I imagine the bulk of the beef eaters are in the high and medium meat eaters category (as you might expect). There's a strong drip off then to the low meat eaters/pescetarians/vegetarians which tend to group together.

I'd class myself as a low meat eater and rarely eat red meat (I've also gone over to oat milk) - it's better for you and because cows produce the bulk of the methane in our diet it helps with the environmental impact. I am pleased to see that completely getting rid of meat from my diet wouldn't do that much to improve my carbon footprint unless I went vegan, which seems doubtful.

That said, the idea of our individual environmental footprints is largely an invention of the fossil fuel industry to shift the blame from themselves. The other day, I heard on the radio that if China switched off its coal-fired power stations and replaced them with gas, we'd be back on track to a rise of 1.5C, which makes me giving up the cow seem pretty small beans.

Ah well, it's chickpea and spinach curry not for the planet but because it's damn tasty.

But would that be just beef, or beef and milk and cheese and leather so all cow products?

Indeed - see my other post below. The idea of an individual's carbon footprint was just dreamt up by Big Oil to pass the blame to us. Large producers of carbon sorting their mess out would solve this overnight. Apparently, just switch replacing China's reliance on coal with gas would put us back on track for a rise of 1.5C (or close to it, we may already be too late for that exact target). Any changes we, as individuals make, is a drop in the bucket compared to that. We should have had widespread carbon capture decades ago which would have bought us time to decarbonise our energy supplies but we can't even manage that today.

The upside is that it helps us feel like we have some control (illusory as that may be) and giving up red meat could be a good idea on health and welfare grounds.