Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. In this season, we are going chapter by chapter of a new but very readable academic book that has gathered together all of the peer viewed research on climate obstruction globally, so really digging into the research and everything we know
about how this works. Because as much as inaction on climate often gets framed as lack of science or perhaps the wrong messaging framework, this, that, and the other, it's important to remember that we're here because of various acts of sabotage, that certain industries and certain individuals spend a lot of money and a lot of time to block any kind of government policy, to warp the information ecosystem, and to convince the eighty nine percent of people globally,
eighty nine percent who want to see action on climate change, that nobody else cares and so they shouldn't talk about it. This isn't just a thing that happened organically, and it's also not a thing that just the fossil fuel industry did. Lots of other industries see regulation of emissions as an existential threat, and we're going to talk about a big one today, the animal agriculture industry, the meat, gez and dairy.
They spend a lot of money and a lot of time to convince people that excessive consumption of meat and dairy are healthy, that they are part of various cultural identities, all sorts of other things. I'm joined today by Catherine Labber from the University of Edinburgh and Sylvia Seki from the University of Iowa. They had a fascinating conversation. They blew my mind multiple times throughout, so I hope you enjoy
it as much as I did. And for those of you who prefer to consume your podcasts on YouTube, I don't understand you, but we are trying to reach out. So this is actually our first entire episode that also has a video component. You can check that out on YouTube. Just look for Drilled you'll find us. Actually, maybe don't search drilled on too, Drilled podcast, drilled Media, try that check it out. Let us know what you think. We are trying to work on doing more video content, so
very open to suggestions there as well. Hope you enjoyed this conversation, so very like basic kind of one on one question to start, I would love to have you just talk briefly about you know, what are the ways that animal agriculture impacts climate change.
So briefly, one of the ways in which animal egg influences climate change is through queenascas emissions. So food production is responsible for but one third of anthropodonny queen as gas emissions, and a huge amount of that is from animal egg. So there's must really vary, but it's between twelve and nineteen percent of all queen as gas emissions come from animalag and that's methane, but also nitro oxide doesn't see it.
Too, okay. So I know in conversations I've had with various folks about animal egg that one of the recurring themes is that for the fossil fuel guys, they love the idea of individual responsibility and individual action, but the animal egg guys really hate this. And I would love to have you guys kind of explain why that is.
I think to me it's really interesting, And having worked in other industries like soft drinks as well, I do wonder if this is a kind of reflection of the stage at which animal egg is obviously has been under radia for climate scientists a little bit later, came under radia.
A little bit later than phossil fuels.
And so I do feel like we're still in quite an early stage where public awareness isn't as high, and one of the few things that is happening at the moment is individual action and it does do something, obviously, but we are never going to get, you know, get to a point where we're addressing animal agadmissions in any meaningful way without government action.
We do need policy. We need to.
Change the environments in which people make food decisions. And I feel what we've seen with other industries is that they kind of once regulation and policy came onto the agenda and started happening, like taxes, for example, and marketing restrictions, that's when they started pivoting to, oh, yeah, actually we're quite happy with individual action, why don't we do that instead? So I do wonder, if, you know, be really interested to see if that happens as regulation becomes more of
a concrete option. But yeah, I do think individual action is really important, but overall between legislation and I think animal like does know that, and that's why they also do push really hard against that.
I would also add that if you compare agriculture and food production with fossil fuels, people have more agency when it comes to the food we eat. Right, if you live in rural Iowa and there is no public transport, you can't really say, hey, I'm going to you know, not use your agency in terms of what you eat,
what you buy, and what you eat. And so I think the industry is running all these campaigns basically against individual action, because individual action here has potentially more leverage than it would in the case of fossil fuel and transportation and things like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, but as you kind of cover in this book chapter, they are starting to campaign against any sort of systemic efforts or the person of maybe the beginning of systemic efforts. Even so, can you talk a little bit about what are some of the more regulatory efforts that have been made and how is industry responding to those?
Well, from the US perspective, I can tell you that basically they've been extremely successful. So and I would say that they've been extremely successful at curtailing activity against pollution
that they cause. It goes beyond greenhouse gas emissions and think about water quality, think about air quality, right, and so we have seen, for example, that there's been a lot of activity regarding the reporting of where these facilities are because I'm going to try not to use the term confined animal feeding operation or KEFO, which was what
we use in the United States. But basically, we have these very very large entities that I hesitate to call farms where you have millions of chickens, you know, thousands of pigs or thousands of dairy cows, for example, and so we know where they are. But the EPA in twenty seventeen basically said, but we're not going to disclose
it right to anybody. And in twenty twenty three there was this draft Strategy for Monitoring, measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification that also kind of like didn't even talk about combined animal feeding operations. It was all about soil organic carbon. So they're being very successful. The industry has been very successful at kind of like diverting attention away from their contribution. It's almost like, oh, look, there's all these other things
we can do, don't look here. And the regulatory environment has been very favorable to them in this respect. Across both parties in the United States, this is a bipartisan issue.
Yeah, And just kind of add to that to zoom out from the United States, I can't over stress how the most important success that they've had is actually to keep proper legislative action of the agenda. Even so in a lot of countries, even speaking about saying meat taxes or anything to regulate herd sizes or to regulate consumption is really really controversial, and I think that that's why we actually haven't observed a lot of concrete pushback against
policy measures. But what example would be what happened in New Zealand a couple of years ago. They proposed the first tax on cattle emissions in two thousand and two, and then first the delayed and then after the changing government, the tax has been completely scrapped. So that's kind of one really concrete example of something they've managed to off the agenda and it gets scrapped. But generally kind of keeping things quiet and keeping the threats away has worked really well.
I think Catherine's point is kind of like the cracks here, there is absolutely no discussion of consumption issues, everything everything else they might talk about, you know, the tech fixes, but the real cracks of the matter, particularly in the global North, in places like Europe, in places like Australia, in places like the United States, is consumption and how policy facilitates consumption and pushes for consumption. This is not like a free market kind of situation, right, So that's
off the table in so many places. You know, we'll talk about this more, But it's not just legislature. Is the science, is the education everything.
