Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes I found online. Turned out Americans could save the Amazon rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don’t have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef in America dropped 10%, so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At that time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!
Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well helped me understand how a trend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas. Like, I dunno, people buy fewer Barbies and the price of air conditioners goes down. I’m sure some people make a lot of money by figuring out stuff like that.