I don't have full access to the danish study, so I will have to take your word for it.

I do see that Tilman D, Clark M (2014) Global diets link environmental sustainability and human health. Nature 515(7528):518–522. is referenced in the 2016 study and the 2022 study.

I already fly only if there's no alternative, and usually once a year to see my family. I know a lot of people that basically also make one trip per year. For these people, going vegan would be much easier than further reducing flying.

I don't like the anti-kids arguments. Even better for the environment than not having kids is suicide but no one goes around suggesting that. Having kids is a very personal choice and someone has to do it, or we'll be in a very bad place soon.

Yes, flights are a huge deal. One really long flight (like to the other side of the planet) should still be less co2e pollution than a non-vegan diet for a year, but not by much.

No doubt that flying often is the biggest impact, but most people don't fly often.

Corporations are only producing things that people want.

Yea but not what you or I want. Or else they wouldn't have turned turned the entire tech industry into an AI Ponzi scheme.

https://iiasa.ac.at/news/may-2025/worlds-wealthiest-10-caused-two-thirds-of-global-warming-since-1990

Corporations exist to create value for their shareholders. AKA the people responsible for 2/3s of pollution.

We can all eat shit and die and corporations will still cut that shit with the last of the Amazonian sawdust.

Corporations killed localized food supplies and all but eliminated traditional perennial crops that provided a lot of the nutrition we now get from meat/dairy.

Corporations are only producing things that people want.

That's backwards.

People select what to buy from a list of things offered. I want a rabbit sandwich. Stores only sell pig, cow, and chicken. Of course it's going to look like everyone likes pig cow and chicken.

I want an electric car under $30k. I want a phone that isn't made by children.

"But if enough people want it the market will provide" - ignores everything about barriers to entry and greed.

Think of EVs. Corporations didn’t want to manufacture them but people acting together forced them to. Then it only took a handful of people to let them drop it again (in the us).

If protectionism against Chinese made vehicles ever ends, GM and Ford are going to disappear overnight. They keep insisting on focusing on smaller quantity of less variety of more expensive vehicles, and resisting modernization

Corporations caused this problem by buying politicians that created regulations favorable to them. They are the only entities big enough to fix this problem, for instance, by recapturing gases like methane. I refuse to be held responsible for simply eating.

"Everyone will just X" when X individually makes obvious sense for most people.

For some, it's a matter of cost. The cheaper option tends to get a lot of adopters. Making the better option cost less is sometimes a matter of engineering and innovation improving the cost of the better option. Or sometimes it's making the worse option cost more, sometimes directly through taxation or indirectly through regulations. Electric cars are pretty much on a self sustaining path at this point, where the economics of electric cars can be a much better financial decision for themselves personally, compared to similar ICE vehicles.

For others, it's a matter of cultural influence, where trends in adoption just make things different. Tobacco use, especially actual smoking, is way down. Drinking alcohol is down, too. In my lifetime, helmet use for bicyclists and skiers is way up. These broad societal preferential shifts can happen without necessarily having big mandates from government.

And even if nudged somewhere by temporary government policy or price, sometimes people stick with that option long term if that's what they learn to prefer. Seat belts kinda went this way, where seat belt usage rates went way up between 1980 and 2010, so that even after federal regulations were struck down by the courts and state level enforcement dwindled in the past decade, everyone still wears seat belts (including when visiting places where they're not required).

And of course, the big influential force for changing behavior is government policy. As a society, we've pretty seamlessly moved off of things that were banned (leaded fuel, CFCs), even if the transition took a few decades (lead pipes, lead paint), or quickly adopted things that were mandatory (child car seats, bike helmets).

Emissions from food production is one of those things that can shift a bit from all of these factors. We've shifted away from beef towards chicken in the last few decades, and that alone has made a difference in greenhouse emissions. We might see more shifting down that line, just culturally. Or we might see some economic nudges from the fact that beef and dairy production are so costly for reasons correlated to their environmental impact.

But ultimately, meat doesn't contribute nearly as much as driving does, for the typical American household. The real impact comes from how we design our cities, not on how we eat.

You forgot ocean acidification from farm runoff and the overfishing destroying the oceans ecosystem.