Here we link dietary data from a sample of 55,504 vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters with food-level data on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication risk and potential biodiversity loss from a review of 570 life-cycle assessments covering more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries.
Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% for land use, 46.4% for water use, 27.0% for eutrophication and 34.3% for biodiversity.
In the US, your car is a far bigger impact than your diet. We need to enable ways to live without a car, like legalizing corner stores, legalizing the housing density that allows for good transit, etc.
In the US, people who are trying to avoid climate action focus on diet rather than our true sources of emissions. And the US has the most action to take since we are such ridiculously high emitters.
If you want to change your diet, that's fantastic. But if you are in the US, you have far far bigger concerns to address first.
This is a surprising claim that requires evidence. I am very involved in climate action in the US and I've never seen this attitude from anyone. And of course, diet is a "true" source of emissions. There's an interesting study you could read if you're curious how that could be.
My gut feeling was that the realistic way to handle car emissions will be to migrate the global car pool to electrical, but I don't have any hard number to back this gut feeling with.
The real title is:
> Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts