Keeping 1.5 billion ruminants on the planet is just bad news for humanity’s carbon footprint. We have removed so many forests for the sake of grasslands and croplands to feed them. We agree that CAFO beef is out of the ethical and ecological picture, with untreated wastes and a heavy reliance on antibiotics. But free range cattle require a minimum of 2 acres per head, and often have as many as 50 acres per head (like the adorable ranch family in Cowspiracy say they have in Montana). 2 acres of reforested land would be far better for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Look at the results of four stomachs churning out the methane on the graph on page 4. How long would the soy and meat substitutes have to travel to close THAT gap? http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2015/comments/uploads/CID230_Ripple__2014_NatureClimateChange-Ruminants.pdf

Diagram c. also shows the methane from ruminants compared to other sources — oil, landfill, biomass, coal and rice.

This is my source for comparing water footprints between a beef burger and a soy burger, and soy milk vs. cows milk. It’s an awful lot of math and text for the sake of the last sentence:

“The study shows that soymilk and soy burger have much smaller water footprints than their equivalent animal products. The water footprint ofthe soy milk product analysed in this study is 28% ofthe water footprint of the global average cow milk. The water footprint of the soy burger examined here is 7% of the water footprint of the average beef burger in the world.”

Again, this gap is enormous. The paper does illustrate organic soy farming as being much more water efficient than non-organic. For both beef and soy categories, they acknowledge that the range of water usage is huge depending on the farming methods. Which begs the question — how do we know how efficient a local farmer’s methods are?

I wasn’t suggesting that you are the worst of the omnivores. I was trained by Al Gore as a Climate Reality Leader this summer, and they are very conscientious about food…and like other donor funded NGOs they just don’t say anything about it to the public (much to chagrin of the five Climate Vegans attending). The developed world is full of really bad omnivores setting a bad example for the developing world. 1 billion more people every 15 years is a scary figure when it comes to fossil fuel consumption, and it’s no less scary when it comes to food production and the solid and gaseous wastes it will produce. NGOs need to talk about food, and that’s not happening at COP21.