Vegetarianism can have a large carbon footprint

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the environmental case for a vegetarian diet depends on what the diet actually consists of, and that plant foods carry emissions of their own by three distinct routes. The first is transport. Popular fruits such as blueberries and strawberries are often imported by air when they are out of season locally, and air freight attaches a high emissions cost to a small weight of produce, so a habit built on fresh fruit all year round is not a low-carbon habit merely because the fruit is not meat. The second route is land conversion. Millions of hectares of forest have been cleared in the past years to make land for the production of palm oil, soy and cacao, crops that recur throughout vegetarian eating in processed foods, meat and dairy substitutes and confectionery. Clearing standing forest releases the carbon it held and removes the capacity to absorb more, which is why supporters of the position count deforestation within the footprint of the crops that replace the trees. The third route is fresh water. Foods such as nuts, rice, olives and oats require thousands upon thousands of litres of fresh water for a single kilogram, a demand that has to be met by supply, pumping and irrigation, and that competes with every other use of the same water. The conclusion drawn is comparative and conditional rather than sweeping. A purely vegetarian diet can be seriously detrimental to the environment, and the carbon footprint of a vegetarian, depending on what he or she eats, could be as large as that of the average meat eater. On this view the variable that matters is the composition and sourcing of a diet rather than the presence or absence of meat, which is why proponents list a large carbon footprint among the cons of vegetarianism.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument selects worst cases and presents them as the norm. Air-freighted out-of-season berries, water-intensive almonds and deforestation-linked palm oil are real issues, but they are not what a typical vegetarian diet consists of, and life-cycle analyses consistently find that plant-based diets have substantially lower greenhouse-gas footprints than meat-inclusive ones — beef in particular is far more emissions-intensive per kilogram than almost any plant food, because livestock add the inefficiencies of feed production, land use and methane on top of the very transport and water costs the argument attributes to crops. 'Can be as large as the average meat eater's' is a claim about a deliberately badly-chosen vegetarian diet, not the average one; it shows that some vegetarian choices are high-impact, not that vegetarianism as such carries a large footprint. The genuine point — that not all plant foods are low-impact and that sourcing matters — is a case for eating seasonally and locally, not evidence against vegetarianism's environmental advantage.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] That a vegetarian's footprint 'can be as large as' a meat eater's describes a deliberately high-impact diet, not the average, so it does not show vegetarianism generally has a large footprint. [Rejecting P1] Air-freighted berries and water-intensive nuts are selected worst cases, not typical of vegetarian eating, and life-cycle studies find plant-based diets are lower-emission on average, with beef far higher.