Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #3

This one is just a quick observation, but is the kind of mistake I see very often.

I was reading an article in the Washington Post about the carbon footprint of meat-eaters versus vegetarians and vegans, called 'How much your meat addiction is hurting the planet'.  This is something I have been concerned about for some time (although I am still in the morally hard-to-justify position of eating meat regardless), and I certainly don't dispute the article's central point.

However, I was prevented from fully agreeing with the article when I read this:

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that the rest of the world appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."

There are two main problems with this:

1. It is comparing beef consumption for the USA to meat (not just beef) consumption in general for the rest of the world.  Since I don't have comparable figures for the rest of the world, I'll not dwell further on this issue here.
2. With the journalist's choice of wording, the reader may be led to believe that this is a comparison between the USA and all countries aside from the USA.  In particular, it may appear all that all of the rest of the world is seeing increasing consumption, and that the USA is the only country with falling consumption (of either meat or beef: we are not sure which, as mentioned in the previous point).  In fact, neither of these are accurate.  What they meant to do was compare the USA with the global aggregate.  There may indeed be many other countries with falling meat consumption.  In fact a quick search says there are - this paper notes a decline in consumption for Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary.

So on this basis I feel that the article would have been much better had it said something like

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that total global demand is headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."