Yeah, and like DIFI guidance is really boring to most people, but that actually gets a lot more heated than you think around animal products and.
Towards Yeah, no, I know, I don't know. I randomly had a window into just the way that the industry uses like health influencers too, and has really been involved in this pushing of like more meat, more meat is actually good for you, and butter is actually really good for you, and all of this stuff. So yeah, anyway, Okay, I wanted to ask you about this two thousand and
six Long Shadow Report. You have a little call out on this in the chapter, and I think it's really interesting, But like people outside of the sort of food and egg universe don't necessarily know what this report is, and it was so important that I'd love to have you kind of say what was this report and why did it spark so much concern from the animal egg industry, lifetock.
So Long Shadow is really really important to people like us because essentially it was the first estimate of the life stock sectors contribution to global anthropogenic climate change. So this is the first time at least a authority of agency like the UN agency, Food, an alcopult organization that published it put a number and how much of our quenascus emissions comes from livestock, and they put that at
eighteen percent. Again, that's been contested since and the number is varied, but we're not that far off that now. But essentially that was the first time that there's been a really concrete warning of the environmental consequences of business as usual in the life sect sector. If say, we keep growing a media dairy consumption as we are doing right now. They put a really clear warning up that this is not going to be tenable in environmental and
climate twins. And when that initially landed the report, it was pretty quiet. It took a couple of years to probably gain traction. But as the report itself gained more traction among people interested in climate and themal welfare for example,
the pushback also started to develop a lot. And you could tell that particularly the beef industry that had been highlighted as a major source of emissions in the report, got pretty nervous and there was a more concerted effort to discredit the report's message that kind of emerged around two thousand and nine twenty ten, alongside the kind of growing positive attention.
One of the things that happened that.
We addressed in the chapter is that the beef industry awarded some funding to someone called Commit Learner, who was a scientist with a bant background in animal science and UC Davis, and he was essentially funded to assess Livestock
song Shadow. What came out of that process is essentially a article that he could published with other academics, where, among other things, an argument that he makes is that the comparison between livestock emissions and transport emissions that's made in the executive summary of Livestock Song Shadow, where the authors say something along the lines of life stock submissions
are greater than transport. He says that essentially that that's flawed because the lifetecle emissions calculation included full life cycle assessments where the transport one didn't. So on this tiny tiny point that was not really something that came out
of the formal analysis of the authors. That was just kind of a point that was picked up in the executive summary for and was picked up in a lot of media reporting actually, but that's what he really lashed onto, and one of the authors of life Stocks Some Shadow even acknowledged that, yeah, he has a point, But essentially the meat of the report wasn't really in question. Ever, the main analysis of how much emissions does lifet contribute
was never really in question. But the problem is afterwards, the way that this was reported in the media and also by a lot of industry groups is essentially the link between animal agriculture and climate change and quenascas emissions had been debunked. And there's also kind of I think one someone described Midlearner as the scientist who debunked livestock shadow. So this is a really interesting example, and it wasn't
just him. There was a lot of other noise around the report, and there was a lot of other pushback. But that's a really really interesting example of how something really small essentially led to the discrediting in the eyes
of some of this really really important report. And I note that also picked off a lot of complaints that the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization got internally from some member states and some of the industry groups that they work with, and that's kind of picked off a lot of discussions internally within their fail but how they deal with livestock and climate change.
And we should note that Midliner receives quite a bit of funding from the industry.
Yeah, still very involved in interesting discussions that are going on at the moment about how we measure.
Methane that could have major implications for what we.
Do about animal agriculture, So he remains very relevant.
Yeah, Okay, I want to make sure we talk about some of the early days too, because actually, for me ben as a climate reporter, and I think a lot of other people too, there's this tendency to think that the industry just started pushing back on stuff around climate and emissions, you know, and in response to livestock's long shadow.
But they were working on things in the nineties too, So can I have you talk a little bit about what that what the industry obstruction looked like in the nineties as well.
Actually it starts before the nineties. So there's a paper that Jennifer Duquet and Vivicamores, who are also co author of this chapter, wrote this year where they trace back some of the early efforts to nineteen eighty nine, because in nineteen eighty nine EPA held this workshop and then published a report on reducing methane emissions from livestock, and that kind of like triggers some of the early strategies that we see that you know, that Catherine was talking about,
that they're using today. So we have the National Cattleman Association, with which is today the National Cattleman's Beef Association, basically hiring public relation firms, forming coalitions with other industry members, coming up with campaigns and slogans that are pro beef production.
And again I want to emphasize that this is all part of an overall strategy to gut any possible regulatory action beyond greenhouse gases too, because at that point we have more and more concentration of livestock production, and so the industry realizes that they need to overcome the facts right with Actually, in my house, my kid came up with this term propaganda, you know, with a message that basically goes counter to all the evidence, where whether it's climate, water, air, labor, conditions,
you know, all the issues associated with agriculture. And I think that's why they've been so successful. It's because they've had this history that's now you know, decades long of campaigns and the co opting, as Katherine was saying, co opting parts of the scientific community too.
Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Okay, we're going to come back to the US for like a lot, because it you know, it does so much, always doing the most. But I would love to talk about what this looks like in some other places too. So let's start with the European Union. What does climate obstruction look like coming from the Animal act guys in the EU.
Yes, So we looked at the EU because they are parfterward that consumes and produces a lot of animal protein, and that's why they have arguably more responsibility in other parts of the world for addressing the missions that come
from food production through animals. So the situation that we have in the European Union that will start with essentially is that the European Union spends its largest the largest part of his budget on agriculture actually, so they have a huge agriculture policy program called the Common Agricultural Policy that goes back to the nineteen sixties and actually in the same year as the Agricultural Policy was founded launched.
Initially we have seen the start of the most powerful and still active agricultural lobby group that they have in the European Union.
That's called Coppakajeca.
So that was established in nineteen sixty two, the same year as the policy, and so a lot of these kind of this interest representation around agriculture goes a really really long way back, and agricul cultural interests are really entrined and have a huge amount of political sway in the European Union context. And obviously this looks really different at national context that you know, in all the member states.
