I think we can expect a lot more people become more interested in eating less meat. However to contradict everything I just said, I know that meat consumption world wide is increasing.
I don't know, as you say globally meat consumption is rising though more white meat (poultry and pork). I suspect while plant-based foods will grow in popularity, they will tend more to supplement traditional animal-based foods. At best the result might be a slowing of the rate of increase in meat consumption (with the caveat that I suspect we will see a global decline in prosperity over coming decades).
"food entertainment industry"??
A term I use for how food in the West is often consumed. A lot of our eating is not about survival or nutrition - it is a pleasurable, social activity. Cafes, restaurants and fast food takeaway are about entertainment. There is nothing wrong with eating for fun but when it becomes a massive industry servicing billions of people its impact becomes huge. Many animals are killed literally for fun.
Factoring in the rise of the middle class in India and China - I think we are going to see an increase in global prosperity. and I don't see what renewable energy has to do with it.
Modern civilisation, especially our economies, are essentially energy at work. The progression from wind and animal power to coal and later oil enabled the development of innovative technology and huge increases in food production. All of this enabled a massive rise in population. However, the biggest growth spurt was from the use of oil which was plentiful and energy dense. We went berserk over the past couple of centuries chewing up all the oil and coal we could. While there is still plenty of it, the cost of recovering it is increasing. It needs more and more energy to produce energy from those sources, so we are facing a decline in energy available to our civilisation. Wind and solar are not a replacement as they are unreliable, intermittent and require extensive redundancy and storage to work. The energy cost of producing wind and solar and storage is greater than that of coal and oil. Overall, the transition to wind and solar that people are mooting would cause a decline in overall global prosperity. In the shorter term, wind and solar are not reducing fossil fuel use but are instead proving to be something of an addition much like I mentioned above about plant-based foods. Worse, they require FFs to build them.
I think you have that backwards.
I may be too cynical. However, I believe that only external constraints can prevent us getting into massive resource overshoot. Like any population of animals, we use what we can as fast as we can. Oil allowed us to stretch the boundaries and overcome natural constraints. Wind and solar may cause a contraction of civilisation as energy becomes less available and consumption declines. Nuclear fusion, or some other very cheap and dense energy source on the other hand would allow us to continue extracting resources and growing our population. No-one is volunteering to constrain population and consumption because our economies and economic system depend on continual growth. A new and better energy source would lead to more exploitation of the natural world.
I think a lot of people are confused with the term "vegan". Veganism is about abstaining from eating meat products and animal cruelty. If you are not truly against animal cruelty and you are simply just not eating meat for the sake of diet/nutrition, then you are plant-based.
I think veganism is confused. It should be about making informed and rational decisions about our relations with other animals wherever our needs/interests intersect with theirs. In terms of food, as best I can tell it doesn't follow that a blanket prohobition on eating other animals is rational. Donald Watson's motivations were more sentimental than rational - he didn't like to see other animals hurt and killed. But our entire food system hurts and kills other animals and damages the environment. A more informed approach may indeed continue to use animals for food (because let's face it, the natural world works the way it does, not how we wish it did).
