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Chickens might not produce many greenhouse gasses, but they cause more damage than this article suggests. Intensive chicken and egg farming operations pollute ground water for example. There are simply too many people for them to all eat chicken except from factory farms. So chicken is not the answer.
Also, meat production's effect on global warming isn't just about the methane produced. As the article points out, land is being cleared world wide for meat production, and the loss of those forests contributes to global warming. In the US we've already lost many of our forests, but we could rebuild them and reduce global warming if we weren't using them for grazing ground, feed lots, and fields to grow all the grain and soy we feed to livestock. We could make do with less total farming land on a plant based diet, even though humans would be eating more grains, legumes, and vegetables, because right now we feed most of our grain and soybeans to farmed animals. Also, most meat is trucked long distances. Living animals are also transported. Their feed is transported by trucks as well. So they are a major contributor to vehicle emissions. Likewise, heating and cooling intensive farming operations, providing electricity to them, all of those things add up.
Livestock runoff is killing the oceans and we don't even understand fully yet how dependent we are on a working ocean ecosystem for our climate, our air, our very survival.