But essentially at the EU level that's always a huge debate.
And in more recent years what we've seen is that as climate change becomes a bigger issue and it's really acknowledged by the European Union through strategies like the Eogreen Deal for example, we've seen this clash between this really entrined agricultural kind of workstream and the Common Agricultural Policy and everything around it. They have an Agricultural Ministry department as well. Do do you agree within the European Union, we've seen this clash between those entried interests kind of
promote agricultural production. Again, this is more about quantity than about what we produce. And then at the same time, the main aim has always been to generate livelihoods for farmers. So it's like there's an economic and there's a production element. There's never been an environmental element to it. And as this environmental aim has kind of come in a bit more,
we've seen a lot of issues essentially. So one of the most ambitious kind of pieces of strategy that EU is published in the last couple of years is the Founder Folk Strategy, which I'm.
Sure you've heard about as well.
That was really ambitious in combining not just production but also kind of bringing in the consumption element. And they were saying, which is exactly what we need particularly and I'm just talking about livestock and animal agriculture here, but if we just do one or the other, that's not really going to fix the problem. We do need both, and the fund of Folk Strategy addressed that really nicely,
and it was quite an abitious piece of strategy. But strategy alone doesn't do anything we needs to happen in the European Unions that this needs to be turned into legislation, and very sadly, what we've seen with almost all of the files at the consumption end is that they've not gone anywhere, So a lot of these have been abandoned, and at least to some extent, this can be traced back to the power that agricultural lobbies have in the
European Union. And we're also so kind of around a similar time of the fund folk strategy, we also sort of kind of emergence of groups specifically focused on livestock. So we have something called the European Livestock that was formed by Corbacajaca and some other groups representing meat, feed, leather, kind of meat production and any allied industries, and they're specifically aiming to promote pro life of messaging.
So it's not only they're doing, but.
Essentially, you know that emergence of those kind of groups really illustrates a level of concern that came about emergence of farmer fork.
Here's a little clip from European Livestock Voices video on the farm to fork strategy, just to give your little taste of what they do.
The nine paradoxes of farm to Fork. At this time, Europe is reviewing its food system and proposing a strategy for transitioning to more sustainable production. It is called farm to Fork and it is part of a larger and more complex plan called the Green Deal. This project contains ambitious and far reaching targets, but there are also a few paradoxes steming from the preconception that meat is not sustainable to the environment nor our health.
And yeah, because of this, and because of you know, for all of other reasons, we've had a right shift in European Parliament, for example, and we've had a lot of farms protests that will get back to later. That's why a lot of these files have sadly not not manifested into actual legislation.
Interesting, Okay, let's talk about China, which I don't feel like we talk about enough around animal agriculture, but it's very interesting. So, yeah, what is happening in China? Run this topic?
Well, in China, you know, and more generally, I would say, in all the brick countries, so Brazil, Russia, China, and India. Would India being a little bit of an exception because of their you know, cultural differences in terms of eating meat,
meat consumption, and the consumption of red meat. As the country became has become richer, was actually promoted by the government, and in general, environmental regulations associated with agriculture have lagged behind all sorts of other environmental regulations.
Right.
We know that China is really exploded in terms of green energy and the production and consumption of solar panels and things like that, but it's not the same thing in the case of animal agriculture, because there's still this kind of, you know, traditional role that food and the promotion of certain types of food has had. In terms of internal policies, China is very driven by internal needs.
They are a big player on the world market in terms of I mean, they're the biggest consumers of meat now, but they also need a lot of imports and they're not really that concerned with environmental regulations and environmental issues. We're starting to see some movements there, but I would say the Chinese meat production industry doesn't have the same kind of you know, threats to their footprint that we have seen in places like the European Union and the US.
In Brazil, you know, because Brazil is a completely different story compared to China.
Yeah, so actually, yeah, let's talk about Brazil because it's so interesting, and you know, we're heading into this Cup in Brazil and a couple of months too, so yeah, what's the situation there.
So Brazil is all about production, right, Brazil is a big exporter of commodities, agricultural commodities in particular, and there is this huge tension between the promotion of agri business and the protection of the Amazon. In these days, more and more we appreciate the Serado savannah as an ecosystem to protect, and so in Brazil, this kind of like Cago war of the agribusiness in particular has a long history.
There is a ruralist caucus in the Brazilian legislature, and there's all sorts of associations that agribusiness is involved in, all sorts of local you know, all the way up. It's a federalist country, so all the way up from local to national, and a very long history of obstruction of regulations and also a history of trying to work through private public partnerships. In the case of beef and soybeans for example, some of these things have been driven
by the global North. So it was the buyers of Brazilian soyabeans or Brazilian beef who put some conditions on where these things would be raised and grown. But of course a lot of this was uphanded by Bolsonaro and we're still kind of trying to figure out where we go from there. One thing that I would say is that Lula is much more progressive, of course in Bolsonao. But these interests in Brazil, both the agri business and
the oil interests, let's not forget that powerful. And so even though there's more protection for indigenou as people, more considerations of consideration of environmental consequences, it's not all.
Roses right right. We're working on a project in Brazil right now with a group of reporters there, and they were just trying to explain to me that Agro is pop campaign. They're like, do you know that agro is pop? And I'm like no. So even that level of like cultural power is interesting.
I mean, per capita, I think Argentina is by far the biggest consumer right and Brazil is not very far behind. And so you really see the the culture associated with a certain type of patterns of consumption and of course the industry launches into that right and create narratives associated with that.
Yeah, yeah, Okay. So it seems like governments in general, especially in countries where animal egg is a big industry economically, have been very resistant to regulating this industry. I would say, maybe more so than the energy industry, Like there's something about it that makes them not want to touch it. So I'm curious for your thoughts on that. Why is it that governments are so averse to regulating this industry.
