Veganism & The Environment: by the numbers
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Global Warming
3 Primary Gasses Are Responsible for Global Warming
Carbon Dioxide
- If one person exchanges a "regular" car for a hybrid, they'll reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1 ton per year.
- If one person exchanges eating meat for a vegan diet, they'll reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.5 tons per year.
- If every American dropped one serving of chicken per week from their diet, it would save the same amount of CO2 emissions as taking 500,000 cars off the road.
Methane
- Chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows are are collectively the largest producer of methane in the United States.
- Methane is 20X more powerful at trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Nitrus Oxide
- The meat, egg and dairy industries produce 65% of worldwide nitrous oxide emissions.
- Nitrus oxide is 300x more powerful at trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Impact of Eating Meat
- One calorie from animal protein requires eleven times as much fossil fuel as one calorie of plant protein.
- The diets of meat eaters create seven times the greenhouse emissions as the diets of vegans.
A Thirsty Industry
Water
- Nearly half of all water used in the United States goes to raising animals for food.
- It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat. It takes 25 gallons to make a pound of wheat.
Water Requirements Per Diet
- You'd save more water by not eating one pound of meat than you would by not taking a shower for 6 months.
- A vegan diet requires 300 gallons of water per day versus a meat-eating diet which requires 4,000 gallons per day.
- Animals raised for food create 89,000 pounds of excrement per second, non of which benefit from the waste-treatment facilities human excrement doues. This creates a massive amount of groundwater pollution.
- Chicken, hog and cattle excrement has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states.
Land
- Raising animals for food uses 30% of the Earth's land mass, which is about the same size as Asia.
- This is the equivalent of 17 million square miles. The surface of the moon is only 14.6 million square miles.
- More than 260 million acres of United States forests have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.
- The equivalent of 7 football fields of land are bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals.
- Livestock grazing is the number one cause of plant species becoming threatened or going extinct in the United States.
Why is Raising Animals for Food so Inefficient?
- Animals eat large quantities of grain, sybeans, oats and corn; however, they only produce a comparatively small amount of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return.
- 70% of grain and cereals grown in the United States are fed to farmed animals.
- It requires 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat & 5 pounds of wild-caught fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish.
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