"The Only Way to Have a Cow"

This may have been the first article I read for this class that I'm not a fan of. First off was the rhetoric. The author, Bill McKibben sounds extremely stuck up. He speaks in a way that sounds like he thinks he's better than everyone else just because he doesn't eat red meat. For example, the first sentences of the article are, "May I say - somewhat defensively - that I haven't cooked red meat in many years." Why does he say "defensively"? Does cooking red meat make you a bad person? Is it a sin punishable by death? He then goes on to say, "I haven't visited a McDonald's since college" and "If you asked me how I like my steak, I'd say I don't really remember." At this point, I'm not even halfway through the first paragraph and I don't like the author. Later, when he is talking about cows and red meat he even says, "And the fact that the product of this exercise "tastes good" sounds pretty lame as an excuse" Right here, it sounds like he is specifically targeting red meat eaters. I don't get offended very easily, but when I read this sentence I could tell that he was trying to offend anyone who didn't agree with him. I can tell that this article was definitely written for vegetarians who share the same views on red meat as he does. I could tell that McKibben's purpose for the piece was to persuade people, but since his rhetoric was offensive to people with different views as him, his point did not get to me. 

Another thing; I'm not sure if I just didn't understand what he meant, but it seemed a little ridiculous that he directly blamed the consumption of red meat for global warming. Sure, cows produce a lot of methane gas, but you can't blame the consumption of red meat for global warming. That's like blaming the person who invented the computer for a virus that you got on your computer.