I mean, from my perspective, one really important point here is what we call agricultural exceptionalism, and that's kind of the approach of treating agriculture, including animal agriculture, as a really exceptional industry that we can't treat the same way as other industries. And that's got something to do cultural importance. I think that we've touched on a lot at political importance, but also this kind of sense that everybody needs to
eat and that's why we can't just regulate. And I think that's particularly from my perspective, in the European Union, but also in the other regions we mentioned us, and results really work in a favor, and I think industry has done a very good job at maintaining this and upholding this, even as we've seen really high levels of
corporate concentration. So we're not just you know, a lot of the time, we're not talking about farmers, we're talking about really large corporations, but they're still kind of being treated as if they're you know, in need of protecting. And there was a lot of NEOs to this, but I think that's a major factor.
And I think they've been very successful in terms of achieving bipartisanship, right or multipartisanship. So a really good example that ties in with the Catherines farm to fork conversation, both the first Trump administration and then when Biden came in the USCA under Vilsack. We're absolutely opposed to the farm to fork strategy. I think Veilsa calls it in one clip the farm to empty fork strategy, and we
really rests right. They're really afraid, clearly of the reduction of the consumer side of things and the dietary aspect right being brought in through legislation and regulation, and I think that's that's very indicative, right of the type of opposition you see.
So in Brazil.
You know, like we eat meat in Europe. We have to protect our farmers, you know which I'm from Italy by the way, and you know when I go back home, we eat like Dutch pork in Sardinia. You know which is like which farmers.
Are you protective?
You know, antual operations pork from the Netherlands. It's not particularly culturally appropriate or anything like that. But that's not the story you hear.
That's really interesting. Okay, I want to talk about some of the common narratives. We've talked about them a little bit, but what are the narratives that got used to kind of tell this like hands off of animal agg story.
We have pulled out five main narratives for the chapter, which wasn't easy because they're all really related and it's
incredibly context dependent. But one the five narratives that we've seen kind of across the board and across the different regions are firstly, that animal agriculture's contributions to the climate crisis are uncertain or overstated, and you often find out with the kind of you know, in the scientific space, in particular basically saying there's no consensus, we need to do more work bringing all those scientists that say opposite, essentially, like doctor MacLean that we talked about earlier.
So that's really common.
But then also within that you also get the animal arg is actually only a small part of the mission, so we should really focus on fossil fuels and we don't deserve to be a target here, So that's also really common. The second narrative that we picked up on was that livestock production is essential or positive for public health,
for food security, for the climate. So you get a lot of talk that basically, if we didn't have animal agriculture, we didn't have food security, which is a really paradoxical argument to make because we grow so much, we grow so much grains and soy to feed animals, which is
a really inefficient way of using land and resources. So yeah, but that comes up a lot, and you get off the kind of dystopian narratives like the Servia said the farmflare empty fork, or one of the European livestock groups said that farmer fork was going to lead to societal chaos,
which is incredibly dystopian. Yeah, and then you also, you know, you get to argument a lot about farmers and you know, the importance for economic growth and livelihoods, and also again kind of paradoxically, you get a lot of arguments around environmental stewardship under this narrative, so that livestock, particularly in I think North America, that grazing is really important to maintain land, which is there's never any discussion of scale and of how much meat could we technique we could
we really eat if we were to graze all animals that we eat. So yeah, In connected to that, you often get of green branding of grass fed beef for example, that's been challenged a lot, like Tyson sprays and beef
for example. A fair narrative that we picked up on was that any climate impacts that agriculture animal acc does have that they do accept can be addressed through technical fixes and sevia somehow said really well already, but there's a huge emphasis at the moment, at least not necessarily on contesting that there is a contribution of animal ac to greenas gas emissions, but there's a huge emphasis and essentially, all we're going to do efficiency increases, We are going
to reduce how much emissions we produce per kilogram, but we're not going to talk about how much we produce overall, we're going to talk about relative emissions intensity and the kind of technologies that come in here, our feed additives for example, vaccines, et cetera. A lot of these might do something, but a lot of these are really tricky
to scale. And again there's a really there's a lot of authoritative reports, including for example, from the World Bank that's say, the most cost effective thing we can do to address life circumissions is to reduce consumption. And the fourth narrative we picked up on was that regulating life circumissions or consumption is unfeasible DAMA. So this kind of ties to the benefits that they illustrate, so that essentially scaling down production of consumption would really harm food security,
would harm livelihoods in town environment. And that's also connected to kind of claims that agriculture is already doing enough to solve the problem through technofixes. And then lastly, and this actually animal rights activists have probably received at to most, but you get a lot of arguments that the people that are advocating for meat production are extremists and misguided.
We saw that really strongly around the launch of the eat landset Clinanciy Health diet a couple of years ago, and it'd be interesting to see what happens when the next one comes out in October. So yeah, this is really common as well, and I think a lot of scientists get this, but animal rights activists are probably most familiar with those kind of arguments.
Let me give you a couple of examples. And emeritus professor from Davis actually wrote a paper with walk on the title attacking the eat Lancet study as being written by extremists. You know so and by the way, he's an agricultural economist, so they take.
Not a scientist. Then the construction.
Levels that the industry wants for granted. And then I think another good example of these strategies, which ties in with a lot of like what Drilled has discussed, is this issue of biodigesters, right, because biodigesters are an end of pipe tech fix that doesn't really change anything upstream. They have been really pushed by California, right, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard has really expanded this technology beyond the
borders of California. And I think in terms of the narrative, what they say is a little bit like in the case of ethanol. They say, oh, we're part of the solution. Look at all the things we're doing to be part of the solution. When these solutions are causing still a pollution to occur, in some cases more pollution because you have more production associated with them. But also they're super heavily dependent on public money which could be spent elsewhere,
and it's never mentioned, right. I mean, we have the biodigesters because California pays a premium for renewable natural gas associated with them, and so they really they are the industries got really really good at you know darvo. You know, like that people talk about with abusers, you know, put the blame on the person who is abused, on consumers and taxpayers. Yeah, and kind of like make yourself to be this fantastic entity.
