True. The best thing that anyone who cares about the environment could do is adopt a plant-based diet.

"Eating a vegan diet could be the “single biggest way” to reduce your environmental impact on earth, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Oxford found that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce an individual's carbon footprint from food by up to 73 per cent.

Meanwhile, if everyone stopped eating these foods, they found that global farmland use could be reduced by 75 per cent, an area equivalent to the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined.

Not only would this result in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions, it would also free up wild land lost to agriculture, one of the primary causes for mass wildlife extinction.

The new study, published in the journal Science, is one of the most comprehensive analyses to date into the detrimental effects farming can have on the environment and included data on nearly 40,000 farms in 119 countries.

The findings reveal that meat and dairy production is responsible for 60 per cent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the products themselves providing just 18 per cent of calories and 37 per cent of protein levels around the world.

Researchers examined a total of 40 agricultural products in the study, covering 90 per cent of all food that is eaten.

They looked at how each of these impacted the environment by analysing climate change emissions, water pollution and air pollution.

Lead author Joseph Poore said:

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.

“It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he explained, which would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy,” he added.

[independent.co.uk]

Huge amounts of the food grown is fed to animals for eating; so we could also revert vast areas of farmland to forest and wilderness, and still produce more food to feed the hungry in the third world. And you don't even need to go vegan just reduce meat eating by nine tenths, which would also make us all a lot healthier. The extra trees would soak up carbon. And well you can just go on listing......

Im currently watching documentary called 'eating animals' and they just had same statistic.

It would seem that each of us needs to become a vegan if we are to save the planet. No more cooking outside on the fire or filling up the freezer with meat. Instead of grass everyone will have dinner growing in their yards.. All in all it does not seem like that bad of an idea as I always felt bad about eating meat.