Don’t have the cash for a new hybrid? Did you know that you can reduce your carbon footprint by the same amount as driving a hybrid by simply eating less meat? Well, now you do.

In 1971 Frances Moore Lappé wrote the vegetarian best-seller Diet for a Small Planet which hi-lighted the agricultural inefficiency of meat eating. (On average, it takes eight pounds of vegetable protein to generate a pound of animal protein.) As global warming has become a hot issue, that agricultural inefficiency is being measured with a new yardstick— the carbon footprint of meat.

As the food writer Marc Bittman writes in the New York Times article Re-thinking the Meat Guzzler.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, 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.

Something to chew on, don’t you think?