Yeah. I remember when there was like the initial sort of boom in these biodigestors and the talk around renewable natural gas, which I should say because every time we mention it, I feel compelled to say, like, could never do more than at most twelve to fifteen percent of natural gas demand. It gets used to lock in natural gas. So this is like an area where the fossil fuel
guys and the animal ag guys unite, you know. But I remember when it first started happening, there was a guy who was a pr guy for you know, an animal ag industry group who is on Twitter having these like very disingenuous conversations about how like I don't understand, like what did the environmentalists want. I don't understand why they would be against this. And I was like, I don't think you're asking in good faith, but I'll explain it to you.
I mean, I looked into this in Iowa and where we have also deregulated this biodigesters, and almost half of the dairy expansion we've seen in the last four or five six years is associated with biodigesters because all these were big, right, these things make sense, and so it really increases concentration. And then you'll have all the associated problems with that. By the way, because the digestate still needs to be spread somewhere. It's not like all the nutrients,
all the pesticides, all the other stuff goes away. We don't know very much at all about how how things may be mobilized. As the manuver goes through the bi digester. Then there's no money to study it, really because we don't want to know some things.
Right, right, Okay, we talked about narratives, let's talk about tactics. What are some of the tactics that get deployed to you know, keep regulation at bay. It's like amazing to me that they've been so effective preventatively, Like they don't even have to fight regulation because they've managed to keep it at bay for so long. So what are some of the tactics that get used to do that.
Yeah, So when something does come up, what we see quite a lot is really similar to kind of what we know from other industries. So we see traditional lobbying, we see political donations by companies and their representative groups and some brand groups for example. But one thing that we wanted to pick up on that we thought it was really important to pick up on a chapter is essentially the extent of which they've ramped up their presence in global spaces because not much is happening at the
national level, and that's for a reason. Currently in global climate governance in particular, there's a bit of pressure to pay more attention to methane and you know, to do more about those short lived, really potent gases, and there's been a lot of push to essentially get climate cops and you know, other global food governance spaces to pay more attention to the climate impacts of animal agg and you can tell that animal agg knows this, and they've
kind of really ramped up their presence over the last couple of years, over the last say, three or four COPS in particular, and the SMOKE has done a really good tracking of how many agribusiness representatives come to every COP, and that's been going up over the last couple of years, and I'm sure we're going to see a lot of them at COP thirteen this year. But that's really important, and a lot of their focus at in those spaces has been very much on positioning animal agg as a
solution rather than the problem. So this is all about how we can help, you know, increase so carbon This is all about how they can you know, how they can basically turn cows into a solution. But then also one thing we've seen at the national level is that industry groups can get pretty aggressive around things like the eat land set report that I mentioned earlier, which personally really surprised me because you do still see that quite rarely to that extent, and to do that, you know,
it's important not that these are not powerless actors. They've paid PR firms like Red Flag for example, red Flag I actually knew that from my tobacco days. They've worked for tobacco, for chemicals. It's an Irish company that has supported several animal agg initiatives like, for example, the Irish medi and dairy Fax platform and the Protein Impact for the US Media Institute that used to be the National North American Meatia Institute.
So they do.
Have money to pay, you know, PR firms as well. I think they were recently linked as well to the pushback to the eat landset diet very directly.
Another thing that we see is the industry has been really good at pushing the can down the road. And so I think that the best example of this is EPA twenty years ago started this air quality National air Emission Monitoring Study and it's twenty years and they still are not done with it. And in the meantime, basically they surveyed I don't know a couple dozen operations, but everybody was grandfathered in if they asked to be exempt, right, and so we any way, EPA did the same thing
a couple of years ago. For water quality and air quality is more important in this case because the Clean Air Act does not exempt confined animal feeding operations or treats them any way differently than any other point source or polluter. Right. But basically, we need to study this some more.
Right.
We are not opposed to this, but we need to study this some more. And I'll see you ten years from now.
Right.
And in the meantime, then they give money to academics who are favorable to their positions. They they say, oh, we're doing good stewardship. We just don't know enough. There's too much uncertainty. Right, As Katain said, this is like one of their big tactics that we point to in the chapter. So we have so many examples of we need to study it some more. They pacify academics by giving them money to study things that we already have plenty of evidence about. That's why we rewrite the same papers,
you know, every ten years. It's a cycle. It's because we're studying it again, you know, and that's why we are where we are.
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great lead into my next question, which is about how they work to capture science and
you know, information public perception in general. So we've talked about this, like you know, repeat study thing, we've talked about mit leinner, We've talked about like organized response to scientific reports, which I think is really interesting and maybe a little bit unique to the animal ag or ag industry in general, Like you occasionally see this from the fossil fuel guys too, but not as coordinated and not
as global, I would say. Anyway, So, yeah, what are some of the other ways that they work to sort of capture the information ecosystem around this stuff.
I think we've covered a lot of them, but it's essentially this is like other industries, but I think maybe to a slightly large extent, this is about kind of shaping, like promoting and highlighting the certain types of evidence that worked really well for them, that kind of show what
they wanted to show, and undermining others. And I think they've been particularly aggressive in the undermining and attacking the science that threatens them that particularly it's about dietary change and herd size reduction, so that's been really striking.
And there's also more.
Recent paper that I think came out after we finished the chapter, but that showed the kind of I think they looked at the impact of industry funding on science about cardiovascular health and meat consumption, and they found that industry funded science was a lot more likely to conclude that there was no link between cardiovascular zase and meat consumption.
So there's it's really good at work is.
Happening solely on this, But there's not been a huge amount of systematic research. But we know anecdotally, and we know from a couple of really well studied cases, that industry is really active on this, and there's a lot of happening here.
And I think when we.
Talk about science and evidence, one thing that's also really important to members that they're really good at using scientists as messengers. So it's not just about shaping the science and the scientific outputs. This is also about using people that have credibility in the public eye to you know, to convey the messages that they want to commit.
And I think particularly nutrition has come in here as well.
That you mentioned that earlier, but there's a lot of really popular nutrition scientists that have been saying the industry lines for quite a long time.
Yeah.
