How many pairs of jeans do you think a person buys each year?
I buy 1 pair of Levis and just wear them about once or twice a week (never washing them) and throw them out after 2 or 3 years.
https://foodtank.com/news/2013/12/why-meat-eats-resources/ https://www.globalagriculture.org/whats-new/news/en/32921.ht...
To the extent that the beef industry burns fossil fuels, that's something you could criticize, but it's hardly unique to the beef industry. Cattle would eat less intensively-cultivated corn and more grass if the corn farmers weren't subsidized so much. If no corn was cultivated at all, cattle would still be a pretty efficient way of sustainably extracting food from marginal grassland.
Regarding the parent's comment, the 1800 pounds-of-water-for-pound-of-beef figure seems to be sourced from https://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report-48-WaterFo... (which won't say 1799 because it's metric) https://www.watercalculator.org/footprints/beef-king-big-wat... seems to aggregate various estimates.
To direct the conversation towards solutions, Project drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org) mentions Silvopasture practices (closely related to Joel Salatin style farming). That said, reducing the amount of intensively-cultivated corn grown ultimately still means reducing the number of cattle (we're ~80-90% more than 100yrs ago) and seemingly less meat consumption per capita.
> it takes around 2,000 gallons of water to make a typical pair of jeans.
This sounds like a lot until you consider how much water goes into literally everything else people do without thinking.
Let me know if you need more clarity.