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Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.

1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.

Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.

2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.

Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.

3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?

No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.

4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?

Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?

5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?

Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.

6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?

While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.

Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t

Here's some quick napkin-calculations. A gallon of water weighs a little over 8 pounds. If you consider meat is mostly water, that means a pound of meat "takes" about a pint of water out of the environment. The other 2499 7/8 gallons are returned to the environment to be evaporated, filtered by the ground, or otherwise recycled. But they're not "taken" by any sane use of that word. To use a sensational figure like 2500 gallons, it's obvious to most that it's sensationalism.

As discussed here, the water figure comes primarily from what is used to irrigate pasture, and is higher for beef because cattlemen grow pastures in drier climates than chicken or pork farmers. That is not a beef problem as much as it is a land-use problem. If we kicked the cattlemen out of California, that pastureland would become something else, like an orchard, and then we'd have an apple problem instead of a beef problem.

This is market forces at work. It just shows that our demand for beef is high enough that it pays for a cattleman to grow pastures on arid land. The only other place you hear of irrigation at that extreme is in the UAE, since that's the only type of land they have. Make irrigation more expensive, those costs will just be passed on in the price of meat, fewer people will want to pay the higher prices, and the most expensive operations will pivot to something else. Chances are that land would not be returned to its natural, arid state, though, so you've still got a water-use problem, plus higher beef prices.

Economics, Bruh!

The focus solely on CO2 is fueled in part by misconceptions. It’s true that human activity produces vastly more CO2 than all other greenhouse gases put together. However, this does not mean it is responsible for most of the earth’s warming. Many other greenhouse gases trap heat far more powerfully than CO2, some of them tens of thousands of times more powerfully. When taking into account various gases’ global warming potential—defined as the amount of actual warming a gas will produce over the next one hundred years—it turns out that gases other than CO2 make up most of the global warming problem.

Even this overstates the effect of CO2, because the primary sources of these emissions—cars and power plants—also produce aerosols. Aerosols actually have a cooling effect on global temperatures, and the magnitude of this cooling approximately cancels out the warming effect of CO2. The surprising result is that sources of CO2 emissions are having roughly zero effect on global temperatures in the near-term!

This result is not widely known in the environmental community, due to a fear that polluting industries will use it to excuse their greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists had the data reviewed by other climate experts, who affirmed Hansen’s conclusions. However, the organization also cited climate contrarians’ misuse of the data to argue against curbs in CO2. This contrarian spin cannot be justified.

...

By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture.

http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/earth-day-update-meat-methane-laughing-gas/
http://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-meat-methane-CO2

We need to eat less meat and switch to less polluting meats (such as kangaroo).

Better than sick care is true wellness: http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm

http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm
"Chapter seven is perhaps the most powerful chapter of the book. It offers compelling evidence of dietary causes for most of the common health problems faced by Americans. Then Dr. Fuhrman explains how diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, chronic headaches, and autoimmune disease. He relates true stories of patients (who gave permission to be named) who have been able to stop their antihypertensive, antianginal, and antidiabetic drugs; patients who have experienced gradual elimination of their chest pain; patients who have been able to stop their use of toxic drugs for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. I was able to review the charts of Dr. Fuhrman's patients and verified that he is accurately presenting these results."

His diet is killing him.

If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice. In either case, you are neither adding to the amount of plants that can be reasonably grown nor mitigating damage to the environment.

Except you don't really say what kind of collapse you are talking about and what the consequences of this would be.

The idea that all cattle farming is necessarily destructive to the environment is ignorant nonsense.

I don't think that anyone is saying that cattle is 'destructive' as much as they are saying it has been proven wasteful time and time again.

Hey, I love burgers too! But I don't pretend to be ignorant of the consequences of eating them. And I do think that there should be some market balancing in effect so if I want my damn burger I pay the real price, a price that accurately accounts for all the resources went into producing it. A burger should be the most expensive thing on the menu.

One must also ask, and this is something I rarely see in the general debate : "What about all the nitrogen?"

Even back in 1994 the global warming potential of fertilizers were known :

"In wet soils, denitrifying bacteria convert nitrate to nitrous oxide and gaseous nitrogen. The former is a greenhouse gas that has an energy reflectivity per mole 180-fold higher than that of carbon dioxide."

I came across the notion in an MIT courseware video lecture (16 or 17 I think)

On a slightly different tack nitrogen's role in reducing carbon fixing was documented in 1996
  and thus warning against adding nitrogen to the ecosystem because it reduces the ability to fix the dreaded carbon, ignoring N's own contribution.

