So what you say is true (undeniably and unmistakably) but as a semi-vegetarian psychologist and biologist living on the coast of California, I must point out the fact that a hard head and fists-held-high for your own way of dealing with the problem cannot help anymore than any other side. Yes, meat production is bad, but why would we need more if not for more people? Yes, smog is bad, but wouldn’t it be irrelevant if only six cars out of every ten thousand were “gross polluters”? Also, if you think about it, all usage of electricity is bad (like the fact that you are on a computer that is most likely run by electricity made from burning coal or damming up a river-which both have adverse side effects on the health of our planet, such as CO2 emissions and resource usage-you are also causing the world harm… and are you willing to give up electricity?? Probably not. So good luck telling some Brazillian farmer that he/she cannot run their meat farm any longer. Inasmuch, good luck telling the south african mother to stop making more humans, or even telling the average human being to stop eating meat altogether.

So rather than leading with an iron fist and pitiful assumptions that all others that you speak to eat red meat, lead with a gentle voice and firm facts that cannot be shown up.
It doesn’t matter how much education you have, what matters is how you use it.

I’d certainly agree smog enforcement is need… but I’d address it a bit differently than you; let’s look at “the big picture”:
1. AAAS (world’s largest group of scientists, not some veg activist group) says that less petrol is burned if you eat less or no meat (so long as the crops used to feed the cattle use post-1920’s mechanized technology like combines, which is nearly the whole world) …so that helps your goal of LESS SMOG EMISSIONS. But it gets better:

2. Smog enforcement –and much more– can be funded by the _economic_ efficiency of eating less meat; the primary source saying meat production is _economically_ inefficient (not just freshwater, petrol, and other enviro concerns) is also published by AAAS. Sorry, as an enviro engineer myself who’s able to parse their data, I’ll take AAAS scientists’ observations over your observation of Barrio Jesus; e.g. you also might not be considering that the small group of cattle you saw is _able_ to eat the given amount of vegetation near Barrio Jesus sustainably (i.e. so that it grows back), but only because there’s a much larger group of cattle eating another area –in Brazil, for example (then CR imports the meat)– and they’re eating so intensively that Brazil is burning their jungles to make way for more grazing lands (and farmlands, farmlands to feed the cattle, which takes several times more farmland per-eater-of-meat than per-vegan).

In other words “We need to spend more money on smog enforcement programs first” is a Red Herring. Change is needed to prevent both acid rain _and_ greenhouse gases (and I’ve seen climatologists who are former AGW-sceptics from MIT, and full-time-AGW-hysterics, alike, agree that greenhouse gases need reduction, but as for how much, more research is needed).

Mauricio Mira