistent.

Where's the inconsistency? Presumably the socialist environmentalists you refer to want both reduced consumption of products that harm the environment and a massive decrease in inequality. So they don't want 'only the 1%' to be able to afford those things; they want everyone to be able to afford to use them very sparingly.

Well the only alternative route to reducing consumption, if you don't want it via pricing is legislation bringing forth rationing, or outlawing marketing. I'd imagine both those would be more difficult.

It pretty clearly isn't sustainable. So what would you do?

We can start by eliminating agricultural subsidies and import tariffs, so that market pricing can work to allocate resources to their best use.

I'm of the opinion that trying to politically solve any humanitarian issue while the socialeconomic situation is still a clusterfuck would only result in yellow vests burning down your capital while a Trump expy gets elected. Better start investing into sea walls and squirreling away endangered species DNA because it's going be years before we untangle this clusterfuck enough to start slowing the train down