This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration
The American beef industry knew that raising cattle was a significant source of planet-warming emissions as early as 1989, but scrambled to discredit public efforts to lower beef consumption in the following years, according to new research.
The livestock industry’s impact on climate change became widely known with a bombshell United Nations report published in 2006, called Livestock’s Long Shadow, which was the first major effort to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production. The report made clear that reducing emissions from cattle and dairy production was crucial for slowing the climate crisis.
But a pair of recent studies, one published Tuesday, says the American livestock industry was aware of its climate impact much earlier than the mid-aughts, and like the oil industry—which was similarly aware of its impacts decades earlier than its first public acknowledgments—attempted to obfuscate its role in heating the atmosphere.
“We failed to appreciate how long the meat industry’s been involved in climate obstruction,” said Jennifer Jacquet, a primary author on both of the new studies whose previous work has tracked the industry’s efforts to distance itself from its climate impacts.
Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, noted that the 2006 UN report represented an inflection point, not only making the public aware of livestock’s climate impact, but putting the industry on notice that it could potentially be targeted for regulation. The report said that livestock’s climate emissions—which come from converting forests to pasture, growing feed, methane-emitting cow burps and manure storage—were about 18 percent of the global total, more even than the transportation sector.
After that report’s publication, the livestock industry funded research that challenged the UN report’s findings. UN researchers revised the number to 14.5 percent in a subsequent report, and some said they had been pressured by industry lobbyists to reexamine the initial report’s findings.
But Jacquet and her colleagues began to suspect that the livestock industry was likely aware of its emissions well before the UN report, so she began digging into government records and the industry’s own archives.
“I didn’t really understand the history of the science, so I began looking into that,” she says.
In 1989—the year after NASA’s James Hansen famously told Congress that climate change posed a global threat—the Environmental Protection Agency held a workshop focusing on methane emissions from livestock and, soon after, published a report, “Reducing Methane Emissions from Livestock.” The report said that livestock were a major source of methane and estimated that a 50 percent decrease in global emissions from livestock would yield huge benefits for stabilizing this especially potent greenhouse gas. Tucked into an appendix was the following suggestion: “Reducing methane emissions from ruminants should be pursued as part of an overall investigation into alternatives for reducing future global warming and its impacts.”
Current figures say that agriculture is the largest source of anthropogenic, or human-caused, methane emissions—roughly 40 percent—and most of that comes from livestock. While not as abundant in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, methane’s heat-trapping capacity is 80 times greater over a shorter time frame.
Jacquet and her co-authors note that representatives from the meat and dairy industry attended the 1989 EPA workshop, including a member of the National Cattlemen’s Association. Several months and a handful of planning meetings later, the association, which is the country’s biggest beef lobby and now known as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, or NCBA, developed a “Strategic Plan on the Environment” to counter anticipated public relations problems or regulations related to climate change. The plan included suggestions to reach out to “key influencers” with research and positive messaging about the industry’s environmental benefits.
The NCBA did not respond to requests for an interview.
While the EPA report made no explicit recommendation to reduce beef consumption, advocacy groups soon did. In the early 1990s, a group called the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, which consisted of a broad range of nonprofits and civil society groups, suggested that consumers reduce meat consumption. The group’s president, Jeremy Rifkin, published a book called Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture in 1992, urging people to reduce beef consumption by 50 percent. Rifkin then became the head of the Beyond Beef Coalition, which organized protests at McDonald’s restaurants across the country, among other actions.
The cattlemen’s association responded, the new study says, with an orchestrated effort to push back on the book, the coalition and attempts to influence nutrition or environmental policy in ways that might curtail beef or dairy consumption. Along with other industry groups, it formed a “Food Facts Coalition,” which attempted to debunk claims made in Rifkin’s book and launched a campaign to not “blame the cows.” Rifkin was attacked on call-in shows and eventually cancelled a book tour. An association executive dismissed the coalition as having a “radical social agenda.” Other industry groups hired PR heavies to craft campaigns, including one called “Beyond Belief.” The Beef Industry Council, in 1992, launched the campaign “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.”
“This campaign is not about beef, it’s about Rifkin’s desire to police American stomachs,” said Rick Perry, then the commissioner of agriculture in livestock-heavy Texas, according to one newspaper report. “It’ll take more than stomach police to convince the public that the hamburger is responsible for everything from sexual discrimination to racism.”
The cattlemen’s association denied that it was behind the Rifkin attacks. But it was clear immediately that any suggestion of reducing meat intake among American consumers was going to be met with huge pushback from the industry, which successfully fired up the “meat police” rhetoric that reverberates today.
In a separate study, published this week, Jacquet and another University of Miami researcher, Loredana Loy, trace the meat industry’s efforts to derail advocacy groups’ attempts to persuade the public to eat less meat as a climate strategy. These attempts include the Beyond Beef campaign and others, including Diet for a New America and Meatless Monday.
Looking at records from 1989 to 2023, the researchers outline how the industry hired scientists to produce reports downplaying meat’s climate impact and waged campaigns, like “#yes2meat,” in the wake of a major report that recommended people in Western countries eat less meat for personal and planetary health. The industry’s strategy was so successful, Loy and Jacquet write, that advocacy groups tweaked their own campaigns, either tamping down their suggestions—for example, going from suggestions to cut meat consumption in half to suggesting people “eat more plants”—or cutting their campaigns altogether.
“There was a shrinking of ambition,” Jacquet says.
The study says the livestock industry took a different approach than the oil and gas industry, which tried to convince the public it was only continuing to develop fossil fuels because consumers called for them. The livestock industry, on the other hand, tried to convince consumers that their dietary choices would make no difference.
To that end, Jacquet and her colleagues attached a climate consequence to the industry’s attempts to hinder dietary recommendations—to see, in fact, just how impactful the advice to eat 50 percent less meat would have been had the Beyond Beef campaign gained traction.
They found that if American consumers had cut their beef consumption in half starting in 1992 and replaced it with other foods, including other meat, as much as 13 gigatonnes of climate-warming gases could have been avoided between 1992 and 2023. This “low-tech and immediately available option of halving U.S. beef and veal consumption,” they write, would have been up to 80 times more effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions than all the steps taken to curb methane emissions from the oil and gas industries over a similar timeframe.
“What would our consumption look like today?” Jacquet wondered. “It could be radically different.”
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Loredana Loy’s name.
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