Eating less Meat won't save the Planet. Here's Why

You're right. The water discussed here is just the total rain water that was in the grass the cows ate. Its not taken from aquifers or rivers like you need to irrigating crops. this video

90% of cattle water consumption comes directly from feed and feed is often made of leftover vegetable matter that would have been wasted otherwise or land that can't be harvested anyway: this video

The story with livestock is complicated. From that same Wikipedia article. > The indirect effects contributing to the percentage include emissions associated with the production of feed consumed by livestock and carbon dioxide emission from deforestation in Central and South America, attributed to livestock production So now deforestation is equivalent to livestock? Should I say shopping malls and residential areas are a problem because they require all the plants on the land to be cut down and paved over? I really wish these '% of everything' statistics would go away. It is almost always more complicated which fosters climate skeptics. Energy production - aka fossil fuel burning such as coal for electricity and gas/diesel for - is the vast majority of emissions. We should be focusing on getting our democratic voting power focused on one that one easily digested story to get things done on a nation-state level instead of getting bogged down in these micro-issues. "Everything causes climate change" is impossible to fix. "Fossil fuels and especially cars and coal" cause climate change is very possible to address. See this video and link for examples of more nuance.

A lot of the numbers that people cite were inaccurate and revoked by the original authors, but people keep on citing the old bad numbers. The vast majority of water used by cows is 'green water' that comes from rainfall that will fall there cows or not, on top of land that you cannot use for plant crops, only for raising cattle. Ruminant animal meat is here to stay, for the plain old reason that with a lot of land and natural rainfall water, the only way you can get food from that land is from ruminant animals such as cows and sheep. To not use it would make the price of plant food skyrocket as food demand gets redirected onto plant crops from beef and plant food supply cannot redirect nearly as fast in that hypothetical situation. Source: this video

Devil's advocate. I'll probably be down-voted, but note that ignoring details gives fuel to skeptics (as in this video ). 1. How is this 14.5% number calculated? Does it include deforestation? Grass-fed is far different than deforesting for grazing land or crop land. For instance from the FAO PDF you quoted: "extensive livestock are often kept in remote environments where deforestation and land degradation reflect weaknesses in institutions and policies". The headline then should read "deforestation and bad land policy causes climate change" not "stop eating cows". 2. Again, how are these 10x numbers calculated? Comparing e.g. industrialized agriculture to inefficient agriculture in a third-world country is not going to convince skeptics. If beef production is extremely inefficient somewhere, we should fix that. 3. If country A emits 100x the CO2 production of country B for the same end result, that needs to be noted. If my neighbor has a giant gas-guzzling monster truck spewing emissions, my neighborhood is not at fault, it's just him. 4. Agree 100%. We should be addressing the deforestation. Saying "stop eating meat" is not the solution. "Don't buy food from Brazil grown on land that had rain forest last year" is more nuanced and probably easier to follow. Matter of fact, don't buy products made by totalitarian regimes, slaves, child labor, etc. We should know where and how our products are made. I'm not advocating "don't buy sneakers" because some sneakers are made in unethic

“If the entirety of the US were to go vegan for a year, the reduction in GHG emissons would be 2.6%” this video I think cows get to much blame