An Interesting Study In Minutiae

I'm not one to alter my meat-eating habits... but this article certainly does make me stop and think: If, every day at lunch, you eat a strictly "plant-based" meal (i.e. no meat-based products, which require in their production the creation of a lot of greenhouse gases), that little thing by itself is "40 percent as good as" driving a hybrid car. (Cheaper too.) If you have toast and jam for breakfast, and spaghetti with tomato sauce for lunch, you're doing better than half as well as a person who drives a Prius (and eats meat) while you drive a regular gas-burning car, all other things being equal.

Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you'll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you'd save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

For me, I work from home; when I drive, I drive a scooter. That, plus living on The Philippines infrastructure (as opposed to the energy-intensive American one) makes my carbon footprint incredibly small. So, I figure I can have my steak and eat it too.