Do you believe all 8 billion people could live like Americans in a sustainable way? Do you believe we could produce enough meat and animal derived products in a morally sustainable way? Looking at film of the conditions of the animals in factory farms it’s clear the meat portion of our food supply is grossly immoral.
We saw this movie before in the 70s. “The population bomb” etc. All that Malthusian drivel assumed a static state when humanity is anything but.
You are discounting civilizations ability to adapt and invent by an absolutely incredible margin that is not supported by our own history of human events.
You think 8 billion people can live like Americans in a sustainable way? Now by sustainable, I mean that we do so in a way that does not turn the world into a pollution infested shithole. If all 8 billion people lived like Americans where would the pollution be exported too? Who would do the work that people who live like Americans won’t do but depend on people doing?
The distribution of resources in the world is grossly unfair and it is not sustainable that 8 billion people live the way Americans live.
As it stands now the world is already becoming a pollution infested shithole. Imagine what happens when 7 billion more people live like us.
The only reason agricultural yields haven't collapsed is we have printed fertilizer with fossil fuels and dug it out of the ground. Sustaining contemporary agricultural output is just going to become more and more difficult as energy becomes more costly.
For every rich and wasteful person in the world there is a poor person that lives in scarcity and „offsets“ the wasteful lifestyle. So we’re kind of at a limit when you want to make a genuine effort to continue fighting poverty.
Meat is the best food for humans — ruminants, especially, are great at processing out the various anti-nutrients plants produce to ward off being eaten & then processing it into pretty much exactly the food humans need for optimal health. Think of all the land & water that goes into crops that aren't even eaten by humans — run buffalo & cattle over that instead. That would have the secondary benefit of not monocropping (which produces all manner of negative downstream ecological effects). If you don't want healthy, thriving humans, as well as a thriving ecosystem then by all means keep pushing this plant nonsense (take a look at how much water it takes to grow one almond, & then scale that up into what it takes to make almond (or really any other plant) "milk").