The industry campaign to downplay your climate concerns about meat
Wanna feel good about your meat and dairy? Don't read this.
Sometime in 1980, Steve Kopperud got a phone call from a staffer with the American Feed Manufacturer’s Association. Kopperud, who was then the editor of the livestock industry pub Feedstuffs, listened as the staffer described a new and growing threat to the British livestock farming industry: animal rights activists. At the time, Kopperud was unbothered:
“How ‘European’ to worry about ‘happy’ pigs and chickens. That stuff will never catch on here.”
But seven years later, things had changed. Kopperud had gone on to become a feed industry lobbyist, now working to form a new coalition to defend meat and dairy from the animal rights activist movement growing stateside. The Animal Agriculture Alliance, as the coalition is called today, still cites monitoring animal rights activists as essential to its raison d’etre, but the group now has a new PR purpose too: getting you to ignore what meat and dairy is doing to the planet.
As DeSmog reports:
At the AAA’s 2021 Virtual Stakeholders Summit, the organisation announced plans to “change the narrative and position animal agriculture as a solution to reducing our environmental footprint and improving our planet for generations to come.”
But reframing meat’s climate impact is a somewhat complicated assignment. Animal welfare abuses can be counteracted with stories of happy animals on family farms. This requires more than putting a soft lens on slaughter. Meat and dairy farming, no matter how well you do it, is always going to create pollution. To counteract this, the industry needs to propose a whole new alternative framework for thinking about meat. And they’re doing that in two ways: by supplanting the science of climate pollution and creating the illusion of self-regulation.
A Climate-Neutral Theory of Meat
Frank Mitloehner, PhD, an air quality professor at UC Davis, has long been the industry’s favorite thought leader on meat and emissions. Since the FAO’s landmark 2006 report on livestock that first calculated the true environmental impacts of the industry, Mitloehner has garnered media attention and industry acclaim by rebutting this area of research.
Only Mitloehner doesn’t actually rebut all that much in the way of actual research findings, as has been documented by a number of journalists, myself included. What Mitloehner mostly disagrees with are the policy recommendations that flow forth from these findings, in particular telling anyone to eat less meat.
Since early 2020, Mitloehner has created blog posts, videos and white papers through a small organization he runs at UC Davis called the CLEAR Center, a communications effort that’s separate from his research lab and funded in part with feed industry donations. The primary purpose of the CLEAR Center’s communiques is to reframe the polluting effects of methane emissions from meat and dairy as a natural part of the earth’s ecosystem — nothing to worry about if you’re a consumer.
In one particular blog post, Mitloehner argues that livestock farming can be “climate-neutral.” While cows do belch methane, he writes, the belches are “biogenic” and not from manmade sources, cycling through the atmosphere every 12 years. Yet despite the short-lived nature of methane, there’s no evidence that biogenic methane from cattle is somehow less harmful than any other methane. In fact, the very premise for the EPA’s promotion of on-farm anaerobic digesters is the fact that biogenic methane and natural gas are essentially the same.
However, none of facts I’ve just cited have managed to pierce the animal agriculture industry’s bubble. Because as far as the industry is concerned — in particular farmer social media influencers — this whole “climate neutral” framework for viewing meat and dairy absolutely supplants all other research on the climate impacts of meat and dairy, and is the only set of facts that count.
The Protein Pact
There is another PR strategy too, one that provides the industry with a set of its own self-regulating sustainability metrics. In a new partnership called the Protein Pact, the North American Meat Institute has partnered with the Animal Ag Alliance to demonstrate that the industry is taking enough action to be sustainable (in other words: no need to eat less of what we’re selling you).
In this video, the Pact highlights the bargain animal agriculture wants to strike with the public. We provide you with all of the protein you want, the tradition of meat-centered holiday meals and jobs, and you keep buying meat. That protein is the primary focus here isn’t surprising. American eaters live in constant fear of protein-deficiency:
But dig a little deeper and you’ll find the Protein Pact also creates an industry-led self-reporting mechanism to address areas of concern like labor, animal welfare and, of course, greenhouse gas emissions. By 2030, all members pledge to meet a 50 percent reduction in workplace injuries and announce science-based targets for emissions reductions.
The problem with industry-led efforts to reduce emissions, however, is the vagary of it all allows the meat and dairy industry to keep emitting methane and polluting air and waterways. As Jennifer Jacquet, PhD, has documented, most meat and dairy companies announce emissions targets without ever saying how they will actually get there. Also, nearly half of the Pact is the industry simply agreeing to comply with regulations on the books that are already incredibly minimal, largely thanks to the outsize influence the industry has over policymakers.
A Growing Vegan Army?
Given these extensive communications efforts, you’d think the whole country was suddenly turning vegan and the meat industry about to go out of business. But the evidence doesn’t back that up. Dips in sales are limited to certain categories (fluid milk and red meat, for example) and are offset to some degree by the success of US exports. Overall, meat and dairy consumption continues to increase and the plant-based industry, while growing, is still a fraction of the size of all meat and dairy production.
So why then are industry groups like the Alliance ramping up their communication efforts? Considering how many memes I see about “fake meat” and “real cows” posted daily in various online farmer groups, it seems clear that vegans and animal rights activists pose some kind of existential threat. Perhaps farmers feel frustrated by economic changes that are outside of their control, and vegans are just the very convenient target for channeling those emotions. For the Alliance, it’s probably also an excellent fundraising opportunity.
And there is a long game too. Raising the specter of being overtaken by fake meat and some imaginary vegan army is a good way to rally farmers, ranchers and influencers to spread the word to the public, by discrediting the substantial research on the environmental impacts of livestock and positioning meat and dairy as sustainable for the future. These are ultimately just PR campaigns, like the Whole Foods commercial that I can never seem to get out of my head:
Eat, Drink and Be Merry.
Wanna feel good about your meat and dairy?
Well, we’re your feel-good sanctuary.
Ok then.
