A new Oxford University study pinpoints for the first time how high- and low-meat diets impact the planet.
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The title of this article seems rather sensational and misleading because it doesn’t cite or explain the 8 million cars anywhere and neither does the study it’s sourcing as far as I can tell. A quick web search says 8 million cars is 1/4 of all the cars on the road in the United Kingdom. That seems like too large of a number.
Here are some figures on CO2 output for domestic vehicle travel in the UK https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-and-environment-statistics-2022/transport-and-environment-statistics-2022
( unfortunately for 2020, during lockdown - so add 20%ish to get 2019 )
domestic transport was responsible for emitting 99 MtCO2e (million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent), a 19% reduction from 2019 and the largest fall in emissions on record.
So, if you’re right and 8million is about a quarter of the cars, that’s about 25m tonnes of CO2)
OK very tough calcalculation stupid assumptions, but just sanity checking.
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Assuming 60million people in the UK
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Assume all are heavy meat eaters (no)
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Assume they cut down saving 5kg of CO2 a day, I make that
108Mt a year saved.
So actually, it would take a quarter of the population being heavy meat eaters cuttting down to get to the 80m cars.
So - not entirely mad?
Note - my maths is really really bad, so I could well have made egregious errors here
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Not to mention, the super wealthy and corporations being reigned in will still do far more than a random joe eating less steak. Just my two cents.
I mean, that’s cool and I can get behind eating less meat, but in my lifetime I’m not convinced that people eating meat will be the major contributor to greenhouse gas reduction. This notion always sounds like putting the burden on common folks that are trying to live, rather than companies, countries and organizations that deliberately contribute.
These countries and organizations are destroying the world on our behalf. We like what they do, we buy their products, and we accept it all because it’s more convenient, tasty, or otherwise makes our lives better.
We need to do both personal and societal responsibility. We need to stop the pollution at the source AND we need to accept what that means. Stopping agricultural waste for example will mean things like expensive meat, less meat, more ugly looking vegetables, eating more plants. Otherwise it won’t happen. There’s no dream scenario where we stop the environmental destruction from an environmentally destructive thing and yet we still keep the thing.
This is exact right. Thank you for writing what I wanted to say.
