Veganism isn't better for the environment than significantly reducing the total amount of consumed meat. Animals play an important, difficult-to-replace role in making agriculture sustainable. Animals can be herded on land that's difficult to farm on, animals can consume parts of farmed plants that humans cannot, and animals produce products that humans cannot replicate without significantly more work.
Edit: I see a bunch of vegans who aren't really engaging with the argument. To be clear, anyone who makes statements about how things are right now to try to disprove this is probably arguing in bad faith. I'm not responding to comments anymore because, while it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, y'all aren't making any good points.
Furthermore, I'm not anti-vegan, but now I'm tempted to be. So many people I've engaged with have displayed all of the worst vegan stereotypes I've heard about. I've always assumed it was chuds making shit up, but no I just hadn't met any of the terminally online creeps in the vegan community yet OMFG.
We have the technologies. The list goes on and on and on. We just need to employ them instead of waiting further for magical fixes.
Posting and liking memes is great, but real change comes from actions. If you are as concerned as we are about climate change, please consider joining or supporting climate activists near you.
"No not that! I want to do EXACTLY as I did before but YOU do something about it. Can't you like build a technology to suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere or something?"
"We need new technologies that can be controlled by a megacorporation to make a select few rich, not things that individuals can do or use that can break the hold of existing monopolies"
Yeah we already have the technology needed, we have to implement them.
And much of the tech is actually very old. Electric trains are like a century old. So for a lot of things, we have to re-implement technology we foolishly removed.
Oil was just a bad technology path. Gotta get back on the right path.
20 years ago a few key technologies were still missing, like grid storage battery technology. But there are multiple promising ways now. Unfortunately lack of massive funding for research and development and patents means we'll have to wait another 20 years to produce them really cheaply on the free market. Otherwise it would be unfair to the poor inventor! /s
To be fair, a lot of the new technologies people talk about regarding this are some of these things, but improved. For instance, better batteries or solar cells, recent improvement to which has already had a pretty notable impact (for instance, better solar panels making solar energy cheaper, which makes even entities concerned only with profit more likely to adopt it.)
There is only one true solution, and that is abolishing the explotation of the planiate and the workers for private profit. Capitalism will kill us all
If you can install toilets, make it entirely and consistently accessible for humans with disabilities, solve people who refuse to shower or understand how headphones are supposed to work you can convince me only then public transit should be considered a usable alternate form of transportation.
So far as I’ve seen the only people who are boasting public transport as a workable alternative never have to spend more than 20 minutes on a single bus to get to where they are going and have full use of their legs.
The biggest technology needed is actually excavators so we can dig ditches everywhere to soak up rain water and refill aquifers. Also building retaining walls, terraces and swales using permaculture style water management to reforest degraded grazing lands.
Veganism isn't inherently better for the environment. You're looking for sustainable agriculture. End goal would be a hydroponic grow tower, powered by renewables. Perfect growing conditions year round with little to no runoff. Doesn't work for all crops currently, and takes a ton of power to operate, though.
Heat pumps really shouldn't be on this list. They're no magic bullet for heating. They require electricity to run. As it gets colder outside the heat pump loses efficiency until you're somewhere in the teens and you'd just be better off using straight electric heat strips in your air handler. Most electricity generation still creates carbon emissions. High efficiency gas furnaces create very low carbon emissions. I have an open-air natural gas fireplace insert that can run unvented (probably shouldn't, but it can) do to how well it combusts it's fuel leaving virtually no CO.
None of these things are a solution – they're measures for extending our status quo and minimizing how fucked we are, but we're still guaranteed to be fucked.