By Clare Carlile and Brigitte Wear are researchers at DeSmog. Originally published at DeSmog.
Global meat and dairy giants are investing just a fraction of their revenues into cutting emissions despite being among the world’s largest polluters, according to new estimates.
Company spending on advertising outstripped that on low-carbon solutions, the report by campaign group Changing Markets Foundation found, as corporations ramped up attempts to win consumers over with their green credentials.
The meat and dairy sector – responsible for over 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – has come under increasing pressure in recent years to tackle major climate harms.
The New Merchants of Doubt, published on Thursday, examines the climate targets, lobbying records and advertising campaigns of 22 of the largest livestock companies, through case studies in the U.S., the UK, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, and Brazil.
Cows emit large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions through their burps and farts – and the expansion of the livestock sector is driving rising emissions as meat consumption grows. Meat and dairy companies have also been linked to deforestation of the Amazon and other vital carbon sinks, where vast swathes of forest have been cut down for ranching or to allow the production of soy exported for animal feed.
None of the companies in the report had targets to cut emissions that aligned with guidance from UN experts.
The report found that the sector failed to take action on tackling emissions, while also spending millions on marketing sustainability claims. Companies have seen a spate of greenwashing allegations in recent years, with multiple firms forced to pull misleading ads – including Brazilian meat giant JBS, which last year was ordered by the U.S. advertising watchdog to stop making “net zero” claims.
Industry campaigns were strongly geared towards younger Gen Z consumers, including through TikTok and YouTube partnerships, and school education programmes, the report found.
Researchers contrasted this green marketing to the livestock sector’s lobbying behind the scenes. Companies and their trade groups had opposed nature-friendly laws in multiple countries, the report noted, including attempts to curb methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The report “exposes the blatant hypocrisy of Big Meat and Dairy”, said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of Changing Markets Foundation.
“They claim to be committed to climate solutions while employing deceptive tactics to distract, delay and derail meaningful action. These tactics mirror those of Big Oil and Big Tobacco, allowing them to continue their harmful practices unchecked.”
‘Greenwashing’
While the majority of companies analysed have promoted efforts to reach net zero and carbon neutrality, most do not declare how much they plan to invest in cutting emissions.
The report’s analysis of publicly available data found that companies spent just one percent of their revenue on research and development (R&D) – an area that includes spending on improving sustainability.
In numerous cases – where spending information was available – companies paid more for advertising than their efforts to decarbonise.
JBS, the world’s largest meat company, invested just 0.03 percent of annual revenues into climate measures, the estimate suggests – equivalent to around six percent of its total advertising spend. Meanwhile dairy giants Fonterra, Nestlé, and Arla all spent more on advertising than on research and development of low-carbon solutions, according to the report.
Nestlé – whose 87.5 million tonnes of emissions are similar to those of Chile – spent 14 times more on “marketing and administration” in the last year than it did on “regenerative agriculture” (the company’s headline sustainability spending pledge) for the past five years, the report found.
“Regenerative agriculture”, which includes organic and no-till farming, has been widely touted by livestock companies as a solution to their rising emissions. However, the nonprofit research organisation World Resources Institute found that while good for the environment, it has “limited potential” to mitigate climate change.
Fonterra’s director of sustainability, Charlotte Rutherford, said the figures in the report did not accurately reflect the organisation’s investment into sustainability, and that “it only covers outdated capital investment, rather than the significant investment we have made across the Co-op”.
She added that Fonterra had a “large team of sustainability experts” and “was working constructively with industry and government to ensure emissions reduction strategies can deliver”.
A spokesperson for Nestlé said the company was investing and delivering on their “net zero roadmap”, and that the company was on track to cut agricultural emissions in its supply chain by 50 percent by 2030.
“We continue to ramp up our climate efforts using world-class R&D, including via the Nestlé Institute for Agricultural Sciences,” they said in an emailed statement. “We also advocate for the right enabling policy environment to speed up decarbonization in agriculture at scale, and provide transparent reporting on our activities.”
The other companies and groups referenced in this article were all contacted for comment, but had not responded prior to publication.
The report also found that companies’ large marketing budgets had sometimes been used to mislead consumers through greenwashing claims.
Companies did this through vague and misleading statements on product packaging, for example. Danish dairy company Arla has marketed its cheddar as “building a sustainable future”, despite the company not having climate targets aligned with 1.5C, the report found.
JBS, the world’s biggest meat producer, is currently being sued by New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James, over allegations that it has misled consumers about its climate commitments.
The company has said that it disagrees with the attorney general’s characterisation of its commitments to sustainability.
The Changing Markets Foundation report also found that the meat and dairy industry had targeted younger audiences through tailored campaigns on social media and online collaborations with influencers, gamers, and popular sports figures.
Gen Z – which describes those currently aged between 14 and 27 years old – is generally seen as more concerned about the environment, climate change and animal welfare, and therefore likely to move towards lower carbon diets.
The report gave one example of a collaboration between industry group Dairy Farmers of America and the U.S.-based YouTube influencer Sean Evans, who teamed up in 2022 as part of a major marketing campaign.
