Skip meat one day a week to save planet?

really?....

Other than the American diet, every other diet guideline pyramid out there suggests keeping meat to a minimum - at most a few times a week. Reducing the meat intake would have a huge effect on the health of our environment, but also on the health of one's body.

Great idea, and very easy step to make to do your part; however, skipping meat one day a week will not save the planet.

I try to go meatless at least one day a week, though I never will go fully without.

Yeah... I'm sure not eating meat for one day will make that much of a difference... How about a second opinion from someone that doesn't have a hidden agenda. For every animal Rejendra Pachauri doesn't eat, I'm going to eat three. Now if you would excuse me it's almost lunch time and I have to go make my ham, turkey and roast beef club sandwich...

I think i'll have another hamburger.

This is a crock - is there no end to the things that are going to be piled into the "causes global warming" bucket? By now, it looks like everything in the world either causes global warming or is being caused by it. ANY liberal cause has jumped on this bandwagon and tied their cause to global warming in some way. It is obvious that special interest groups are just using global warming alarmism to try to scare everyone into doing what they want them to - in this case, it looks like PETA is milking this cow.

This is "utter" nonsense!
There are far more humans than livestock animals. Consumption of a vegetarian diet relies on legumes for a source of protein, does it not? If we were all to convert to a vegetarian diet wouldn't we be adding to global warming due to increased flatuence from ingesting beans??

Beans, beans are they good for the planet?
The more you eat the more you warm it
The warmer the planet the worse you feel
Eat more cows at every meal

More feel good ideas from the global warming crowd. . . too bad it is all politics and little science. . .

Another wack job and the UN backing him. . . . And after Al got the Nobel Prize for a movie I think it lost all credibility . . . .

I guess the assumption is that we all eat meat every day of the week? Many of us who are on the greener side of things have already cut back our meat consumption -- I'm once every few weeks or so as it is.

Maybe all of us Catholics should go back to no meat on Friday -- we could save the planet and rack up Karma points at the same time.

I wonder if it will be any easier to get Americans to eat less meat than to drive less?

18% is a surprisingly large number, until you realize that these animals are mostly eating foods (mostly corn and soybeans) that were grown with artificially produced fertilizers, farmed with smoke-spewing tractors and other equipment, and then shipped over long distances. That's aside from the energy used to move the animals from the ranches where they're born to the feedlots where they hang out in their own filth (more pollution) getting fattened up to be shipped, wrapped in styrofoam and plastic (bound for landfills), in refrigerated vehicles (more energy use) over long distances to consumers.

Few suggestions for positive action meet with such intensely defensive knee-jerk whining. "Tell me to buy an expensive car, sure! But cut down on meat? That's for POOR people!" It actually saves money, so it's completely out of whack with our waste-equals-prosperity culture. Good to see it getting some press, anyway. We're slow learners, but we can learn. I just hope we can learn fast enough that future generations get the chance to look back and wonder at how long it took us to figure it out.

Did Chick Filet make up this story?

Um, no, there actually aren't "far more humans than livestock animals." There ought to be, but there aren't, not by a long shot. Approximately 10 billion land animals are killed for food every year in the U.S. alone--that's more than the human population of the entire planet (6.7 billion), let alone the human population of the U.S. (305 million).

That's part of why we desperately need to cut back on our meat consumption--the land simply cannot continue to sustain ever-larger numbers of animals raised to feed ever-larger numbers of humans. C'mon, one meatless day a week? Is that really so hard? You probably already eat a meatless breakfast most days, so that just leaves lunch (try a bean burrito) and dinner (how about spaghetti with tomato sauce?). It's as easy as apple pie (which also happens to be meatless!).

I particularly liked Dr. Pachauri's implicit recommendation that we cut back on meat consumption on a per-meal basis. It's past time we viewed animal product consumption like we view other environmentally-destructive activities, like driving or lighting our houses with incandescent bulbs - as an activity we can scale back without necessarily going whole hog (cold tofurkey? - sorry, too easy). Now it's time for our own environmental leaders to catch up to Dr. Pachauri and recommend the same.

Bernard Brown
Director, PB&J Campaign (www.pbjcampaign.org)

I think it's a great idea.