Shocked, Shocked!! US Beef Industry Knew For Decades About Its Climate Impacts, But Lied And Covered Up
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.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/14032025/american-beef-industry-knew-climate-impact-decades-ago/
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