Question: Do you think we should become vegetarian in order to reduce climate change?

Ross Alexander answered on 16 Mar 2020:

Hi Miss C,

I get asked this question ALOT. And it is a very complicated situation. The short answer is, yes we should reduce our meat consumption as it is one of the biggest sources of CO2 in the atmosphere, but here is where it gets complicated:

basically if you look at the environmental impact that mass produced meat farming produces, you have to say, “hey thats not great for global warming and cutting that out would be a good idea”. And in theory that would be true. But if you cut out all animal products from your diet you have to replace it with something else.

And in this case that would be plants( fruits / vegetables / cereals / etc). So here is the complicated bit.

So the first thing to think about is, where would you grow these? In the fields that the cows were in? Probably not as that land is not good enough to sustain plant life as it doesn’t have the necessary nutrients.Its good enough for grass , that is why the cattle graze there (we cant eat grass as we cannot break it down in our guts). To get it up to scratch it would require lots of input from man and this would have a huge environmental cost. This would be through fertillsers / chemicals and physical labour with machines.
Then you have to look at the worlds population, it is predicted to get to over 10 billion in 30 years. And the challenge facing farmers is they have to produce more food in those 30 years than has ever been produced EVER, and do this on less land (maybe as much as half).

Which is a huge challenge. So coming aback to your original question, there would be a positive impact but it would not be as big as you think. A diet that is a mixture of the two with reduced meat consumption would possibly the better way to go at this time.

At least until us plant scientists can figure out how to grow more plants with less space and inputs.