I think one good example here is, well, i'm speaking to you from Iowa, where we produce one third of America's pigs, right, and my alma mater, Iowa State University, is one of the centers of this quote unquote scientific approach. And the National Pork Board gave eight and a half millions to a consorti led by Iowa State for the Real Pork Trust. And so this was led by an animal scientist, but it incorporated those adult specialties disciplines that
Catherine was talking about. What's really interesting about this, by the way, is that they just terminated their contract and they're giving the money straight to PR.
Wow.
So maybe you know, the emergence of the tireffs is moving the industry towards more straight up, we need to move towards PR. But if we're talking about PR in the United States, we have the Chekhov system and so basically farmers pay in to this kitty right that can be used for promoting their industry. And you know, you got milk campaigns. All sorts of very successful marketing strategies have been based on the checkofs. So there is a
whole ecosystem right that reinforces this message. And there's various actors from the universities from the PR firms. The checkof money is also some of it goes to promoting exports of American meat, and the US may contribute to those market access programs. So, as I said, there is a whole ecosystem of funding moving in various ways to promote the message.
Yeah, my favorite example of the dairy checkof is the butterboard thing.
Do you know?
This story element was their main PR firm for a long time, and now they've kind of been ousted and replaced by someone else, but they were paying them for a really long time to do like they did the undeniably d thing as a counter to like nut and plant based milks, where it was like it's real dairy. But they also had this team of influencers that they tasked with coming up with dairy forward recipes and putting them out on like TikTok and Instagram and you know whatever.
And one of them came up with this butterboard idea from a shot it was like in a chef's cookbook, and then she just sort of copied it and put it out there and I went super super viral, and the then Edelman and DMI took credit. They were like that was us, that was us, And then they got into a whole like debate about it because she was like, actually, I submitted that recipe, but you guys said you didn't like it, and I did it anyway, and that's why I didn't label it as sponsored and blah blah blah.
That one recipe got picked up by the New York Times bbceded something on it. All of these like morning shows were like how to make the viral trend blah blah blah, And it was entirely funded and and strategized by the dairy industry.
You can see the through line from the butter cows at the state fair right to the influencers. This, by the way, is punctuated by the story during World War Two again my alma mater, where Theodore Schultz, who was an economist wrote a had his group write a pamphlet that said you could eat margarine instead of butter, and they basically got him fired. Now don't worry about to guy went to the University of Chicago, won the Nobel
Prize for economics. But you can see the influence of the dairy industry in wanting to control the narrative that pamphlet was not paid by taxpayer money. It was paid by foundation money because Schultz knew that he was going to get in trouble otherwise, but he still had to go and all his research group was dismantled.
Wow.
Wow, this is really also not unique to the US. I know, we have a lot of except we have a lot of examples from the US because it's also really well documented over there. But we have a similar
situation in the UK. Here, for example, there's a board called Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board that's a levy funded organization similar to the Chekhov and Dave recently had a campaign that was called Let's Eat Balance, where it's meant to be about balance, but essentially what it shows is just a bunch of meals that all campaign quite significant
amounts of meat. So it's like it's like this whole like the campaign is essentially about promoting British beef and land, but it's kind of faed's this kind of healthy, balanced health campaign, but essentially it just so you know, it just looks like you're meant to eat meat in every single meal. And I think there's a lot of those exists across the European Union as well.
So yeah, yeah, I feel like the European Union, each country has so much of this cultural campaigning around meat too, or it's like it's part of our identity that we have this one particular meat, and like the US does it too, but I don't know there's something special about the European one.
Indeed, and we briefly touch on that in our chapter that the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy also has a budget for promotion of European products and a huge amount of that goes to promoting meat and dairy products. And there was a whole debate about it a couple of years ago where Greenpeace I think, challenged that and you know, try to get it reviewed in line with founder Folk and European Green Deal, and that didn't go anywhere, perhaps unsurprisingly.
Those radicals at Greenpeace. Yeah, don't want anyone to eat anything, Okay, Okay, So I want to talk about the USDA Land Grant complex because it's so weird and I'd love to have you just explain what it is and then what role it plays in climate obstructure.
So we go back really to manifest destiny here, right, because USDA and the land grant universities were created through acts in the same year eighteen sixty two. And the land grant universities are university that received land grants if in the in the East there was no land to be granted. So actually in Iowa, for example, we granted land to Penn State and Rutgers and Cornell.
Right.
So these universities, together with USDA, were created to promote a certain type of agriculture, the kind of agriculture that is super pro technology, the tech fixes that we talked about, that's really their wheelhouse was Also there were also institutions created to promote agriculture as an export industry. Historically in the United States, the agricultural sector has done well when
we have exported out we have access production capacity. So think about the nineteen seventy earlbuts friends rout to Fensro, right when we were selling to the Russians. But before then, think about the plan after the Second World War when we were in the United States was giving aid to Europe for reconstruction after the war, right, And those were the thriving years of agriculture. This relationship that goes back almost two hundred years now between the universities and USDA.
You have a very poorest kind of like barrier people get jobs at USDA from the land grants. They serve in USDA panels from the land grants. Professors that land grants get money from industry and USDA and their students to work for industry. They have partnership private public private partnership that USDA supports. You know, this complex that ranges from you know, agronomies, soul science, to animal science, to rural sociology and economics has really produced a certain type
of science that is of service to the industry. I call that small science. It's science that takes for granted, for example, the consumption levels of meat and does a question them, doesn't even think about, you know, doing scenarios where we reduce meat consumption and what things would look like if we did right. It's science that is, you know,
it's properly done. But the questions that you're asking and the support that you're receiving to ask those questions, it's all directed to being of service to the industry and furthering a certain type of very productivist, I would argue, extractivist agricultural system.
Yeah, that's super interesting. Can we talk about coalitions and trade groups and how important they are to all of this, What do they kind of do for the industry.
Yes, so, actually a lot of the most aggressive and concidered lobeing is happening through trade groups. So that's animal agricultures, civic industry associations, farming more broad farming industry, agribusiness industry associations, but also some of the mixed associations that contain different sectors so den't really central to a lot of the lobbying across the.
Different regions that we looked at.
