We're at a point where whoever thinks we're fine is totally uninformed. We're living in a mass extinction that is measurably happening faster than the one of the dinosaurs (spoiler: they disappeared). We're going for 4 degrees warming (and that's a conservative estimate), which means that half of the planet will become uninhabitable (as in, if you stay outside without life support, you die). What happens when half the planet wants to move (together with all their military force) where the other half of the planet is?
And what's the answer to that? "Hmm I think we will miraculously find a solution, in the meantime I want my burger".
> Completely agree. Reducing or getting rid of livestock animal agriculture will help with many major challenges we have today, like climate change, loss of biodiversity, animal cruelty, antimicrobial resistance. But hey, gotta have that cheap burger, huh?
They said "I don't care if it's cheap, but I want my burger".
Can you understand where I come from?
There are models of agriculture that achieve better sustainability by using a small number of livestock as unskilled labor to emulate the wild environments that the plants our gene stock come from were adapted to. This will likely be the model moving forward, especially as petrochemical fertilizers get more expensive.
“Just enough” livestock will still get too old to breed or provide labor. They will still have too many babies in good weather and need to be culled in subsequent bad years. That doesn’t put T-bone steaks on everybody’s plate, but it does provide enough animal protein to approximate the traditional Asian diet of a few ounces of animal protein per day, as soup stock and a bit of variety.
The future will still have chicken soup even if burger joints go away.
2) Your ire is misdirected. Whether this individual does or does not eat meat has 0.000000001% impact on the meat production industry. Your energy is much better spent advocating for policies that reduce overall meat consumption, as the GP was voicing their support for.