The meat industry is using ‘tobacco company tactics’ to lie about its role in the climate crisis, but are we really surprised?
Breaking news: the animal agriculture industry is lying to us about climate change. For those of you who follow us, this will be yesterday’s news, but for others, it will come as somewhat of a surprise to learn that ten of the world’s top companies and industry groups are borrowing tactics from the tobacco industry to deliberately ‘obfuscate the science’ that tells us - unequivocally and without any doubt - that raising animals for human consumption is destroying the climate.
According to a major investigation by DeSmog, reported on today by the Independent, the global meat industry is “borrowing tactics from tobacco companies” and following the example set by fossil fuel giants to “confuse and delay regulation” regarding their planet-destroying ways.
The five-month-long investigation by DeSmog - a publishing outlet founded in 2006 to tackle the “PR pollution clouding the science and solutions to climate change” of which there is plenty - included a comprehensive review of hundreds of documents and statements by meat industry companies and trade associations.
The research showed that major industry players were even going as far as to actively portray themselves as climate leaders by:
Downplaying the impact of livestock farming on the climate and casting doubt on the efficacy of alternatives to meat to combat climate change;
Promoting the health benefits of meat while overlooking the industry’s environmental footprint;
Exaggerating the potential of agricultural innovations to reduce the livestock industry’s ecological impact.
Credit: DeSmog
Speaking to the Independent, Dr Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor of environmental studies at New York University, said: “Tobacco didn’t challenge the existence of lung cancer, but they kept denying and deflecting the causal link [with smoking] – and that’s what we’re seeing with beef and dairy.
“Beef and dairy don’t deny that climate change exists, but they are carrying out actions to try to convince us that the causal chain isn’t there.”
The parallels with the tobacco industry - responsible for around 8 million deaths per year worldwide - are clear when it comes to their use of PR spin and misdirection, but actually run much deeper when you also consider the personal health implications of eating meat.
As classified by the World Heatlh Organisation (WHO) in 2015, red meat is a class 2A carcinogen while processed meat is class 1 - the same category in which we find asbestos and smoking tobacco. Is it any wonder then that the meat’s PR machine is taking an amber-coloured leaf out of the book of its fellow cancer-causing industry?
Perhaps it’s only a small section of the meat industry that’s lying to us, several bad apples in amongst the trustworthy? Well, even with the benefit of the doubt, the DeSmog analysis is hard to counter, pulling together evidence from ten multinationals and industry bodies including Tyson, JBS, Danish Crown and the UK’s very own Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).
In DeSmog’s words, the AHDB is “an arm’s-length body connected to the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs” which calls the UK is “one of the most sustainable places in the world to produce beef and lamb” and claims that setting any limit on livestock production would be “a misguided and meaningless” climate mitigation strategy since livestock farmers “produce vital, nourishing food for a growing population.”
This is in stark contrast to the message from England’s recent landmark National Food Strategy - an independent review commissioned by the government in 2019 - which called for the country to cut its meat consumption by 30 per cent in the next 10 years to curb the environmental damage and the strain imposed on the National Health Service (NHS) as a direct result of our consumption of animals.
That review found that poor diets contributed to around 64,000 deaths every year in England alone, costing the economy an estimated £74 billion, while meat consumption had to be cut by a third to meet the government’s targets on both climate change and health.
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Proponents of grass-fed and outdoor rearing systems - particularly those who perpetuate the romanticised picture of ‘British farming’ with its dairy cows and sheep grazing in lush pastures across a green and pleasant patchwork of deforested land - argue that farming in the UK is very different to industrial farming elsewhere in the world, and is even the solution to the climate crisis.
The AHDB is very much part of this grand deception, stating that “managing livestock effectively can sequester tons of atmospheric carbon in soils”. Nevermind the fact that according to Grazed and Confused, a study released by the University of Oxford’s Food Climate Research Network (FCRN), soil reaches a state of carbon equilibrium beyond which it cannot take in any more atmospheric carbon, grass-fed cows release more greenhouse gases through belching and manure than they are able to offset.
Responding to a request for comment on this very point, the AHDB displayed a rare moment of honesty:
“There are a number of reports and studies that support the statement that ‘managing livestock effectively can sequester tons of atmospheric carbon in soils’,” said an AHDB spokesperson. “Please note this is not claiming that more carbon is sequestered than emitted.”
The AHDB was just one of the ten organisations examined by the DeSmog report to perpetuate several harmful fallacies, including that meat is necessary to feed the world’s growing population, it is an exceptional source of nutrients, that eating meat is a personal choice, and that animal agriculture contributes to global food security.
As if that wasn’t enough, DeSmog found that the ten companies and industry bodies were undeniably responsible for undermining the importance of dietary change, as in shifting the balance in favour of plants and switching from meat to non-meat alternatives.
Fearing the implications of a forecast made by the interdisciplinary scientific EAT-Lancet commission, which recommended that global consumption of red meat by halved by 2050, the Vion food group claimed that “eating less meat will not necessarily contribute to more sustainability,” while the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) and the European Livestock Voice (ELV) both argued that removing animal products from diets would only reduce US emissions by 2.6 per cent.
Unfortunately for Vion, NAMI and ELV, they all backed up their claims using a 2017 study by Virginia Tech’s Department of Animal and Poultry Science and the US Dairy Forage Research Center that has been criticised for using unrealistic assumptions. Although, it serves as a further damning indictment of meat industry ‘science’ that the only way they can create findings to support their message is by going about it in such a blatantly biased way and using industry-funded researchers.
The list of offences to truth committed by the ten organisations under the spotlight goes on and on, and we thoroughly recommend reading the original DeSmog investigation into how the meat industry is climate-washing its polluting business model.
Through subsidiaries, sister companies, levied memberships and other connections, these ten players represent a huge cross-section of the global meat industry. More troubling still, through associated lobbying groups, all of which are incredibly well-funded, they influence food, agriculture and environmental departments that shape policy and legislation in governments across the world. The AHDB for example played a part in developing the UK’s national dietary 'Eatwell’ guidelines from Public Health England (PHE), an executive agency of the Department of Health and Social Care - it is therefore impossible to say that bias and towards consuming animal products and the protection of industry interests would not have found their way into government guidelines.
It’s time the public woke up to the misconceptions and downright lies being spread not just through manipulative marketing tricks, agricultural scandals and generations of government collusion in the case of dairy in particular - all of which we’ve covered in Surge articles and videos - but by seemingly reputable criticisms of legitimate science. Don’t believe them for a second.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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