The Dairy Industry Is Scared, and Queen Latifah Is Here to Make It OK2Milk

 [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. In this season, we are going chapter by chapter of a new academic book, but very readable academic book that has gathered together all of the peer-reviewed 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, you know, 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 [00:01:00] 89% of people globally-- 89%! 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 gonna talk about a big one today. The animal agriculture industry, the meat guys 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 and all sorts of other things. I'm joined today by Kathrin Lauber from University of Edinburgh and Silvia Secchi from the University of Iowa. We had a fascinating conversation. They blew my mind multiple times throughout this.

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 YouTube, 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.

 So very like basic kind of 101 question to start. I, 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 ag influences climate change is through, greenhouse gas emissions. So food production is responsible for about one third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and a huge amount of that is from animal ag. So estimates really vary, but it's between 12 and 19% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from animal ag, and that's methane but also nitrous oxide and CO2.

 Okay. So I know in conversations I've had with various folks about animal ag 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 ag guys really hate this, and I would love to have you guys kind of explain why that is

 To me that's really interesting and having worked in other industries like soft drinks as well, I do wonder if this [00:04:00] is a kind of reflection of the stage at which animal ag is 'cause animal ag obviously. Has been on the radar for climate scientists a little bit later, came on the radar a little bit later, done fossil fuels.

And so I do feel like we are 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 are addressing animal ag emissions 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 start 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, I'd be really interested to see if that happens as regulation becomes more of a [00:05:00] concrete option. But yeah, I do think individual action is really important, but overall we do need legislation and I think Animal Ag does know that, and that's where they also do push really hard against that.

 I, would also add that if you compare 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 my car, but you, you have more 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.

 But as you kind of cover in this book chapter, they are starting to campaign against [00:06:00] any sort of, systemic efforts or the perception of maybe the beginning of systemic efforts even. So, 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, 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, there's been a lot of activity regarding the reporting of where these facilities are because, i, I'm gonna try not to use the term confined animal feeding operation or cafo, 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 [00:07:00] 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 2017 basically said, but we're not gonna disclose it to anybody. And in 2023, there was this draft strategy for monitoring measurement monitoring, reporting and verification that also kind of like didn't even talk about confined animal feeding operations. It was all about soil organic carbon. So they've been 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 both parties in the United States.

 Yeah. And just can I add to that to zoom out from the United States, I can't overstress how the most important success that they've had is actually to keep proper legislative action off the agenda even. So, in a lot of countries , even speaking about say, 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 one example would be what happened in New Zealand a couple of years ago, they proposed the first tax on cattle emissions in 2002, and then first 30 later, and then after the changing in government, the tax has been completely scrapped.

So that's kind of one really concrete example of something that they managed to move off the agenda and get scrapped. But generally kind of keeping things quiet and keeping the threats away has worked really well.

 think Kathrin's point is kind of like crux here, there is absolutely no [00:09:00] discussion of consumption issues. everything else. They might talk about, you know, the tech fixes. But the real crux of the matter, particularly in the global north, in places like Europe, in places like Australia, in places like the United States, is consumption

 how policy facilitates consumption and pushes for consumption.

This is not like a free market kind of situation, right? And 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, is the the education, everything.

 Yeah, and like dietary guidance is really growing to most people, but that actually gets a lot more heated than you'd think around animal products, animal source foods.

 Yeah, no, I know. And I don't know, I randomly had a window into just the way that the industry uses like health influencers [00:10:00] 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, this 2006 Long Shadow report. You have a little call out on this in, in the chapter, and I think it's really interesting. But like people outside of the sort of food and ag 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 ag industry?

 Yes. So, Livestock's Long Shadow is really, really important to people like us because essentially it was the first estimate of the livestock sector's contribution to global anthrop anthropogenic climate change. So this is the first time at least a authoritative agency like the UN Agency food and Agriculture Organization that published it.

Put a number on how much of our greenhouse gas emissions [00:11:00] comes from livestock, and they put that at 18%. Again, that's been contested since, and the number has 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 livestock sector.

If say we keep growing our meat or dairy consumption as we are doing right now, they put a really clear warning out that this is not gonna be tenable in environmental and climate trends. And when that initially landed the report, it was pretty quiet. It took a couple of years to properly gain traction. But as the report itself gained more traction among people interested in climate and animal 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 2009, 2010, alongside the kind of growing positive attention. this is placeholder media that you'll see if you add a layout to an [00:12:00] empty scene, you can go ahead and delete it

 So one of the things that happened that we address in the chapter is that the beef industry awarded some funding to someone called Frank Mitloehner who was a scientist with a background in animal science. He's at UC Davis, and he was essentially funded to assess livestock's long shadow.

