The US based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Garrison Institute have jointly published a fact sheet based on the organisations' internal analysis of opportunities to reduce annual GHG emissions in the US by 1 billion tonnes below business as usual, through simple and inexpensive personal actions.
One billion metric tons is equivalent to 15% of the United States seven billion tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions and roughly equivalent to the total annual emissions of the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia combined.
The NRDC's calculations are non-cumulative and the model measures only the abatement achieved in the year 2020, to allow time for adoption of the actions.
The NRDC looks at four sectors: transport, household energy use, food and consumption (including waste) and adopts a systems-based lifecycle approach.
In the food category, the paper proposes replacing red meat with poultry two days per week, and replacing dairy with plant-based calories two days per week (or a 2/7 substitution of calories currently consumed).
It is calculated that these two measures combined would cut ~105 MMtCO2 in the year 2020 (72 million tons for red-meat-to-chicken and 35 million for dairy-to-veg), a figure roughly equivalent to the total emissions of Belgium, or Sweden and Singapore combined.
The paper uses the assumptions on efficiency and relative emissions factors found in this US paper.
The paper says that "cutting food waste by only 25% in the United States (after subtracting the rebound effect for the dietary shift described above, and using the ultra-conservative USDA estimate that 27% of post-farm food is wasted) would reduce emissions by another 65 MMt CO2". The paper includes a table showing the estimated emission savings achievable by action.
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