Yet here we have Nasa saying that carbon fixing is nitrogen limited and we should add more nitrogen to the system.

Not that all modern thinking is pro-nitrogen.

Add into the mix the world's estimated 1,300,000,000 cattle belching out 400 litres of methane each per day : 520,000,000,000 litres

Here's more on methane

Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Whereas human sources of CO2 amount to just 3% of natural emissions, human sources produce one and a half times as much methane as all natural sources. In fact, the effect of our methane emissions may be compounded as methane-induced warming in turn stimulates microbial decay of organic matter in wetlands--the primary natural source of methane.

and more

What conclusions?
My conclusion is that reducing one's carbon footprint will not suffice. The way to fix more nitrogen is to grow more pulses and legumes which is good because you're going to need something to replace the cows you're eating now. Stop pouring nitrogen on to the fields and start eating more organic produce.

As we've been saying for a while : "think globally, act locally"

I can't believe you lecturing me on how a city needs food and fuel and all that. Wow. You must have though I fell off the turnip truck onto my head! At the very least, as a /. reader, you should assume I read the Asimov Foundation series, which goes on and on about how whole planets supply the central administrative planet. Anyhow...

Land is being used 'somehow', but not all of it, and not nearly to capacity. I remember hearing years back how Dutch farmers were 100 times more efficient than Russian farmers - her Russian farmers could barely more than feed their families. I bet a lot of farming done in the world is using 19th century technology, at best. Keep in mind that there's plenty of food in the world right now to feed everyone, it's a question of greed and to some extent transportation and storage.

Just think about this - according to this document, in India, which probably doesn't have super modern agriculture, approximately 26.8 million metric tons of food a year are eaten or spoiled by rats, who are protected and encouraged to thrive. This waste was from 134 million metric tons.

Now, according to this page, "...in the U.S., 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes, and vegetable protein suitable for human use is fed to livestock every year to produce only 28 million metric tons of animal protein consumed by humans."

So if you could just double the efficiency of the India farmers, and cut out the waste, you'd be able to feed another approximately 295 million people on an American style, super sized, extra meaty diet, just from some changes to India.

According to Bread for the World Institute 842 million people in the world are hungry. We just talked about how to overfeed a third of them. I'm sure we could feed clothe and house everyone on Earth quite comfortably, if we really wanted to.

If someone gives you a contract in .001 font size, no it is not illegal. It is up to you to say "I won't sign this, and I won't use your product."

Actually, a clause in a .001 point font (that is 0.0000138 inches, significantly smaller than the smallest line most laser printers can produce) isn't going to be visible to most people. Most people won't realize that the clause is there. They've been deceived as to the actual contents of the contract were. That is illegal. The question is where to draw the line between behaviors that are deceptive and illegal, and behaviors that are not.

(Of course, truly hard core laissez faire economics fans will point out that the market can correct for even this abuse after a few people get burned by it. Personally I'm not willing to fead the free market with the blood of innocents. The Free Market is a theory that cannot be put into literal practice, much like frictionless surfaces that physics majors so love. There are many important little differences between the theory and the best possible practice. Most of them can be summed up as: there is lag between an action and a response in the market. It's in this lag that peoples lives can be destroyed by the unscrupulous. Reducing production costs causes beef with a deadly disease to be shipped to consumers. Sure, the market will correct, after some people have died. (And if the lag between infection and symptoms is say, 10 years, alot of people are going to die.) )

That's simply not true. The founder of the Vegan Society is still alive and well to this day. Carl Lewis was (is?) a vegan. I've met a 75-year-old vegan granny at an animal rights protest who was in good health for her age. There's plenty more examples I could cite.

Vegetarians in general and vegans in particular need to go through effort to find suitable replacements for the protiens they would be getting otherwise in order to maintain status quo.

Not really. See this factsheet on protein.

The only thing vegans like me can't get reliably in their diets, except from "artificial" sources, is Vitamin B12 - I take vegan B12 supplements to make sure I get enough.

However, I obviously would recommend anyone thinking of going vegan to read up on the dietary recommendations before jumping in.

Aye, it's a crying shame that more geeks don't see through the pharmaceutical lies that bring us GM food, instead they cream over it.

The crasy thing is that *we don't need more food*. We pay farmers to sop growing it. The price is kept artifically high despite the massive over production.

And that's in spite of the fact that much of the grain goes to raise animals to feed us. An unbelievably innefficient system.

