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I don't care how accurate your arguments are (and there's good reason to think that PETA's could use some intellectual fine tuning), you're not going to sway people to your cause by calling them a bunch of stupid hypocrites. My gut reaction to PETA is and always has been, 'Yeah? Well fuck you too.' It's a good strategy for remaining an maligned fringe group, but I rather suspect that they're too invested in being the Lone Voice of Reason in a world full of unevolved carnivores that they don't much care about making allies. Where's the hipster cred in going mainstream, eh?
But there are more important things on the table than slagging those moralizing popinjays. As for our environmental impact, I'm with those who say that, ultimately, there are just too many of us. Even assuming that, as one poster said, we all used public transportation and made more responsible eating decisions, that's really just a temporary fix. The idea that modest lifestyle changes on the part of first-worlders are going to fix all our environmental problems only holds true as long as no-one else joins our elite club; but if, say, China were to suddenly achieve a resource consumption rate comparable to what we have here in the U.S., even if we assume that by then everyone here is taking the bus, it's going to rapidly undo whatever gains we made by switching over to Priuses and locally grown veggies. Now imagine that scenario, but with the entire developing world becoming first-worlders. We better have discovered cold fusion and be driving hydrogen-powered cars by then or the whole planet's going to be in deep shit.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take steps to lessen our environmental impact; every little bit helps. But at the same time, it might be a good idea to at least entertain the possibility that, just maybe, we've gone and dug ourselves into a very deep hole, and that hybrid cars and vegetarianism aren't going to get us all the way back out. You can either have a large population and low resource consumption, or you can have a small population with high resource consumption; and right now we are working steadily towards a large, resource devouring population. Make of that what you will, but don't pretend that, barring the invention of some miracle technology, we can maintain our present way of life forever if we just knock half a dozen tons of greenhouse gases off our respective environmental foot prints: there are 5.5 billion people (and counting) waiting to more than make up the difference.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. Trust me, I'd be thrilled if I thought that I could maintain my present lifestyle for the cost of eating more chicken. It's just that I don't see that as being a long-term solution.
