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Here’s an inexpensive, concrete thing you can do to cut your personal carbon contribution: Stop eating meat—or cut down dramatically. Right now.
This is 100 percent not as easy as this blasé, sanctimonious pronouncement makes it sound. There are countless personal, cultural, and economic factors that put this protein at the center of so many diets and lives. And yet, if you can swing it, it’s hard to find an easier way to reduce your individual emissions contribution. That’s not just limited to food. For most of us, it’s easier to stop eating meat than it is to swap out your gas-powered car for an EV, change how you heat your home, or get your utility to generate electricity from cleaner sources.
It makes a huge difference. According to the University of Colorado, cutting meat out of your diet for one day a week can save more than 20,000 gallons of water and reduce your personal carbon contribution by more than 400 pounds per year. Imagine these numbers at scale. What does a million people practicing Meatless Mondays for a year look like? It looks like taking 348,000,000 car-miles worth of emissions out of the atmosphere, which is huge. What if those million people added another day? What if they didn’t eat meat at all? (696,000,000 car-miles and 2.4 billion car-miles, respectively. Also huge. In fact, huger.)
Humans will create emissions no matter what we eat, so we can’t fixate on perfection. Farmed vegetables still need to be farmed, which means tractors and trucks burning fossil fuels. Even the act of tilling soil releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and while advances in agriculture can reduce our impact, all of it incurs environmental costs. Our civilization relies on food that we don’t have to forage. Go ahead and @ me, if you disagree — then head out to your trap line and see how many squirrels you’ve got for dinner.
Squirrels notwithstanding, we should all start questioning whether we need meat with every meal. This small, personal moment, that occurs only in our own heads, is a beginning. We’ve been taught that no dinner is complete without animal protein, but that’s dangerous misinformation for so many reasons.
Consider: Raising any kind of meat is incredibly land-intensive. In addition to the physical space the animal occupies, you also need to grow its food, which takes up its own acreage. You have to process that feed, which incurs emissions as you harvest the crop and prepare it.
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