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The root cause is not meat.
It's not oil.
It's not coal.
It's the fact that we, humans, as a species, are too damn successful. We outbreed any environment in which we live because we can make things work just a little better, for just a little longer, and thus make the problem last just that much longer.
We can replace every light bulb, switch to biodiesel, end coal mining and use only biomass in electricity production, stop making plastics out of oil and only make them out of the plastic we already have at hand... but if we don't stop having more babies than replacement and we don't stop living longer and longer, we are still a net drain on the planet. It's that simple. We need fewer of us, permanently. (And yes, I'm doing my part -- no kids, and one way or another, when I'm 70, I will not be walking on this earth.)
We eat local, and the local climate cannot support soy, a lot of beans, almonds, olives, and other veggie proteins (we're high in the Rockies). We CAN support chickens, brook trout, sheep and goats, and deer and elk. We eat a lot of wild meat we hunt ourselves - turkey, geese, elk and deer. We trade that meat for chickens. But there's no way we could go vegetarian without putting a lot of oil-based CO2 in the atmosphere (plus heavy metals, acids, and some nasty salts...) And in our region, getting the soy beans from field to table would put a lot more CO2 and et cetera than the methane the deer and elk make anyway.
Don't breed. Eat locally. Walk. It worked for thousands of years....
