Oh sorry, is eating meat bad for the planet? I didn’t know.

Enlarge / One of Texas' top BBQ destinations: Micklethwait. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

People want to be good. They want to save the Earth, or at least maybe just destroy it a little more slowly. The problem is, they don't know how. They don't really have any idea about how much energy their appliances are using, or how much energy it takes to make the food they eat, and thus don't know the greenhouse gas impact of using those appliances or eating that food.

If only they knew, the hope goes, they (we) would change their (our) destructive ways. "Those who believe that reducing meat consumption effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions are much more likely to intend to reduce eating meat," according to a paper just out in Nature Climate Change.

A study done in 2010 indicated that people knew that refrigerators and dishwashers use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases than light bulbs. But they had no real sense of the true emissions numbers, nor the magnitude of the difference between high- and low-emitting appliances.

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