"The meat industry has a particularly heavy impact. Grazing areas for cattle account for about 25% of the world’s ice-free land and more than 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Crop production uses 12% of land and creates less than 7% of emissions."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/06/human-society-under-urgent-threat-l...

25%! This is what i am living on the frontline of. The more i think about it the more i see the cattle industry as a major cause of climate change - right up there with coal. It involves massive deforestation of native habitat and massive methane production. Throw in massive amounts of poison to control the non-edible weeds and to treat the cows against ticks and buffalo flies, and you've got a built in environmental disaster.

Less clear is what can done about it. There's a lot of noise now about reducing coal, which is good, but not much about reducing cattle farms. Yes, there's an activist vegan movement in Australia - the current conservative government just rushed in new, 'terrorist-type' laws to jail them for protesting at abattoirs and farms - but is the world really gonna give up eating beef any time soon?

I'm interested in the growing fake meat technology - haven't researched it too deeply so there may be underlying problems there as well - but on the surface it would seem to offer some solutions