You’d probably rather give up your SUV than stop eating meat — but you may have to make a choice.

And it’s not just because you’re eating too much meat (which all of us probably are). It’s not just because Americans grow and kill more than 10 billion animals a year for food.

Like it or not we have come to the end of the era of cheap meat and cheap oil — and you might as well get used to thinking of them together, because both contribute heavily to global warming.

Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

— Mark Bittman, Rethinking the Meat Guzzler, NY Times

One incandescent light bulb is responsible for 700 pounds of greenhouse gas (CO₂) over its lifetime, according to the NRDC.

Our eating habits are funding global warming and many other environmental catastrophes, according to a recent report from the United Nations.

Click here to download a PDF of the report.

“Do you eat meat? Then you are responsible for the destruction of the Amazon, because 95 per cent of deforestation is caused by cattle ranching. I would love it if every one of your readers boycotted Brazilian beef.”

The tearing down of trees to make way for intensive cattle production has helped destroy an area of rainforest nearly three times the size of Great Britain. The Instituto Peabiru has been monitoring the social and environmental impact. In the next decade, another Great Britain could be lost, along with the animals, birds and plants it supports. Though the message has failed to penetrate Europe, this carving out of pasture is far more pernicious than logging (accounting for three per cent of rainforest loss) or large-scale agriculture, including intensive soya production.

“There are five big companies producing soya in the Amazon, but 420,000 cattle ranches. Why is Greenpeace diverting attention to soya?”

— João Meirelles Filho, a Brazilian conservationist living in Belém, quoted in The Observer, Sunday, November 18, 2007

Livestock production is at the heart of almost every environmental catastrophe, and:

• More climate change gases than all the motor vehicles in the world
• 64 percent of all the acid rain-producing ammonia. (Why do you think the oceans are dying and sea creatures are starving?)
• 15 out of the 24 biggest global ecosystems that are dying out are declining because of our desires to eat meat.

Does your spirituality encourage global warming?

And if that isn’t enough to make you think twice, consider that eating meat makes you more susceptible to suffering from E. coli outbreaks.