Cattle in a feedlot that sits on the northwestern edge of Garden City, Kansas. Photo: Keith Myers/Kansas City Star/MCT
If you want to slow climate change, white meat may be the right meat, according to two studies that tally the environmental effect of the beef industry.

Raising cattle in the U.S. requires 28 times as much land and 11 times as much irrigation water, and pumps at least five times as much planet-warming gases into Earth's atmosphere than producing the equivalent calories of dairy products, poultry, pork or eggs, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ######

"For people, the obvious answer is: whenever possible, replace beef with something else," said Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College and lead author of the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." If you really need it to be from animal sources, that's still OK. ###### As long as it's not beef, you have always made a significant step forward, because beef is so much more intensive than the rest."

The beef industry, not surprisingly, is not impressed. ###### The fact is the U.S. beef industry produces beef with lower greenhouse gas emissions than any other country."

Indeed, emissions from developed countries, such as the United States, topped out in 1970 and have decreased 23 percent, according to the study published in Climatic Change. ######

Beef cattle produced more than half the emissions, followed by dairy cattle (17 percent), sheep (9 percent), buffalo (7 percent), pigs (5 percent) and goats (4 percent), according to the Climate Change study. The largest increases came in Congo, the Central African Republic and Oman, the study found. ######

Caldeira said his study amounts to a broad "rule of thumb" estimate using rough emission factors developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But its conclusions parallel those of several other studies, according to the report.]]>