One thing that we wanted to highlight in terms of when we think about alliances and coalitions is actually something that kind of gets forgotten sometimes is these kind of alliances that are really important for separating the message from the messenger. So one of those groups would be, you know, one of the kind of categories of allies would be
environmental groups. So we know that some more motivate ennmental groups, for example, have worked with the industry to help them do small changes, you know, small fixers around you know, how can we increase soil carbon storage? How can we know make more things better? How can we improve biodiversity, on grazing land.
Et cetera.
Those initiatives in some cases might have some small positive yields, but the problem is that essentially in some cases it can look a lot like legitimizing something that essentially is the status quo. And you know, in that case, some of those environmental groups in effect have ended up helping companies like jbscreenwash their products. And that's quite important to note.
And if you wanted to include that, we have a short clip where someone from the Canadian Catle Association puts that into words, essentially saying that if we say catle is good for the environment, no one's going to believe us, so people won't take us as seriously, whereas if the environmental groups say that, people will believe them. So for industry working with those environmental groups, having those independent voices in the room, it's really important for laundering the message.
We've been to the last six cop meetings, the climate change meetings. We've also been involved in the biodiversity discussions, and now we're part of the Canadian delegation. And to give you an idea that wasn't the simplest task. We have one of the most climate change focused governments in
the world. They're talking about having that the highest carbon tax in the world, and we spend a lot of time talking about the significant environmental role and the positive role that cattle ranching, farming, and feeding creates both for our economy, for the environment, and along the way. One of the things that we found to amplify our message was we knew the conservation groups were groups that we
worked with for decades. So when we go to a forum, we go with Nature Conservancy and we co host the forum. In Canada, we may have Birds Canada Inducts Unlimited that are helping us co host the forum. And when they're saying the cattle industry is good for the environment, people pay attention to that more than if we say it's good for the environment.
I mean that happens on the fossil fuel side of the fence too. You know, you've got like Environment All Defense Fund is the best known example r AM I really getting in on that action. Lately. There are a lot of these groups that are you know, around methane actually in particular.
Exactly and in terms of those partnerships with NGOs, But we also see a lot we see a lot of this in the biodiversity environmental space, which again it's kind of compared sometimes comparing these like extensive types of you know, catarranting with crazing, with really intensive agriculture. Essentially it is incredible, we know is incredible about biodiversity. So it's kind of comparing you know, bad with worse. Yeah, it's kind of measuring those things that can only end up making catarranting
look like a positive. And I'm saying that's the main sector, but I've seen this, but yeah.
I've seen this also from a lot of the like the ecomodernist people to have had this whole thing where they're like very pro concentrated animal AAG and pro GMO and whatever, and it's like they make this argument that basically like by containing or limiting the impact on biodiversity.
Yeah, I mean you also get the on the other side where people are saying that branching, extensive ranching is good for biodiversity because it helps maintain you know, I think Canadian Cattle Association had this partnership with Ducks Unlimited. I think it was, and you know, you get on both sides, but there's just so many trade offs you with every type of animal farming that we just can't you know, it's just really hard to do any of this without reducing the numbers.
One thing to think about is that a lot of these NGOs are based in the Global North, and so this is to me creeping neocolonialism. You know, DF is more of an American institution, but the Nature Conservancy has global operations, right, and they provide a lot of cover to the industry with these partnerships and trying to make things better. And I think the Conservancy is a particularly interesting institution because they hire excellent scientists and they have
pretty independent state level chapters. So I'd like to compare it a little bit to the Catholic Church actually structure, and I think that the role that they are playing is under scrutinized in terms of like how these organizations where a lot of money flows are from the global North, where they have you know, lots of interests from you know, big donors, industry, and participate in these coalitions that make decisions that impact the global self.
Yeah, super super interesting. Okay, we talked about or sort of briefly mentioned the farmer protests in Europe, and I want to talk about one of the big ones that really made news everywhere. What is the Dutch nitrogenis and why were so many farmers taken to their tractors about it.
Yeah, so this is.
What the Dutch actually called the nitrogen crisis. This is not something that we came up with, but essentially that's something that happened after a court rolling in twenty nineteen that ordered the Dutch government to finally after nitrogen pollution because they essentially said, you haven't been doing enough. This is not compliant with EU nature legislation. Again, this is a really good case for why EU legislation is so important also holding.
National governments to account.
But essentially, after this ruling, one of the proposals that came out from the Dutch Liberal Dutch Green Liberal Party was that we should they should be harving livestock numbers because life sotong is a huge source of nitrogen pollution and nitrogen turns into no soxide, which is a huge
you know, also greenhouse gas. But I think the main case was around impact on nature and pollution more directly essential and after the Green Liberal Party announced that proposal, protest led by farmers and farmers groups broke out and they lasted on and off until about twenty and twenty three, so they lasted for a very long time and kind of at some point started intermingling with the European level protests because they were happening all over Europe at the time,
so I'm not going to get into that level of detail, but essentially they were in the beginning relatively peaceful disruptions. They turned a bit more extreme as time went on, when groups like the Farmer's Defense Force got involved, and it's really tricky, it's very complex. These things are never but one thing alone, but obviously the kind of threat to livestock farmers in particular was one of the reasons, and they're very unhappy with that proposal and the.
Timeline, which was very ambitious.
The policy proposal that the gut Dash government ultimately published was I think aiming to reduce livestock size lives of numbers by a third by twenty thirty and half night to GENERI mission, So it's pretty ambitious, but only because
they hadn't been doing nearly enough. So that was the kind of quite immediate threat for farmers, but that at some points started to kind of get mixed up with politics around immigration, which is not something that we get into in a chapter, but essentially one thing that we felt was really interesting is that the protests, the farmers that were getting really loud on the protests and the farmers groups that were really active in organizing the realse
protests did receive funding from feed industry, from the feed industry and from some meat and dairy processes, which is really I think it's really telling in terms of who has a voice in those debates, because by far not all farmers are against climate action. Climate action is really important because farming is really at risk by climate change,
including livestock farming. So to us, this was a really interesting case showing who gets a voice into amplifies those voices that we have to acknowledge that the farmers protests were, but a lot more than just climate policy and environmental policy. What happened in a Dutch case is that they i think last year they pushed the target back to twenty thirty five. We're not sure if that's actually going to happen now, this might be really interesting debate around it's
just a compliant with the U legislation. And at the same time, also in the last couple of years, the Dutch Farmer's Party I called it BBB has massively risen and they're part of the government now. So there's a really interesting dynamic that's essentially like a small petridish of what's been happening at the EU level as well. And again at the EU level there you know, protests and
never does about one thing. We've also had mania jobs at the European Parliamentary Brussels and yeah, at the same time this has been accompanied by a huge production in ambition around climate policy and climate and agriculture actions in particular.
