Interestingly, most beef, lamb etc produced in Australia, is not
done by industrial farming, but by natural grazing.

Now lets say everyone stopped eating meat, what would be the effect?
Those grasses would grow like steam with no grazing, creating huge
fuel loads. Next they dry out, lightning invariably strikes
eventually.

Would Animals Australia rush out to extinguish the huge mega grass
fires that would blacken the countryside, burning everything in
their path?

Methinks the author needs to rethink the ramifications of her
claims. The law of unintended consequences, applies here.

Climate change appears to be a convenient vehicle for many pressure groups to use to advocate for their agenda. There are issues with land clearing, and a lot of it in the Amazon basin is driven by grazing. There are also health issues with excess consumption of meat; obesity and cancers show links.

To conclude we must stop eating meat sets a dangerous precedent in policy terms; or at least a rather cynical manipulation by some pressure groups. If that process of logic is applied elsewhere then by simile because motor vehicles cause injury and death and cause pollution we should stop using motor vehicles; come back Pol Pot all is forgiven!

Australia’s sheep population has declined from 170,000,000+ in early 70s to 70,000,000 now. Cattle populations have shown marginal increases. So what has changed?

Electricity consumption and vehicle traffic are the areas of change.

Analyses have been undertaken that show for agriculture to contribute to reducing greenhouse gases then farmers must stop all agricultural output and totally convert properties into tree lots.

“You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” Matthew 23:24

Meat bashing is as fanciful as Druids dancing around Stonehenge at solstice.

Instead, a bit of finger-pointing at pig/cattle/poultry feedlots would make some sense on a number of fronts.
The author could give equal time, in a more rational consideration, to the vast swathes of landscape totally denuded of original vegetation, and animals, to make way for waving seas of grain. These huge landscapes of monoculture have much greater negative impact than cattle pastures with retained tree shelter.

Picking winners on one element such as meat consumption, should that have any success, will do no more than buy “peace in our time” as the real elephant gains size and strength to utterly trample our grandchildren.
That elephant is the human imprint - of numbers and their fundamental needs. And how that bastard brat of an elephant does grow.

The perspective of such growth from the viewpoint of a sixty-year old:
From one billion in grandmother’s grandmother’s time; two billion in her daughter’s; three billion in the mother’s; 4 billion when the sixty-year-old turned 25; 5 billion at age 40, 6 billion at age 50, and 7 billion, near enough, now.
As an eighty-year-old, I am witness to the world’s population more than trebling; to the results of Howard Florey, Frank Fenner, and their array of colleagues’ efforts to minimize premature death by disease; to the success of Margaret Sanger, Frank Cotton, and Carl Djerassi in developing the contraceptive pill - minimizing rate of births and providing balance for the work of those others; to the war against use of the latter by the Vatican and like-minded fundamentalists.

I have been one of the great many who appreciated Frank Fenner’s efforts to bring to the public’s awareness their place in, and utter dependence upon, the environment which they continue to destroy by their sheer numbers and life styles. Those efforts seem to have been totally missed by the author of this article.

Problem is not meat

We just eat too much of it

For everything's health

Oh dear, a few facts.

Even if we don't have meat animals to eat it, & yabby's dried out grass doesn't burn in a huge bush fire, it will definitely rot, releasing all that lovely plant food CO2 it took up to grow, in the first place. The result is identical. The animals merely accelerate the process a little.

The meat livestock herd represents millions of tons of CO2 sink at any one time. More stock, less CO2 available for the atmosphere. Eliminate the stock & you release all that CO2. That should help the grass grow.

No less an authority than the CSIRO recently released a slimming diet which recommended the reduction of carbohydrates, & an increase in protein intake. In view of this, we should be feeding all that carbohydrate stuff to cattle, to help reduce obesity

Note to the other posters.. as you all rightly point out, methane supposed contribution to global warming is small.. in fact, graphs compiled by the US National Office of Atmospheric Administration show that methane concentrations in the atmosphere stopped increasing around the turn of the century. No one really knows why. that part of the global warming story is dead.

As for the article, the author makes this howler among others "some 70% of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing". Sorry, what? 70 per cent of the Amazon basin aint not there any more, and they're running cattle on it? Beg to differ. Although there has been logging in parts of it and slash and burn indigenous agriculture in other parts, the 70 per cent figure is absurd. It may be possible to state that the 70 per cent of the basin has been affected by human activity at one time or another - otherwise the writer has no real idea what the figure means..