Beef Industry Tries to Erase Its Emissions With Fuzzy Methane Math
A new campaign asserts, incorrectly, that cows in the U.S. “may not be contributing much at all to global warming.”
Scientists with the world’s top climate organization made reducing meat consumption an official policy recommendation in 2019, echoing what environmentalists had urged for years: Eating less meat, in particular beef, reduces the large volume of emissions attributed to livestock. That guidance has only accelerated efforts by the beef industry to discredit the notion that strip steaks and cheeseburgers are climate culprits.
For two years, industry officials and a handful of sympathetic academics, some of whom are funded by livestock business groups, have argued in congressional testimony, newspaper op-eds, and research papers that the climate science is all wrong. There’s even alternative math to prove the cattle industry has been falsely maligned.