That's kind of a disingenuous comparison though because it assumes that everyone across the board would be substituting all meat products in their current diet with beans and not something more water and energy intensive like soy. Not to mention most studies of the GHG emissions of meat production take in to account growing exclusive feed crops, which is really only the case on the huge factory farms.

Perhaps in certain high volume situations it's true that beef production is 20 times worse than beans, but around here nobody's even growing beans or soy 6 months of the year, cattle is either grazed or fed hay over the winter from existing production crops (i.e. wheat that would have been grown anyways regardless of the existence of any cows), and it's cheaper (and less resource intensive) to butcher a few cows locally in January than it is to ship a bunch of beef flavored soy substitutes up from wherever in the southern US that is still growing soy to feed a bunch of cold miserable Canadians.