Want To Cut Your Carbon Footprint In Half? Go Vegetarian.

This comes from Grist...

"A team of British researchers scrutinized the diets of 2,041 vegans, 15,751 vegetarians, 8,123 fish eaters, and 29,589 meat eaters, all of them living in the U.K. They estimated the greenhouse gas emissions associated with 289 types of food. Then they combined the data to determine the globe-warming impacts of those four diets, based on consumption of 2,000 calories a day."

It seems that eating meat adds a significant amount of carbon to the world. Raising the animals requires the use of fossil fuels to power the farms and farm machinery. There's also the issue of animal flatulence (there is an effort afoot to genetically engineer animals to eliminate this, let's see how that goes over).

Here are the numbers...

Heavy meat eaters add 16 pounds of carbon dioxide a day. If you eat less than two ounces, you add 10.3 pounds a day. If you only eat fish, 8.7 pounds. Vegetarians add 8.5 and vegans 6.5.

We are what we eat.