Der Fleischkonsum in US-Städten verursacht umgerechnet 363 Millionen Tonnen (329 Millionen Tonnen) Kohlenstoffemissionen pro Jahr. Das ist mehr als die gesamten jährlichen CO2-Emissionen des Vereinigten Königreichs von 336 Millionen Tonnen (305 Millionen Tonnen).

Researchers have quantified how meat consumption in the U.S. is contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

More than 11 million tons of meat is consumed in U.S. cities annually — equating to about 329 million tons of carbon emissions, according to a study published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.

That figure is comparable to emission levels from domestic fossil fuel combustion in the U.S., at about 334 million tons annually, Benjamin P. Goldstein, an assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan and lead author of the paper, told ABC News. In addition, emissions from meat consumption in the U.S. exceed total annual carbon emissions from the U.K., at 305 million tons, and Italy, at 313 million tons, the researchers said.

The three most populated cities in the U.S. — New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — consumed a total of 3.2 million tons of meat per year, according to the paper.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02450-7

Ok? I’m not trying to say emissions from meat consumption aren’t bad or out of hand but all people from US cities? That’s going to be a much larger population than the UK. It’s a weird apples and oranges comparison.

Title seems misleading when not accounting for the massive difference in population:

Population of the UK: 69.5 million

Population of the US: 350 million

They still have a point, so I don’t understand why they wouldn’t apply a per capita allocation into their conclusion/title.

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You know 90% of the emissions from beef is just transporting it. These emissions will still  be there if everyone switched to a vegan diet

Population size matters a lot when comparing national emissions. A more useful way to look at this is emissions per person.

When you shift it to a per capita view, you can see which diets or systems are actually producing more carbon on average, instead of just total volume.

Everyone keeps debating per-capita numbers or saying should “just eat less beef” but that misses the actual point of the study

the climate issue isn’t meat consumption as a personal choice it’s the U.S. industrial meat system that is deliberately built to maximize emissions.

Beef raised in regenerative systems can be close to carbon-neutral, while beef from feedlots can be twenty to fifty times worse and the U.S. overwhelmingly uses the latter with cattle fed fertilizer-intensive corn and soy, manure stored in methane-heavy lagoons, and long transport networks that burn fuel at every stage alongside deforestation and major soil-carbon loss.

These structural emissions don’t show up in a simple per-capita comparison, but they are what determines whether meat is sustainable or disastrous

Reducing personal beef consumption can help but the real leverage is in changing the system that forces nearly all beef to be high-emission beef in the first place.