Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. By Jillian Mock This week, we’re trying something different. Usually, our One Thing You Can Do feature highlights an idea for reducing your climate footprint. For a change, we decided to look at an individual action and talk about what would happen if everybody in the United States actually adopted it. Here’s the question: What if everybody in the United States ate less meat? We don’t mean going vegetarian. Just less. Is that realistic? “There is historical precedent,” said Richard Waite, an associate in the food program at the World Resources Institute. Overall, Americans eat about a third less beef than they did in the 1970s, he noted. It’s conceivable that we could make such a dietary shift again. So, according to a study this month in the journal Scientific Reports , if everyone in the country reduced their consumption of beef, pork, and poultry by a quarter and substituted plant proteins, we’d save about 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That […]
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