Evans – host of First We Feast’s “Hot Ones”, which features celebs eating spicy chicken wings – made a sponsored video for his 13.6 million subscribers, promoting milk as a safeguard against spicy food and “also [to] help keep the planet from getting too hot”.
Inadequate Climate Targets
Though 15 of the 22 companies analysed had published or were working towards setting climate targets, the report found that these did not align with expert advice.
The UN published guidance on setting meaningful targets in 2022 ahead of COP27, in response to fears that inadequate targets could contribute to greenwashing. The report found that none of the companies analysed complied with the recommendations – which include calls for measures to apply throughout supply chains and see overall reductions in emissions.
Inadequate targets can fuel “a culture of climate misinformation and confusion”, the UN Secretary General stated in January 2023.
The livestock industry is responsible for over 30 percent of global methane emissions – a greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential 80 times higher than that of carbon dioxide over a 20 year period.
However, of the companies analysed, only dairy giant Danone had set a methane target – another key recommendation by the UN.
Global methane emissions have increased dramatically in the last two decades.
The report found that meat and dairy companies had repeatedly underplayed the role of the sector in methane emissions, for example misleadingly claiming that their methane emissions were a natural part of the carbon cycle and therefore absorbed by vegetation. Such claims ignore the significant short-term warming caused by the industry’s methane emissions.
Some companies produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas, among them JBS, whose methane output increased by six percent between 2022 and 2023.
Lobbying and Revolving Doors
The sector has so far largely avoided legislation to curb its climate harms. The report found that the industry had instead used “extraordinary political access” to push back against nature-friendly laws.
Meat and dairy companies held over 600 meetings with top decision-makers at the European Commission in the last decade, the analysis showed. In the U.S., revolving doors were shown to be in full swing. The report highlighted how Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack previously worked as the president of the US Dairy Export Council – following another previous stint as Secretary of Agriculture under former U.S. President Barack Obama.
The sector also secured a massive win in the Inflation Reduction Act, the flagship U.S. climate policy. The 2022 act provided billions in funding for emissions cuts, but – in the wake of lobbying from firms including Cargill and Nestlé – failed to regulate the agricultural industry.
“The livestock sector has incredible access to the highest political level,” said Nusa Urbancic of Changing Markets Foundation.
“It is shamelessly using this to set the political agenda and even define the realm of what is possible when it comes to environmental regulation.
“As the main players in the sector are very anti-regulation, we end up with the weakest possible approach: all carrots and no stick.”
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Quelle surprise.
I’m so frustrated with these companies! They make it sound like they care about the planet, but it’s all just talk. My kids have been learning about climate change in school, and they come home worried. How can we trust these big companies when they spend more on ads than actually doing something to help? It feels like we’re being tricked. Does anyone else feel the same?
Permanent pasture is a carbon sink, especially if grazed correctly (for most pasture, in temperate climates, mob grazing to mimic the intense grazing by a band of herbivores on the move and no fertilisers). The grass is manured from above and stimulate to regrow and put down stronger roots. Over the years, soil carbon content increases. This deals with all the cow burps!
Growing soya with fertiliser, stripping nutrients and allowing soil erosion through rain run-off, and then feeding grain to a grass eating animal in an intensive lot (CAFO) is vastly more damaging. The meat industry needs to be wound back, to cows, outdoors, on permanent pasture.
Unfortunately, the science on this is very complex, and hideously distorted by the infiltration of Big Ag money into soil and agricultural science.
Grass fed beef/milk can be sustainable, it can also be enormously damaging, likewise any kind of grain/soy production. So much depends on a complex interplay of agricultural practice, soil biochemistry and local climate. And often ‘traditional’ methods can be as damaging as some modern methods (witness, for example, the long term degradation of Middle Eastern farmland – much of the desert there was some of the most fertile lands on the planet).
So there are no easy answers. My own simplistic one is to put a regular sales tax on all ‘inputs’ – whether it is fertilizer or fuel or imported animal foods. The hidden subsidies that riddle nearly all agricultural systems almost always distort things in the direction of long term destruction. We also need to crack down on peripheral agricultural methods that cause outsized damage – an obvious one is sheep rearing on uplands. Its entirely unnecessary and staggeringly destructive.
This isn’t in any way a peripheral problem – we like to agonise over the environmental destructiveness of data farms or air travel or SUV’s or whatever, but in reality its the food in our kitchens that is by far the biggest contributor to climate breakdown and ecological destruction. It has to be the primary focus if there is to be real change.
James Hansen proposed a fossil-carbon-focused version of this price-on-it concept. He called it “Fee and Dividend” because he was afraid that “Tax” was such a dirty word. Here is a wikipage link about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend
Its certainly a theory of change ( toc) and it has its supporters and would-be advancers . . . its theory action group (tag). Those who believe in any toc will do their best work on behalf of that toc in company with all the co-members of their tag.
( And who is James Hansen? This is James Hansen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen )
There is also a toc called “abolish capitalism” which has its tag. Those who believe in abolishing capitalism as the fastest and best way to reduce greenhouse gas skyflooding will do their best work in pursuit of abolishing capitalism.