You may add something to what Catherine said. She said because nothing had been done about this in the past. I think this is a really important point if you think about cost of abatement. Our industries have already done something, and so the cost of abatement is higher. In agriculture, we haven't really done anything. So that's actually another reason to say we should do something because some of these
abatement activities are don't cost any thing. They might actually make things better, right, So I think that that's kind of like, you know, there's really a lot of low hanging fruit here because we haven't done anything at all. Now that we get that kind of reaction, but the reaction is not commensurate to the actual cost of some of the policies.
Yeah.
Yeah, I feel like too. The what that farmer protest in particular, really made me think about just the level at which this, like the farmer as like an archetype, has been created and promoted and all of this stuff. And I'm just like, I can't think of any other industry that has quite as much of an effective argument around like I should be able to get to keep doing my job and exactly the same way that I've always done it, and it's like a core part of
my identity that everybody should protect. I'm like, I mean, how, like every industry has been impacted by you know, the digital revolution or new technology is coming or whatever whatever. It's like, why does this one get to be so protected?
Well, I mean Europe and the US, not only do you get to keep doing what you're doing, but you do it on the public nine.
Yeah, yes, exactly.
I think this also.
Gets back to the whole agricultural exceptionism point, because there's a huge exceptionalism for farmers and farming. But also I do think it's important to remember that this is not all farmers and this is just a specific you know, a specific sub group, and they're just a lot like in the European Union context, there's other farming associations. You know, Copacteca is really noisy, but you have a lot of other farming associations that are a lot more supportive of
climate climate action. But definitely, you know, they don't get covered that much in politico or they don't get as much you know, in time, they're not anywhere nearly as big in terms of how many lobbyists they can center me to European Parliament. So it's really important to kind of note that imbalance in representation between the different corners of the farm.
And you're I mean, you said this before, but it's true, like farmers are being impacted by this all the time. They're like they're very aware of all of the different climate you know, changes that they're having to deal with and how unstable that makes their livelihoods and all of that stuff. Way more so like I don't know, I've talked to both my grandfathers were farmers too, so I'm like,
you know, I'm not anti farmer. I think that like, yeah, this one very vocal minority has been very effective.
That's another topic if you do a season to think about unpacking the You know, the National Farmers Union in the United States has very different positions from the farm Yew Federation, for example, Right, Yeah, we just had the farm aid concept, right, that kind of those kinds of farmers are a little bit more progressive than the National Cattalian Association. So unpacking those groups and who gets to have a louder would be a good.
Thing to look into. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Okay, So I want to just as like one last question, I do want to ask you guys about efforts that have been successful at countering this level of obstruction or that are maybe starting that are promising. What have you seen in terms of trying to get past this roadblock, and especially anything that seems like it's actually worked. I'm curious to hear about.
Well, in the US, we've had the Mighty Earth complaint to the SEC about the claims that JBS has made on their net zero bonds, right, and I think that that was a good effort. But in the current administration, you know, one thing that we have seen work at the local level is the nusance lawsuits. You know, in places like North Carolina where they have had a moratorium
and you confine an email feed operations. Things are driven by local concerns more than global and so I think people have to be strategic in terms of the kind of things that may resonate with local populations. These agricultural operations produce dozens, if not hundreds of pollutants, right, and so which one you go after really depends on which one is the most regulated and where the impact is,
whether it's a watershed, airshed, or whatever. So I think people working at the local level, you know, you know, in places where they've had moratoria or where they've had limits, that I see that as going forward because at the federal level in the US, we're not going to see anything for quite a while.
So yeah, and kind of in a similar vein this is a small win in the grand game of things, but in terms of similar to nuisance lourss in the US. There's also been a Spanish case this year where a Spanish called the local authorities have breached their residents human rights by fate to act on water and air pollution from mega farms, which was I think mostly pig farms.
But I thought that was really nice and there's a lot more of those kind of cases underway, which is again I think tackling that a lot more immediate and water pollution, and there's been some more green washing cases as well. But one thing I thought it was really important to note is that it's really nice to see the level of investigative work in rescue journalism coming out on this topic.
It's really really nice to see what I think is a ramping up in attention.
And yeah, I've seen that too.
I think, Yeah, I think that's amazing, and I really want to commend everyone doing this work, and I think that would be really important. Maybe not, I think it might be true getting get the tangible outwards, but I think this would be really important in just kind of denormalizing the proximity between animal agg and decision makers when it comes to what do we do about climate change and animal act that the.
Lack of separation.
I found that really really stunning, and I think there's that kind of work showing the obstruction and showing it over and over and over again. I think it's really important in you know, going towards denormalizing that a bit more.
Yeah, I do feel like they might be the most ingrained in government of like any any industry. It's wild guess you do have.
Those kind of agricultural departments and agricultural agencies that have this long history of working with industry where this was the point of the existence that they production, They promote more production, food security, you know, security of production, you know, promote as much income as possible.
This is this was the point of them.
And then suddenly we're asking them to, oh, you know, maybe regulating because it's you know, climate change. So it's just a lot trickier, like when we bring those things in afterwards you have this really ingrained system of aligned interests.
It's tricky.
Yeah, I mean, let's not forget that when Silence Spring was published US, THEA went after racial charis and basically because we're aligned with industry and they were promoting this heavily tech, right, we want to use pesticides. This was the time where they wanted to eradicate things. So there is a long history of these institutions not necessarily working towards the public good, but more like the sectoral good and even parts of the sector right