Cheeseburgers, Buffaloburgers and Melting the Ice Caps
By Stephanie Feldstein

If we're going to have a serious conversation about reducing our environmental impact and stopping climate change, we need to stop excusing beef and start reducing our meat consumption.

Jayson Lusk's "Cheeseburgers Won't Melt the Polar Ice Caps" (op-ed, Aug. 18) does more to sell burgers than it does to sell the reality of meat production and climate change.

While Mr. Lusk is correct that grass-fed, local or organic beef does have more of an environmental footprint than many people realize, this doesn't let modern agriculture off the hook as a leading cause of global warming. Factory farms have enabled us to artificially extend the number of livestock animals that the Earth can sustain by cramming them into warehouses rather than relying on the limitations of pastureland.

Consider this: We now have more livestock animals than ever before, demanding more feed crops, more water and more energy, while emitting an incredible amount of greenhouse-gas emissions in a fundamentally unsustainable system that is harmful to farm animals, wildlife, workers, consumer health and the climate.

Contrary to Mr. Lusk's contention, natural grasslands do a lot more than feed cattle to feed humans. Like forests and wetlands, grasslands naturally store atmospheric carbon. Thus, when grasslands are converted to arable land, it not only removes a counterbalance to our carbon emissions but becomes a significant source of emissions itself.

If we're going to have a serious conversation about reducing our environmental impact and stopping climate change, we need to stop excusing beef and start reducing our meat consumption.

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This article originally appeared here.