The two separate tags can pursue their two separate tocs and see who achieves what. Or the two tags can waste their time and energy raiding eachothers’s tag for converts and members. They can even spend their energy actively obstructing and sabotaging eachothers’ efforts.
Or, more likely, one tag (guess which one) would spend all its effort sabotaging and condemning and obstructing the other tag and its toc. Oh well . . . .
James Hansen, who has been a truly heroic scientist, was severely and insultingly criticized for this essay:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/opinion/07hansen.html
December 7, 2009
Cap and Fade
By JAMES HANSEN
AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars.
Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.
Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.
Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.
Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.
Yet cap-and-trade schemes are still being pursued in Copenhagen and Washington. (Though I head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I’m speaking only for myself.)
To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage “offsets” — alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere…
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/unhelpful-hansen/
December 7, 2009
Unhelpful Hansen
By Paul Krugman
James Hansen is a great climate scientist. He was the first to warn about the climate crisis; I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously.
Unfortunately, while I defer to him on all matters climate, today’s article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable.
What the basic economic analysis says is that an emissions tax of the form Hansen wants and a system of tradable emission permits, aka cap and trade, are essentially equivalent in their effects…
I’m not prepared to take Krugman’s word about anything. About Hansen or anything else.
My understanding of Fee and Dividend is that it is designed to force every first buyer of a fossil fuel to pay a fee for every unit of that fossil fuel, and then be totally free to pass the cost of that fee on to the next buyer in the price the first seller sells at. And the next buyer is free to charge that very same price to the next buyer after that and so on down to the very last end-user retail-level buyer-user of the good or the service.
The fossil carbon fee charged to the first buyer at the mine-mouth or well-head is not supposed to be a one-time set-and-forget amount. It is supposed to rise slowly enough for society to adapt to it, but steadily enough that it rises from irritating to irksome to burdensome to punitive to prohibitive to extortionate to exterminatory. The goal is to price fossil carbon out of existence with a fee which is eventually supposed to be so high as to exterminate the coal, gas and oil industries from existence . . . starting with coal.
The dividend is supposed to allow every person the exact same amount of money back to spend on whatever. The hope is that a “whatever” made without fossil carbon input can be sold for a lower price than that same “whatever made with fossil carbon inputs. ( Those fossil-input-free “whatever” makers or do-ers with honor will indeed charge less, and those without honor will charge the higher ” fossil-fee-baked-in” price.
I don’t know if Hansen has an answer to that problem, other than that the lower price charged by those fossil-free thingmakers/ thingdoers with honor will attract customers away from those fossil-free thingmakers/thingdoers without honor.)
I fail to see how this is like Cap And Trade. If Krugman says that it is, that is a good enough negative reverse-endorsement to make me think that it is not.
” Your Krugman is no good here. This is a No-Krugman Zone.”
But let the Krugmanite tag and the Hansenist tag pursue their own separate projects and advocacies.
Just yesterday I got my copy of the current issue of Acres USA. It contained an article about a paper written by two U of Michigan researchers about the amount of wasted food in the world just due to insufficient refrigeration and the lack of seamless cold-chains aloneand the amount of carbon skyflooding emissions that just this wasted food alone caused and contributed to the overall rate of carbon skyflooding. The article invited us to imagine how much carbon skyflooding gases would not be released if zero food waste caused specifically by lack of consistent refrigeration could be abolished by the application of total-coverage consistent refrigeration and seamless cold-chains for food.
( If the amount of carbon skyflooding required to refrigerate all the currently non-refrigerated and/or non-cold-chained food were less than the amount of carbon skyflooding prevented by total food refrigeration coverage and cold-chaining, then the net difference between the two would be the net amount of lack-of-refrigeration food-waste-caused carbon skyflooding thereby prevented.)
( And some refrigeration could be achieved without burning any fossil fuels at all. “Renewable” derived electricity for refrigeration is easy to understand. But some steps in the refrigeration-coverage could be achieved without even using any refrigeration to begin with. Behold! . . . .
The Zeer Pot –> https://www.survivalsullivan.com/how-to-make-a-zeer-pot/
and India’s commercially available water-based ceramic refrigerator . . .
https://sustainabilityzero.com/mitticool-a-clay-fridge-that-cools-through-evaporation/ and too many others to link to without choking this comment . . .
and . . . updated versions of solar-heatcapture-driven ammonia pressurization-depressurization such as the Crosby Icy Ball . . . . should anyone care to invent lay-user-friendly updated versions.
https://makezine.com/article/science/how-to-build-your-own-icyball/
Anyway, here is the link to the paper itself.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4c7b
And by the way, to the extent that fermentation-preservation of fruits and vegetables can displace refrigeration-preservation of fruits and vegetables; to just that extent will less energy be needed for the less refrigeration which will be needed for the food which can be preserved without refrigeration.
Here is an article about how they do that in Vietnam. ( And I assume that Vietnam has some refrigeration for the food which must be refrigerated to stay useful).
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-02-23/vietnams-low-tech-food-system-takes-advantage-of-decay/
I hope someone does or has done a study on the amount of food-waste happening in Vietnam compared to the amount of food in Vietnam.