Less Meat = Less Carbon

(12/24/2008) - Being the holiday season and all, I've had a bit of trouble sitting down and writing my own thought provoking articles.  So instead, I'm going to pass on an interesting post at Ezra Klein's blog.  Ezra points to an interesting graph posted by the PB&J campaign, which they got from a NY Times article:

As this graph illustrates, eating less meat is a very good way to reduce your carbon footprint.  Perhaps more importantly, the graph shows that substituting chicken or pork for beef does a hell of a lot as well.  Ezra's commenters added some of their own calculations.  Commenter Nav estimated the CO2 emissions in terms of 1000 calories, not pounds of food, while pointing out that we also need to take other nutritional value into account:

Milk 3.3
Cheese 5.9
Chicken 2.4
Pork 8.8
Salmon 12.5
Shrimp 24.9
Beef 25.0
Oat Flakes 0.4
Flour 0.3
Carrots 1.4
Tomatoes 20.3

This second chart makes me happy, because I really like cheese. 

For those of you keeping score, burning a pound of gasoline (1 gallon = 6.3 pounds) releases 3.17 pounds of CO2. 

There are other ways that this system could be improved as well.  For example, including the methane produced by cows would help express the true impact of eating beef.  It could also include more types of food.  Many commenters on Ezra's blog wanted to know what the carbon footprint of eggs is.  Another commenter, Leo, wanted packaging included as well.