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I think it's disingenuous to claim that eating meat is the primary cause of global warming, and I mistrust anyone who proceeds to use that conception as their excuse for evangelical at best, authoritarian at worst, directives to me or anyone else as to how they should live their lives.
If you were to believe that the entire animal production industry were responsible for global warming, then you would have to assume that the infrastructure for the production and transport of meat came into being solely for that purpose. Even a casual understanding of the economic history of the last 200 years would suggest that this is ridiculous.
Humans have been transporting foodstuffs (and the associated energy and water that they contain) for thousands of years - it's not like Rome was able to feed itself, for instance. And food export from then-colonies, now "developing world" states to Europe existed before cheap energy made it possible to quickly transport refrigerated meat, whether by boat from antipodean meadows or indeed by truck from midwestern feedlot.
The underlying problem here is how we use - and abuse - cheap energy, and the unintended consequences of that. But here's the rub - any sort of solution that we fumble towards as a society is unlikely to conform to an absolute vision. I'm happy to concede that it might be appropriate for me to eat less meat, and that the cost of that meat might better reflect the true cost of production, but I'm damned if I'm going to let a bunch of blue-noses tell me that I mustn't eat it, and that I should feel guilty for eating it.
Part of the human experience is to do things that might not be optimal but that we enjoy - just as it's part of the human experience to find someone telling you that you shouldn't do something you enjoy, whether it's eating meat, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, or have sex, or whatever. Part of having a functioning society is setting the parameters of those kinds of behavior - no sex with the under-aged, no driving when drunk, etc. I'm willing to make an accommodation, but not cave in to a belief set that I don't share - which, namely, is that there is no moral distinction between humans and (other) animals, and that all social decisions should be framed around an equivalence.
In any case, wibbling on about veganism or ovo-lacto-vegetarianism and putting environmental catastrophe in a Carrie-Nation-puritanical-lifestyle-choice-discussion misses the underlying economics - it's not just meat that means the the polar bears have less habitat and are starving like with some blameless child in sub-Saharan Africa. It's how we are arrayed as a global economy, and how we use energy.
In the meantime, I hold steadfast to my opinion that you can't overestimate people's technical adaptability and creativity in responding to their surroundings, and that you can't underestimate their stupidity in assuming that their value system of the moment will solve all problems. In other words, just because we can solve problems doesn't mean that we will.
One way to make sure that we don't solve the problem is to posit that we are the problem in our entirety. The various correspondents who have described the danger of humans all skipped over a significant menace of humans in groups - to other humans. It's interesting that people think that our inability to manage the environment qualifies us to manage de-populating the planet. I can barely trust people not to hit me because they're talking on their cell phones (driving or walking, mind you). I'm damned if I'm going to trust anyone to decide who doesn't get to breed. It would be effective to focus on education, contraception, and women's property rights if you really wanted to get the birthrate down, but that's not nearly as hard-core as saying that 90% of us need to die. Woo for adolescent extremism and American middle-class anomie!
