National Public Radio knows who is driving climate change as an existential threat: men who eat meat. And they found the origins of the current crisis in a 2006 television ad for Burger KIng that heralded the fast food chain and its appetite-satisfying whopper as a source of masculine culinary delight totally unlike the small portions of vegetarian food offered by places where women like to frequent.

That ad began running when Malcolm Regisford, whom NPR interviewed for the story, was 10 years old, Regisford saw this commercial often in between his cartoons. “Beef is marketed to men — steaks and hefty burgers — like, ‘that's what a man's supposed to eat,’” he told NPR. Regisford kept hearing these messages all through middle and high school and into college, where he played Division 1 basketball. “It’s thought that animal products yield a certain sense of strength,” he told the taxpayer-funded media outlet. “Some form of masculinity.”

NPR found others to confirm that eating beef is a man thing to do and even statistics prove it, according to Diego Rose, nutrition program director at Tulane University. “Whenever we've looked at the question of gender, we've seen that,” Rose told the outlet. “Men eat greater amounts of beef than women.”

That might be fine, but according to NPR, all the beef eating is promoting more climate change, because, as “scientists say,” beef is worse than any other food when it comes to global warming. Cattle require grazing land that must denuded of its trees. And of course, cows are constantly flatulating and that produces “powerful greenhouse gas emissions” that produce climate change. Climate change alarmists also blame human breathing for emissions.

“If you want to reduce emissions, it's all about the beef,” Tim Searchinger, senior research scholar at Princeton University and technical director of the agriculture and forestry program at the World Resources Institute, told NPR.

In lieu of beef, some researchers suggest having chicken instead, as this can “cut a person’s daily dietary carbon footprint by about half,” according to NPR. But ultimately, for those who link beef and climate change, it is also about making beef less appealing to men.

"Messaging to men about beef absolutely matters," Jan Dutkiewicz, professor of political science at the Pratt Institute, told NPR. "If there's a large portion of men out there who are being programmed to not just eat more meat, but to be completely resistant to any messages about meat reduction," he says, "that's a real problem.”

Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has hired an aide who believes other useful ways of fighting climate change are not having children and not using gas stoves. Harris herself has also suggested the thought of having children can induce “climate anxiety” in couples.