Title: Reducing Your Footprint - 2011 Meat Eaters Guide | Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change + Health | Environmental Working Group
Headings: Reducing Your Footprint
Reducing Your Footprint
Take the Meatless Monday Pledge.
Here’s how eating less meat measures up against other climate-saving actions:

Content: Reducing Your Footprint - 2011 Meat Eaters Guide | Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change + Health | Environmental Working Group
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Reducing Your Footprint
Take the Meatless Monday Pledge. Across the country, thousands of people and dozens of schools and other institutions are going meatless on Mondays. Just like reducing home energy use or driving less, skipping meat once a week can make an important difference if everyone does it. By itself, eating less (or no) meat won’t stop climate change or eliminate environmental damage, but it is very important for improving personal health and reducing your environmental footprint. If everyone in the U.S. chose a vegetarian diet – the equivalent of taking 46 million cars off the road or not driving 555 billion miles, according to EWG’s calculations, it would only make a moderate dent in overall carbon emissions, about a 4.5 percent reduction. Other estimates of meat’s overall contribution to US emissions are higher, but not as high as many estimates for the world as a whole (Weber 2010). That’s because the U.S. has other very large other industrial sources of greenhouse gases, making the meat slice of carbon emissions comparatively smaller. Also, U.S. livestock production does not depend on cutting down carbon-rich rain forests in order to import or grow feed crops and raise animals, as is true in Europe (which imports significant amounts of feed from Brazil) or in some tropical countries, where livestock emissions are a much larger slice of the overall emissions pie. While important, it is clear that making significant cuts in US emissions will not come solely from individual action. It will take political action to bring about comprehensive policies that put the nation on a path to green energy.