You've freely chosen to participate in this thread, and it's impossible for me not to make value-judgements. If I didn't believe that being vegan was the right thing to do, I wouldn't be a vegan.
You're judging me right now, in fact, because you believe that I shouldn't be judging you There's nothing wrong with judging people (EDIT: their actions), as long as it's done in a reasonably respectful manner. My last post, with numerous citations, attempts to outline why I think eating meat is morally unjustifiable.
The meat industry is a major contributor to climate change, responsible for almost 15% of greenhouse gas emissions,
more than the entire transportation sector.
The Environmental Working Group has
found that virtually all plant-based products are responsible for fewer emissions than animal products, which is why it’s unsurprising that a
2014 study, published in the peer-reviewed journal
Climatic Change, found that vegans, followed by vegetarians, had the lowest greenhouse gas emissions associated with their diets. It’s also why the UN’s Environment Program
has called on everyone to move towards a vegan diet:
Why? Growing plants and transporting them to the consumer is much less greenhouse gas intensive than: growing crops, transporting them to the farm, powering the farm (which produces waste and methane emissions from burps (methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2)), transporting the animals to the slaughterhouse, powering the slaughterhouse, and then transporting the meat to the consumer.
Given that climate change is already causing humans to suffer - and will continue to do so but at an accelerating rate - we should all take individual action to ensure that the warming of the planet is slowed and halted. Governments seem set to fail in the duty: the Paris climate change agreement doesn't even limit warming to 2C, and that's even assuming that every country will keep to its pledge.
When you abstain from eating meat and other animal products, you prevent animals from being raised, transported and slaughtered in the terrible conditions I outlined in my previous post. And, as I demonstrated, the maths roughly works out such that each animal you abstain from eating roughly translates to one animal saved.
EDIT: Also, British animal welfare law already requires that unnecessary suffering of animals in the meat industry be minimized. The industry gets to define what's necessary, of course (and they haven't considered, for instance, that eating meat and other animal products is entirely unnecessary). As a result, most of the meat sold in the UK comes from factory farms, and slaughterhouse conditions are very often inhumane. "Free-range", "humane", "RSPCA-certified" and "Red Tractor" have also been exposed as being nothing more than marketing terms. Again, this is because the profit of the meat industry will always come before the welfare of the animals, and that's because we have such high demand for meat.