Diane Rehm hosted a patriotically apropos discussion on her radio show this week, in which experts called for the U.S. to be global leaders in assuaging climate change—with our meat choices. Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group (which conducted the studies that created these charts), said, "If every American stopped eating beef tomorrow—which I don't expect—and started eating chicken instead, that would be the equivalent of taking 26 million cars off the road.”

Even if their projection is off by a few million, that’s a lot of cars. It's also probably more manageable for people to substitute chicken for beef than it is to, say, change how they power their homes or how they get to work. Those just feel like bigger concessions. At the current rate, Faber said, meat and milk production are forecast to double by 2050.

More than half the water and grain consumed in the U.S. are consumed by the beef industry. “If we took half the land that we're now using to produce corn and beans to feed animals, and instead dedicated that to produce food for people right now,” Faber said, “we could feed an additional 2 billion people."

“If China chooses to eat meat at the rates we do,” said Michael Pollan, professor of science and environmental journalism at Berkeley, during the same discussion, “we're going to have an enormous problem because the resources that it takes are just too great.”

Pollan and Faber say American meat-heavy diets are spreading around the world. By 2050 there will be 9.6 billion humans. At current rates, there will be 3 billion more meat eaters—double what we have now. Massive expanses of forests will need to be cleared to create pastures to raise the animals, and to grow the grain to feed them. Managing their waste will become an even bigger problem, with methane emanating from "waste lagoons" and nitrous oxide from fertilizer.

So, in celebrating Independence Day, nothing could be less American than eating beef. Or, well, that's overstatement. If you think Americans are generally wasteful and inconsiderate, maybe eating beef is the most American thing you can do. I just want there to be a superlative in there.

Jude Capper is a livestock sustainability consultant in Bozeman, Montana, who rounded out the discussion with some industry perspective. Capper noted that, pound for pound, chickens and pigs actually use more human-edible feed than cows.

“We looked at the life-cycle impacts of beef, chicken, turkey, all of these meats," Faber countered, "and the feed impacts, the methane emissions—it's very clear that beef is far worse for the climate then many of the other alternatives."

And then there’s the question of hormones. Capper said, "As a mother of a baby, obviously, I'm incredibly concerned about my daughter’s upbringing and growth and health. But if we look at one individual eight-ounce steak that's from an animal given hormones—that does absolutely have estrogen in it—but the average female would have to eat over 3,000 pounds of beef every single day to get the same amount of estrogen as she does in one teeny tiny birth control pill."