In their landmark book Population, Resources, Environment, Stanford Professors Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich stated that the amount of water used to produce one pound of meat ranges from 2,500 to as much as 6,000 gallons. [1]

Even if we believe the beef industry that asserts it's more like 500 (they subtracted things like the amount of urine expelled!) compare that to 50 gallons per pound of apples.

Food science has made some astonishing things out of a few soy beans. I've not had any meat or dairy for 11 years now and in recent hospital tests all of my body chemical levels were normal.

Mind you, huge tracts of moncultured soy beans aren't exactly the planet's best friend but I guess you can't have everything.

Rather that than rivers of blood.

Would like to mod that up.

Yes, set a good example. You don't have to "effect larger changes to policy and science". Start making a difference at home. Get yourself off the grid, whether it's geothermal or solar and wind. Thoroughly insulate with the right materials. Support your local farms by buying their products. Eat less industrially produced meat. Drive less. Use Natural Biological Pest Controls. Expand on this list.

Then teach your kids, they are our future.

Yes, these things are harder than just handing over some money to a cause and continuing on as always. But starting at home has a greater impact. Setting an example has a greater impact. You will feel so much better by doing something. And of course we can't all just donate money while continuing to cause the problems in the first place. What good does that do?

the reason "animal rights activists" don't like the meat industry is that it operates under the "black box" paradigm: here's a shed, you put in food, water, and electricity, and you get out meat and excrement. (Actually, a whole lot of excrement, which we'll get to later). The question is how to turn the most food into the most meat using the least square footage -- and the answer is one that treats animals in less than favorable conditions. But let's not consider whether animals live in painful conditions for the months before they die (who cares), but look only at the environmental impact of this scheme. Viz.
14-120 pounds of food, mostly human-edible, go into 1 pound of meat. The rest (what isn't burned away by the animals' metabolism), comes right back out as excrement. Ruminate on these link links for a bit.

If you're concerned not just about environmentalism, but human starvation, then consider that the reason many starving countries can't afford our harvests is that we're feeding them to our animals instead; i.e. becoming highest-bidder for that food. So when you eat a quarter-pound of meat, consider that the reason you're paying $1.28 for it is so you can have purchased the 5-8 pounds of human-edible food used to feed that quarter-pound. And if you weren't paying $1.00 for it, some third-world country would be paying $38 cents. Supply and demand.

For an alternative view (against the argument outlined above), see here .
Notice that it says "the world right now is producing more food than people could eat if they had it in front of them. The amount of
food produced is not the problem."
and yet we know that people are starving. Why? Because we're producing more non-meat food than all people in the world can eat, and we're feeding it to our animals. Notice later that the excremenet problem I listed above is turned around and said to be a positive source of manure. If only that were the case...

Of the admittedly small sample of people I've known who seemed to care about the environment and human starvation (can you imagine what it's like to *starve* *to* *death*), none concluded after looking into the meat industry that it is something worth supporting, except for "organic" meats grown really on pastures where only grass grows, and not within today's farming paradigm. The food they consume is not human-consumable, and the methods of rearing are much different, and result in a much smaller environmental impact, especially considering the number of animals / square foot that exist on a large open pasture versus today's typical meat industry.

You say you have money, so if you don't like the idea of giving up meat, you can boy elitist organic meat -- but the 99% of the meat industry (I dont' know what the actual number might be) that most arguments are aimed against is definitely something you do not want to be supporting.

I agree with you -- we should be developing ways to inhabit the heavans -- but this technology is still awhile away -- and if we say that "well, we are destroying the environment, so let's get the hell out of here" we are kind of taking the wrong approach to the problem. What will we do? Go to another planet and proceed to exploit the environment and resources on it? No... not the solution. We could then quite possibly find ourselves screwed yet again. If we are going to solely depend on space technology to save our arses, that would be a very bad idea. Think redundancy here, people. =) Taking that analogy further, if we don't take care of the earth, it may well crash, leaving us with nothing... and we don't have a backup yet!

Okay, enough with the cheesy analogies. At the risk of sounding like someone who uses the shallow (if not logically unfounded) argument of "we have no business exploring space when there are starving people in China", I think that while extraterrestrial technology is important, we can't lose sight of the core problem here which is that we are destroying Earth. Rapidly. We are just evading the issue by running away to space. We have a much better chance of survival if we fix the environmental problems here at the same time as we work on tackling space; we are overrunning our planet exponentially at the moment, and if we don't do something quick I think we are going to start feeling the backlash.

And if you think that you can't make a difference; you're wrong, you can. Here are a couple of links:

• The environmental magazine
  
• EarthSave