Every action has a cost. That’s as true for driving a car as it is for growing food and delivering it to your dinner plate. A team of researchers has just tallied the costs of producing meat versus other types of foods for human diners. They find that meat production — from farm to fork — releases more climate-warming pollution that does producing fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains. A lot more.

Their calculations suggest that people could do a lot to slow global warming if they limited how much meat they eat.

There are plenty of “costs” to producing any goods, including food. Sure, people pay money for the food as well as the fuel needed to get groceries to the store or restaurant. But those are just the most visible costs. Producing things also takes resources. For foods, this includes the water used to irrigate1 crop fields. It also includes the fertilizer and chemicals that boost plant growth and fight pests. And don’t forget the gasoline and diesel that fuel plows and also those trucks that take crops to market.

Along with those resources are wastes: pollution. Manure is one obvious pollutant associated with meat production. But there are others, including the air pollutants spewed by tractors that plow fields and the trucks that move feed to the animals and animals to the slaughterhouse. Peter Scarborough at the University of Oxford in England, and his colleagues decided to tally some of the less-visible pollution created by food production.

[5]They focused on greenhouse gases. In the atmosphere, these gases trap heat from sunlight. Lately they’ve been trapping too much, causing a sort of mild, global fever. Overall, food production accounts for one-fifth of this type of pollution.

One greenhouse gas emitted through the production of our food is carbon dioxide, or CO2. It’s released by the burning of fossil fuels, such as gasoline and natural gas.