For most countries around the world, sourcing energy entirely from wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower by 2050 would reduce their energy needs and costs, improve air quality, and help slow climate change, according to a study in Environmental Science & Technology.
Going vegan is a relatively small difference from going vegetarian, which is a small difference from just drastically cutting back on meat. The big thing is that our current systems are unsustainable for animal rights and the environment and everyone needs to cut back on meat drastically at the least.
But I imagine that if you could stop driving a car entirely, that would be a bigger difference than losing a reasonable amount of meat from your diet.
Though, cutting back on meat is an important step that all of us can take with much more ease.
Its not just one. This is pretty common knowledge among people in their field.
These are specialists in their field, their opinions don't just come from nothing, they are informed by information from the studies.
They aren't, but I don't feel like going into it with you.
I will use a simpler data-point to prove that my initial claim was correct.
Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
If everyone went vegan, that would remove the majority of greenhouse gas production. So put simply, it would be the "biggest" thing everyone could do to reduce CO2 emissions.(That is just CO2, there are many other horrible things related to animal agriculture.)
your article makes a claim unsubstatiated by the paper itself. and the paper is almost 2 decades old, and does not, itself, make any claim about the best way for anyone to reduce their GHGe.
On top of that, meat and dairy are only part of agriculture; a big chunk of methane emissions from agriculture come from rice farming.
A huge cut in meat (and dairy) consumption is going to be needed to get to net zero emissions, but it's not a majority of what is needed. People recommend it strongly in large part because ending meat consumption doesn't cost people money, so everybody can do it.
This is unfortunately not true. There are several mechanisms through which meat production increases greenhouse gas emissions:
Bacteria in the stomachs of cattle and other ruminants produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So the more cattle being raised for meat or milk, the more methane in the atmosphere. Reduce the size of the herd, and the concentration drops.
Animals consume energy from the food they eat; not every calorie they eat ends up as meat or milk. In the case of cattle, only about 1/10 ends up in that form. So a lot of land needs to be converted from natural ecosystems to produce food for animals. This conversion causes carbon sequestered in trees and soils to be released into the atmosphere.
That increased area of agricultural land needs fertilizer, and the process for making nitrogen fertilizer involves burning huge amounts of natural gas. This both releases CO₂ into the atmosphere, as well as CH₄ via pipeline leaks.
Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
that's simply not true. GHGe for all of agriculture come out to about 20% of total GHGe.