From Animal To Meat

Munching your way to a hotter climate? October 8, 2009

There’s never any good news about climate change. Not only is it always getting worse – happening faster than we’d thought, wreaking unimagined levels of havoc – but everything we do seems to contribute to it. Why bother changing your light bulbs when your daily commute could illuminate your whole neighborhood? And if you thought driving a car was bad – well, you could drive clear across the planet with the greenhouses gases your Thanksgiving flight home will release. And flying is nothing compared to the damage you’re doing every time you eat a burger!

Reasoning that everything can’t literally be worse than everything else, I did a little research and composed a ranking of our actions’ impact on greenhouse gas emissions, and where meat-eating falls on that list. This ranking is rife with assumptions, but see the chart below for my best shot at the average person’s annual CO₂ emissions from various sources.

The greenhouse gas savings from replacing the average US diet with a vegan diet are pretty significant, but it’s even better to leave the Suburban in the garage.

NOTE: The emissions for flying have been corrected; in the initial version of this graph, they were listed as 1.7 tons. (11/24/09)

Sources

Diet and cars: Eshel and Martin, “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” Earth Interactions v.10 n.9 (2006)

Light bulbs: Fat Knowledge

Air travel: Gallup Poll 12/06 cited in Uclue and Terrapass Carbon Footprint Calculator