Also a layman but my understanding is the issue is 'percent of emissions' part of the fact. The emissions are methane, which are 'worse' than CO2 - so some statistics normalize for this and result in a high % of emissions. I think it's semantics and bad-faith actors use the wording that helps them the most, which muddies the waters.

>muddies the waters.

Yeah, I'm not a climate change skeptic but I've basically become skeptical of any claim I read about it now.

One of these days I'll actually read the IPCC report so I can hopefully sift through the claims myself.

In any case, meat production's externalities go far beyond direct emissions.

> Half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. [...]

> There is also a highly unequal distribution of land use between livestock and crops for human consumption. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for animal feed, livestock accounts for 77% of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18% of the world’s calories and 37% of total protein.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use