- 1 calorie from animal protein requires 11 times as much fossil fuel as one calorie of plant protein.
- The diets of meat eaters create 7× the greenhouse emissions as the diets of vegans.
- If one person exchanges a "regular" car for a hybrid, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1 ton per year.
- If one person exchanges eating meat for a vegan diet, they'll reduce CO₂ emissions by 1.5 tons per year.
- If every American dropped one serving of chicken per week from their diet, it would save the same amount of CO₂ emissions as taking 500,000 cars of the road.
- Methane is 20× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
- Chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows are collectively the largest producer of methane in the U.S.
- Nitrous oxide is 300× more powerful at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere than CO₂.
- The meat, egg, and dairy industries produce 65% of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.
- Nearly half of all water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.
- It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat vs. 25 gallons to produce 1 pound of wheat.
- You'd save more water by not eating 1 pound of meat than you would by not showering for 6 months.
- A meat-eating diet requires 4,000 gallons per day vs. a vegan diet which requires 300 gallons of water per day.
- Animals raised for food create 89,000 pounds of excrement per second, none of which benefits from the waste-treatment facilities for human excrement. This creates massive amounts of groundwater pollution.
- Chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 American states.
- Raising animals for food uses 30% of the earth's land mass, or 17 million square miles. That's about the same size as Asia! The moon (at 14.6 million square miles) has less area than that.
- More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
- The equivalent of 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
- Livestock grazing is the number one cause of plant species becoming threatened or going
- extinct in the U.S.
- Animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn; however, they only produce a comparatively small amount of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return.
- It requires 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat.
- It requires 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.
environment, environmentalism, vegetarianism, veganism
