Virtue PostMortem

Environmental propaganda

The Beef Industry Knew Its Climate Impact as Early as 1989 — and Worked to Obfuscate the ScienceTwo new studies reveal decades of industry tactics to downplay beef’s role in climate. change.

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adb6c0

Since at least 1989, the United States (US) livestock industry knew of its role in global warming (Gibbs et al 1989), and a newly uncovered industry document makes clear that the industry planned to obstruct efforts to shift US diets to reduce emissions (NCA 1989). These internal industry plans add to publicly available evidence that shows that the US livestock industry has, from 1989 to the present, worked to obstruct efforts to encourage meat reduction for the sake of climate change, including recent, modest efforts such as Meatless Monday, as well as a more ambitious campaign in the 1990s to cut US beef consumption by half (Loy and Jacquet 2025). We recognize that a reduction in per capita beef consumption by 50% would have likely faced obstacles beyond those directly imposed by industry, but also see value in exploring what halving US consumption of beef, the most greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive food (Pierrehumbert and Eshel 2015, Poore and Nemecek 2018), might have meant for US GHG emissions reductions. Using a model that reduced annual per capita beef and veal consumption by 50% over 32 years spanning 1992–2023 (and substituted other foods, including non-beef animal-based products), estimated cumulative averted emissions could have been somewhere between 4 and 13 gigatonnes (Gt) CO2eq (estimated total US emissions in 2022 were 6.2 Gt CO2). The low-tech and immediately available option of halving US beef and veal consumption, resulting in a savings of 125–410 megatonnes (Mt) CO2eq per year over the 32 year period, could have been 24–80 times more effective in reducing GHG emissions in a single year than what was achieved cumulatively by reducing methane emissions (mainly in the oil and gas industries) over a similar timespan (1990–2022).

www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-doing-exactly-what-big-oil-does-to-fight-climate-action/2021/05/14/831e14be-b3fe-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html

‘The anti-livestock people are a pest’: how UN food body played down role of farming in climate changeEx-officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization say its leadership censored and undermined them when they highlighted how livestock methane is a major greenhouse gas

The truth behind Europe’s most powerful farmers lobbyCopa-Cogeca claims to speak for all farmers. Critics say it only represents large enterprises.

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