Your July 4 Barbecue is Destroying the Planet

The price of the hamburgers and T-bone steaks that Americans grill every July 4 just hit an all-time high, just as a record-breaking heat wave is broiling the nation. So maybe this will sound less blasphemous than usual: The best change you can make to help the planet and reduce global warming is to eat less beef.

I know, beef is delicious. America eats more of it than any other nation, and every Independence Day, Americans eat more of it than any other food. The cattle industry slogan isn’t wrong: Beef often is what’s for dinner. But even if you would never swap a USDA prime ribeye for a salad or plant-based imitation beef burger, you can make a significant difference for the earth by barbecuing more chicken and pork and less brisket and steak. Those Chik-Fil-A cows telling you to “EAT MOR CHIKIN” have a legitimate environmental point, even if it sucks for the chickens.

Eating animals that eat plants is worse for the earth than just eating plants, but eating some animals is worse than others. The inconvenient truth is that cattle, sheep and other ruminants are dramatically worse for the planet than poultry and pork. Not only do they use more water, they also generate seven to 10 times more greenhouse gas emissions that heat the planet.

This is partly because they burp and fart and poop methane – which sounds goofy but is about 30% of the world’s methane emissions. But it’s mostly because cows require so much land. They are extremely inefficient converters of their feed into our food, which is why two-thirds of global farmland, and one-third of all habitable land, is used to feed them. In the U.S., beef cattle use half our agricultural land to provide 3% of our calories. Beef is by far the world’s leading driver of deforestation; it’s the main reason that a soccer field’s worth of carbon-rich tropical forest is cleared every six seconds. When you eat a burger, you’re not just eating a cow. You’re eating macaws and the rest of the cast of “Rio.” You’re eating the Amazon.

You might think that you’re helping if you splurge for “sustainable” grass-fed beef made from cattle that spend their whole lives in pastures, but in fact, that’s even worse than conventional beef made from cattle that spend their last few months eating grain in feedlots. That’s because grass-fed cattle take longer to reach their slaughter weight, so they spend more time burping up methane, and they require even more land, because feedlots used for industrial cattle fatten up cows more efficiently. American-made beef is usually more efficient and therefore more eco-friendly than foreign beef, but while there’s some truth to the popular line from ranchers that “it’s not the cow, it’s the how,” it’s mostly the cow.

I stopped eating beef and lamb when I started researching my new book that launches today, “We Are Eating the Earth,” because I wanted to eat less of the earth.” I’m too weak to go vegan, which is the best diet for the planet, but cutting out beef and lamb means my diet is about as eco-friendly as most vegetarian diets, since vegetarians tend to load up on dairy. That said, when I spent a week reporting on ranches in Brazil, I cheated and devoured a few exquisite local steaks.

Sure, I’m a hypocrite, but diet is like religion; we all find the level of hypocrisy we can live with. Perfect isn’t usually on the menu. Better is better than worse. Most of us will never go vegan, but for all of us, eating less beef would be better.

The average American eats the equivalent of three burgers a week; cutting that down to even two would save the forests in a land mass the size of Massachusetts every year. It could also help reduce some of the heart diseases and other health problems that doctors attribute to red meat, even if Instagram carnivore-diet “meat-fluencers” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deny it. And with ground beef selling for $6 a pound, eating greener also makes economic sense.

The good news is that change is possible. Americans have already reduced our per-capita beef consumption by one-third in the last half-century. We didn’t eat less meat overall; we just ate way more chicken. We didn’t do it to save the climate; we did it because chicken was cheaper and healthier. But we did it. And Americans still eat four times more beef than the global average, so we’ve got plenty of room to do more.

The bad news is that we’ll need to. The world is on track to eat 70% more ruminant meat and transform forest land the size of India into pasture by 2050. Governments can help change that trajectory. They can do this by investing in plant-based and cell-cultured alternatives to meat, like they invested in alternatives to fossil fuels; by funding livestock research and pasture improvements that could produce more beef using less land; or even taxing agricultural emissions as Denmark recently did. Unfortunately, one American pollster told me that meat taxes are the least popular government policies he’s ever polled – “up there with veterans’ benefits for ISIS.”

Of course, President Donald Trump doesn’t care about the climate, and often accuses climate activists of trying to ban cows, so policy change will be as tough as the well-done steaks he likes. In recent years, environmentalists have shifted their focus away from behavioral change, arguing that scolding citizens about their individual carbon footprints lets corporate polluters and fossil-fueled politicians off the hook.

But if we’re serious about trying to reduce climate change, then everybody’s emissions matter. And nobody is shoving all those burgers down our throats – not McDonald’s, not Cargill, not Trump.

We’re making our own choices when we stuff our faces, and we can choose to stuff them differently. Isn’t that what Independence Day is all about?