Emphasis mine. I think that's a critically important point. Another denialist tactic I often encounter is, "Oh, if you're so so concerned, why are you still using electricity? Still on the Internet? Still using a car? Aren't you just the perfect hypocrite!"
I don't think this is just a tactic of deniers. Or even any kind of tactic, per se. It's an error of thinking that many, many people have. It's another false dichotomy... "it's not good enough to do something if you don't do everything" - literal all-or-nothing thinking. And this sort of thinking puts off some people who do care about the environment (and other issues) from doing anything at all.
There are lots of examples when you get into it. One that comes to mind is an article I read about a woman who gave up sugar. She read that a lot of medical issues in modern times are from eating too much sugar - obesity, diabetes and complications of these, and other health problems - so what did she do? She eliminated *all* sugar from her diet. She wouldn't even eat fruit. Literally everything that had sugar in it... eliminated. She felt good about herself for doing this until she started getting ill and struggling with her energy levels... as you would... eventually going to her doctor, her doctor told her "whatever possessed you to give up ALL sugar? The advice was to eat
less sugar."
This all-or-nothing thinking can be found everywhere, even among writers when people fret they can't make a sentence work without using an adverb, but they were warned about adverb overuse/misuse, so they thought that meant they must eliminate every single adverb from their entire manuscript.
Same with the advice to eat less meat... "eat less meat" doesn't mean "go vegan for the whole of the rest of your life" - but people get polarised into "I'm keeping my meat, go away nasty vegans!" and going 100% vegan and feeling guilty because you found out something you thought was vegan actually has a miniscule amount of honey in it and honey comes from bees and bees are in kingdom Animalia*. The extreme polarisation stops people from realising that even if a meat eater switches to having one or two meat free days a week or just stops eating beef and the less environmentally friendly meats, and/or just switches to getting meat from local farmers instead of meat flown halfway around the world, it's still going to help. But people fall into the all-or-nothing thinking, just changing a few things is "not good enough" so people think "why bother doing anything?" and you get vegans lambasting other vegans over minutiae. And some people take it to dangerous extremes, e.g. becoming fruitarian because plants are living things too. (And I know some people's knee-jerk reaction to vegetarianism is "why just animals though? Plants are living things too.")
*I realise there can be environmental issues with honey production but it's not about that, it's about the fact that people are mentally negating all the environmental good someone's doing from not consuming meat and dairy because of a tiny amount of something that was eaten just once and probably made barely any difference at all.
(note: I know not all vegans do this... plenty of people in all walks of life don't fall into this all-or-nothing thinking, but this post is about the people who do, and the consequences, and how widespread it is.)
These are just a few examples. I think the best way to counter this is to shout loud and clear (okay not literally shout, but promote the message a lot) that making small changes is better than making no changes at all, you don't have to be perfect and even if you just change one thing it still makes a difference. I think some people worry that it's going to make people complacent over changing one thing (like they'll change one thing and feel like they've "done their bit" and change nothing else), but in reality the failure to get this message across leads to large numbers of people doing absolutely nothing and closing their mind to the whole idea. Changing just one thing is still better than changing nothing. And quite often when people succeed at changing just one thing and feel good about it, they're a heck of a lot more open to changing something else.
ETA: just to be clear, I have no criticism of going vegan, my problem's with the pattern of thinking whereby people think that unless you do everything 100% to the absolute extreme, you're a hypocrite/doing it wrong/not good enough, etc. Ditto everything else, not just veganism. Kudos to people who do manage to do so much (as long as it's so extreme that it's dangerous like only eating fruit and nothing else) - just I think the message "doing anything is better than doing nothing" needs to be out there a lot more and people need to be aware of the potential dangers of all-or-nothing thinking.
