Animal agriculture will undoubtedly be more costly to the environment than plant agriculture—that’s for sure. And who knows? Maybe I was missing something about other sources of energy production being more costly than animal agriculture, but especially with the sheer scale of it (over trillions of animals exploited and slaughtered every year), it is very destructive regardless.

However, irrespective of any environmental concerns about certain things possibly being worse than animal agriculture, the exploitation of animals ought to be condemned from an ethical standpoint anyway, and ultimately, even if there are concerns about environmental destruction in other ways, reducing our negative impact on the environment by doing what we can as individuals and finding solutions on a broader scale would not preclude going vegan anyway, so it remains a moral obligation.