Vox: A No-Beef Diet Is Great – But Only If You Don’t Replace It With Chicken

Progressives have a problem with meat-eating.

Don’t let them tell you otherwise. They write about getting rid of meat eating and replacing meat with alternative protein sources like lab grown meat or insects or preferably vegetarian diets all the time. They also want to get rid of fossil fuels and nuclear power and gas guzzling vehicles.

Vox.com:

“Most people have heard it by now: Our meat habit is bad for the world. Polling suggests that tens of millions of people are taking this message seriously: One in four Americans said they tried to cut back on meat in the last year, and half of those cited environmental concerns as a major reason. …

Cutting meat consumption is as smart an idea as advertised. Industrial farming — the source of 99 percent of the meat Americans eat —provides the world with cheap meat, but it does so at a terrible environmental and moral cost.

Where it gets complicated is when people decide which meat, exactly, they’ll be cutting back on. Often, it’s beef that loses out in that calculus. 

There’s no way around it: Raising beef really is bad for the world.

About 15 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. Beef is the biggest culprit, accounting for about 65 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Cattle produce methane, and they also require lots of carbon-intensive land conversion and carbon-intensive feed. They’re about 20 times more resource-costly per calorie than veggies, and about three times more resource-costly per calorie than fish or chicken.

Beef’s defenders have argued that it doesn’t have to be that way. Proposals from feeding cattle seaweed in order to reduce their methane emissions to “regenerative farming” that can improve soil and land have been aired, and some have been implemented on a small scale.

But American consumers shouldn’t kid themselves: If you purchase beef from a grocery store shelf or in a restaurant in America, unless you go very far out of your way to trace, source, and verify the sustainable history of that meat, you’re getting the product of a carbon-intensive industrial process. …

And chicken is no panacea for the climate either. “Its impact on the climate only looks benign when compared with beef’s,” Garces points out. “Greenhouse gas emissions per serving of poultry are 11 timeshigher than those for one serving of beans, so swapping beef with chicken is akin to swapping a Hummer with a Ford F-150, not a Prius.”