Is a vegan diet better for the environment than a vegetarian diet? Today, Slate asks that question. Either way, though, giving up meat is apparently good for the Earth: "going vegetarian has the same effect on carbon dioxide emissions as switching from a Chevrolet Suburban to a Toyota Camry."

Personally, I don't really give a crap which one is better for the environment. I'm a vegetarian for bleeding-heart ethical reasons, and the same ethical concerns force me to acknowledge that recent human history would have been safer, kinder, and gentler had the modern environmental movement never existed. It doesn’t take a carnivore to see that environmentalist hysteria takes on a consistent pattern: affluent Westerners decide that some long-enjoyed privilege of modern life is evil, and set about depriving the people of developing countries of that privilege.

For example, we used the pesticide DDT to rid ourselves of the scourge of malaria, and then bullied the people of the global South into foregoing DDT in their own lands because we feared its impact on local wildlife. And we enjoyed all the benefits of the temporary period of rapid population growth that accompanies economic development, and then decided that similar population growth in developing countries doomed the planet. This provided one of the most persistent popular arguments against the duty of developed countries to fight child mortality in developing countries.

So these myths had disastrous consequences for the world’s most vulnerable people, and were subsequently debunked, but the towering self-regard of the environmental movement survived such deadly embarrassments without so much as a scratch. And so the movement continues to fight with customary vigor in its effort to handicap the development of poorer countries.

Well, what can you do. I don’t know whether veganism or vegetarianism is better for the environment, and I doubt the difference is ultimately of much consequence. But if environmentalism is your thing, then by all means at least make yourself useful by reading the Slate article and then becoming a veggie of some sort. 

Vegans vs. Vegetarians: What kind of diet is best for the environment?

By Brendan I. Koerner

As a longtime vegetarian, I've always been confident that my diet is better for the planet than that of your typical carnivore. But a vegan pal of mine says I could be doing a lot more, by rejecting all animal products—no eggs, no milk, not even the occasional bowl of mac 'n cheese. Is veganism really that much better for the environment?

Since few Americans have followed Alicia Silverstone's abstemious lead and renounced animal products altogether, there aren't many data available on the environmental consequences of veganism. Somewhere between 2 percent and 5 percent of the nation's eaters classify themselves as vegetarians; of that number, perhaps 5 percent are strict vegans. As a result, most research on meat-free diets has focused on lacto-ovo vegetarians, the milk-and-egg eaters who form the lion's share of the veggie demographic.

Read the rest here.

* Read more Jewcy coverage of vegetarianism, here