Humans have evolved with certain traditions, tendencies, and behaviors that have spanned a long period of time. One of these is consuming meat, whether through more modern means of raising livestock or hunting and gathering. While this act of seeking out animal meat has stayed the same, the way that it is done has changed drastically due to evolving technology and an exploding population. More and more of our planet has been dedicated to producing meat over many decades, consuming vast amounts of various resources at an extremely low rate of efficiency. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of the global agricultural land, however produces barely 20% of the global supply of calories. In addition, the efficiency of this entire process is ridiculously low in terms of land and water use. A rough estimate of water required to produce a single pound of beef is 1,847 gallons. 26% of Earth’s ice-free land is dedicated solely to livestock grazing and 33% of croplands are dedicated to livestock grazing. The part of the story that can be seen as most concerning is not the efficiency, but the ramping up of production. More and more of land on Earth is being scraped up in order to create space to raise livestock for consumption. It is easy to simply state that this should not be happening, however that would be speaking from a place of privilege in terms of access to food. An issue that we are seeing appear more and more is the attitude towards developing countries that leads to very difficult conversations. For example, superpowers such as the United States, European nations, and China are responsible for the vast majority of pollution and fossil fuel use. However, now that regulations are beginning to come into the fold, developing countries fight against them as they never had a chance to properly use the resources that allowed developed countries to develop in the way that they did. The deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is not happening for no reason, it is an attempt to develop the arable land for food production out of a need to survive and grow. This is where there is a lot of discourse about who is allowed to continue to exploit the land and who is not. The push and pull of human benefit and the Earth’s benefit will always be a conversation, however the current discourse is very important as it is crucial we do not use environmental regulations to destroy the prosperity of developing countries. We all know who is responsible and who has the resources to change for the better. An added detriment to the situation is that the effects of climate change that we are seeing right now are not manifesting the same way for developed and developing countries. In the United States and Europe, we may see things on the news about strange weather patterns or record-breaking heat year-to-year, however there are much larger impacts happening around the world in places that may not necessarily have the resources to fight back against them. For example, the countries within sub-saharan Africa are particularly dependent on rain-fed agriculture. The area is also subject to large and prolonged droughts, which have been becoming more and more difficult to deal with as the climate crisis develops. This is just one out of many examples that highlight how climate change does not punish equally across the Earth. Each economy requires specific things for trade, food and water security, and job production that are being threatened more and more as the years go on, and sweeping climate change regulation has the potential to harm more than it may help. Power dynamics do not help the situation, as there are powerhouses of influence discussing these issues and the regulation that must come to reverse the damage done, however it seems that not a lot is being done in terms of bringing smaller economies into the fold and figuring out the best way to have everybody cooperate. Bringing the big offenders in is an obvious first step, especially when you see the amount of resources being eaten up by developed countries. The livestock production in the United States is very inefficient for the modern technologies that exist, and China continues to build very inefficient coal plants to this day. In essence, there is much to talk about when figuring out a concrete plan to pull everybody to the same page, however the overall point is the consideration for the nuances of how impact and ability to adapt to new regulations is very diverse across the world, and the level of diversity in this sense requires much more conversation than is currently happening in the conferences and organizations we look to for change.