Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry “$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2019 to 2026.” That’s a really high growth rate—I doubt that there is no other sector of the food industry expanding as rapdily as that, though I can’t say for sure.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.