Giving Up Just Half Your Hamburgers Can Really Help the Climate
The bad news: to make really deep emissions cuts, most of us should probably go vegan
By James Temple
It turns out you can drastically shrink your climate footprint without drastically changing your diet.
An analysis last month led by the World Resources Institute (WRI) found that there’s not a huge difference, in terms of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, between cutting out about half the red meat — specifically cattle, goats, and sheep — in the average American diet and going full vegetarian.
We see these diminishing returns because a standard vegetarian diet doesn’t replace all meat with vegetables. Instead, it relies heavily on dairy, eggs, and other animal-based products that require a lot of land and produce a lot of emissions, says Tim Searchinger, a senior fellow at WRI and lead author of the report. (Going vegan would produce much deeper cuts, but the report didn’t include that analysis.)
