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The study is flawed because it counts CO2 equivalents of methane and nitrous oxide which have an atmospheric lifetime of only 10-15 and 120 years respectively while CO2 has a lifetime of several tens of thousands of years.

This means that after rime the 8.1 tons of CO2 equivalent from meat and dairy farming will decrease while the 4.4 tons of CO2 generated from your average car will still be the same for tens of thousands of years.

Of course it still isnt good that meat and dairy farming polutes but one must take into account the time factor in such a study before comparing it to transport as when you look at this some will think we should rather be careful of the farming then the transport.

Conclusion: Transport is far worse then farming even though on the short term it looks like the opposite.

As others have pointed out, the article incorrectly compared automobile emissions to food emissions.

It also did not compare full lifecycle emissions from the operation, manufacturing and storage of automobiles.

Emissions during the manufacture of an automobile are typically equal to around 20% of the operating emissions.

Each automobile requires road space to operate and at least 3 parking spaces; one at home; one at work and one at shopping. If the spaces are in a parkade, significant emissions occur in the construction. If the spaces are surface lots, they decrease the land that can be used by vegetation to sequester.

Road and bridge construction causes significant GHG emissions as well.

Glad to see dairy lumped in with meat as major contributor to global warming. Even organic, grass-fed dairy is not a solution for tons of reasons, including the fact that grassfed cows emit 4 times as much methane as grain-fed cows.

I disagree that switching from red meat to fish is a good idea, since geophysicists Eshel & Martin published a U. of Chicago study in 2006 reporting that a fish-based diet is as bad as a red meat-based diet. The commercial ocean fishing industry emits ton of CO2 in fossil fuels, and salmon farms are extremely inefficient.

Yes, less meat means less animals raised for food.

But farm animals would be replaced by an increase in wildlife on the land no longer needed for agriculture. Much of this land could be returned to wilderness. While some natural grazing animals like Buffalo emit methane, it is more than offset by the carbon sequestered in the soil and plants that make up a healthy grassland wilderness.

If those trends continue, meat may become a treat rather than a routine. It won’t be uncommon, but just as surely as the S.U.V. will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

Maybe that’s not such a big deal. “Who said people had to eat meat three times a day?” asked Mr. Pollan.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

Some perspective in case you think 28 million tons over five years is a lot.

From a recent article about coal from Yahoo news:

"Worldwide demand for coal dipped at the end of the 20th century, but is now back up and projected to rise 60 percent by 2030 to 6.9 billion tons a year, according to the International Energy Agency."

Today, most coal goes to electrical power plants. In developing nations such as India, China and Africa, coal is the staple — and affordable — source of fuel with which families run their first washing machines and televisions. Worldwide electricity consumption is expected to double by 2030, the World Energy Council says.

In America, about 150 new coal-fired electrical plants are proposed over the next decade. In China, there are plans for a coal-fired power plant to go on line nearly every week. Emissions from these plants alone could nullify the cuts made by Europe, Japan and other rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol treaty."