“Almost 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally come from livestock (and everything involved in raising it); 61 percent of those emissions can be traced back to beef. Cows are 20 times less efficient to raise than beans and roughly three times less efficient than poultry and pork.”
In other words, we could drop global greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 10% – a gigantic drop – if we ban beef. Even if we replace all that beef with chicken, it would still be a huge win. And this is an important point: this proposal is not asking anyone to become vegetarian or to stop eating meat. The proposal here is that humanity stops eating just a single type of meat: beef from cattle.
Why beef specifically? There are at least four good reasons to ban beef:
Beef cattle are an inefficient way to create meat compared to something like chicken or fish. Therefore, cattle can consume a huge amount of feed per pound of meat produced compared to the alternatives. We will explore how inefficient beef is in a moment.
A large percentage of the feed for all these inefficient beef cattle, especially Chinese beef, is coming by burning down the Amazon rainforest and converting the rainforest into agricultural fields.
Beef cattle also consume a large amount of fresh water during their lives.
Beef cattle and their manure can produce a huge amount of methane. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is 25X more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat.
