The following are excerpts from a letter to The New Yorker, written by Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University:

“Estimates of the carbon footprint of American beef production typically focus on things like cattle burps and manure, which account for roughly four per cent of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. But these estimates ignore the climate costs of land use.

Although some cattle graze on dry, native grasslands, most beef production relies on wetter pastures or croplands that have been converted from forests, wetlands, and other habitats. These conversions transfer to the air large quantities of carbon that these habitats stored in plants and soil.

Because climate solutions call for saving and restoring forests even as a growing global population demands more food, any plausible path forward requires two things: farmers must produce more beef per acre and consumers in wealthy countries must eat less beef.

That’s why America’s land-efficient beef farming is valuable and needs to supply more of the world’s rising demand.

But that’s also why Americans should eat less beef. Since the seventies, the population of the U.S. has grown, but its total beef consumption has remained roughly the same. This has undoubtedly saved forests here and abroad.

Continuing deforestation reflects the growth in global population and growing food demands. But this hardly proves that Americans’ reduction in beef-eating has no effect.

Americans still eat vastly more beef than almost everyone else in the world, yet beef makes up only three per cent of our calorie intake. Shifting half of that to plant-based meats could do a great deal of good.”

Bottom line: global beef consumption will continue to rise due to increasing demand outside the US. Beef consumption destroys carbon-storing habitats and contributes to climate change. However, much of the damage done by beef consumption happens outside the US. If Americans ate less beef, there would be more beef available to export. If the US exported more beef, fewer forests and wetlands abroad would be cleared for cattle.

Reference:

The Mail/October 21, 2019 issue of The New Yorker