Livestock breeding isn't inherently unsustainable. E.g. you can have closed-off poultry or pork farms with greenhouse-fed animals, all powered by wind or solar, with sewage processing to ensure there's no external pollution. This isn't sci-fi, it exists today in e.g. the denser parts of western Europe.

Yes it's costlier than beef from the developing world raised on cut-down rainforest land, but growing lab is a lot more expensive.

You can argue that it's inefficient, sure, but so is a vegan eating an avacado instead of white rice. Things can be relatively inefficient and still be sustainable.

growing lab meat is expensive because it requires an economy of scale.

I wasn’t talking about an agricultural collapse. I mean the natural food chain will collapse.

If you kill all the mammals, then the birds of prey will go extinct, and stuff the mammals eat will overrun what’s left.

If you don’t, then the mammals will keep spreading all sorts of pandemics.

For example, if you live in Silicon Valley, start feeding the squirrels in the woods near you. Eventually, they’ll give you the Bubonic Plague.

The plague is not a big deal these days, thanks to antibiotics, but this is an entire hemisphere away from where it hit, and hundreds of years later.

It wouldn’t surprise me if you could already catch covid from a squirrel if you tried hard enough.

Apparently people catch it from bats fairly regularly, and on average, they don’t get nearly as close to humans as an average rodent would.

> If you kill all the mammals, then the birds of prey will go extinct

Birds of prey eat a lot more than just mammals, e.g. fish, reptiles, other birds etc. So no, if there magically weren't any mammals tomorrow most species of birds of prey would survive.