Michael Pollan and the Hummer-Driving Vegan

It sounded like such a great, simple way to illustrate how much environmental damage is wrought by our meat-heavy diet. "A vegan in a Hummer," Michael Pollan declared on Saturday, "has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef-eater in a Prius."

Sadly, it isn't true, as Pollan has since acknowledged.

Pollan made the statement during the PopTech conference. He used the false Hummer example to support a true claim: "Our meat-eating is one of the most important contributors we make to climate change."

The Hummer example, though, is what got the most attention, spreading as it did across Twitter and the blogosphere. Unfortunately, it served to undermine the point Pollan was making. 

Reuters blogger Adam Pasick cited a 2005 paper by Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, then of the University of Chicago, published in the journal Earth Interactions. The scientists examined the relative carbon footprints of plant-based and red-meat diets and concluded that a heavy meat-eater diet creates about two tons more carbon dioxide per year than does a vegan diet. They also compared the carbon footprints of the Toyota Prius and the Chevy Suburban (which is comprable, mileage-wise, to a Hummer). The difference is about 4.67 tons per year, they concluded.

Eshel told Pasick that Pollan's statement was "emphatically wrong" and "not even close." He wasn't happy about having to say so, since he's as concerned as Pollan is about meat-eating's harmful environmental effects.