As if said impacts are not shared by plant agriculture? Where do you think your vegetables come from? They need vast amount of space to grow, they need to kill animals that would otherwise inhabit the space, they need to spray large quantities of pesticide from above, fertilizer is necessary and fossil fuels are burned in that process, and fossil fuels need to transport the crops.
> 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) of tropical forest is destroyed every year to make way for beef herds [1]. That’s 41% of all tropical deforestation (which is where 95% of the deforestation occurs).
What are the economic incentives to destroy tropical forest? Meat is by no means the only thing that land can be used for, first of all, but there is no requirement that cows be raised on land that was previously tropical forest. Go check out the Great Plains where most of the United States' cows are raised, because you won't find a tropical forest, deforested or not, for thousands of miles. And yet, somehow, meat continues to be produced.
No, I don't want forests to be destroyed, but it's a separate issue. Forests have been destroyed for countless reasons that have nothing to do with meat. Deforestation sucks, but that really isn't a the best reason to conclude that there's a problem with eating meat when deforestation isn't an issue. That is unless you have a problem with the non-forested land that cattle farms occupy, and most people don't because tropical forests are more interesting.
As I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if we clean up where we get our energy, these arguments mostly disappear because, regardless of the end product, fossil fuels are currently still being burned. Doesn't matter if you're eating beef or soy.