What came out of that process is essentially a article that he co- 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's Long Shadow, where the authors say something along the lines of livestock emissions are greater than transport.

He says that essentially that that's flawed because the livestock emissions calculation included full lifecycle assessment, but 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 kinda a point that was picked up in the executive summary for, and was picked up in a lot of [00:13:00] media reporting actually.

But that's what he really latched onto. And one of the authors of Livestock's Long 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 livestock 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 that essentially the link between animal agriculture and climate change and greenhouse gas emissions had been debunked. And that's, there's also kinda, I think one, someone described mid learner as a scientist who debunked livestocks on 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 know that also kicked 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 [00:14:00] with, and that's kinda kicked off a lot of discussions internally within the FAO about how they deal with livestock and climate change.

 And we should note that Mitloehner receives quite a bit of funding from the industry.

 Yeah. Still very involved in interesting discussions that are going on at the moment around how we measure methane that could have major implications for what we do about animal agriculture. So he remains very relevant.

 Okay. I want to make sure we talk about some of the early days too. 'cause actually for me, even 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, 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, in the nineties as well?

 Actually it [00:15:00] starts before the nineties. So, it, there's a paper that Jennifer Jaque and Viveca Morris, who are also co-author of this chapter, wrote this year where they trace back some of the early efforts to 1989. Because in 1989, 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, that we see that, you know, that Kathrin was talking about that they're using today. And so we have the National Cattlemen Association with which, which is today the National Cattlemen's Brief Association. Basically hiring public relation firms forming coalitions with other industry members coming up with campaigns and slogans that are pro beef production. again, I wanna emphasize that this is all part of [00:16:00] 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, 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, 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.

That's because they've had this, this history that's now, you know, decades long of campaigns and, and co-opting, as Kathrin was saying, co-opting parts of the scientific community too.

 Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Okay, we're gonna come back to the US for like a [00:17:00] 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 Ag guys in the eu?

 Yes. So we looked at the EU because they are a part of the world 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 emissions that come from food production through animals. So the situation that we have in the European Union that we start with essentially is that the European Union spends its largest, the largest part of its budget on agriculture actually.

So they have a huge agricultural policy program called the Common Agricultural Policy that goes back to the 1960s. 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 [00:18:00] European Union that's called Copa and Cogeca.

So that was established in 1962, the same year as the policy. And so a lot of these kinda. This industry representation around agriculture goes a really, really long way back and agricultural interests are really enshrined and have a huge amount of political sway in the European Union context. And obviously this looks really different in 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 EU Green deal, for example, we've seen this clash between this really enshrined agricultural kind of work stream and the common agricultural policy and everything around it.

They have a agricultural mini ministry department as well DG Agri within the European Union. We've seen this clash between those entwined interests to 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 [00:19:00] 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 these environmental aims 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 has published in the last couple of years is the Farm to 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 Farm to Fork strategy addressed that really nicely and it was quite an ambitious piece of strategy, but strategy alone doesn't do anything. What needs to happen in the European Union is 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 [00:20:00] traced back to the power that agricultural lobbies have in the European Union. And we also saw kind of around a similar time of the Farm to Fork strategy, we also saw the kind emergence of groups specifically focused on livestock.

So we have something called the European Livestock Voice that was formed by Copa Cogeca and some other groups representing meat feed, leather, kind of meat production, and any allied industries. And those specifically aiming to promote pro livestock 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 around emergence of Farm to Fork.

 Here's a little clip from European Livestock Voices video on the Farm to Fork strategy, just to give you a 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 [00:21:00] Deal. This project contains ambitious and far reaching targets, but there are also a few paradoxes stemming from the preconception that meat is not sustainable for the environment nor our health.

 And yeah, sadly because of this and because of, you know, for a lot of other reasons, we've had a right shift in European Parliament, for example, and we've had a lot of farmers protests that we'll 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 on this topic?

 In China, you know, and, and more generally, I would say in all the BRIC countries, so Brazil, Russia, China and India. With 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 [00:22:00] as the country became, has become richer, was actually promoted by the government. And in general, environmental regulations associated with agriculture have lagged beyond, behind all sorts of other environmental regulations. Right. In, we know that China is really exploding in terms of green energy and the production and consumption of you know, 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, and the, the promotion of certain types of food has had. In terms of internal policies. China's very driven by internal needs. They're a big player on the world market in, 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 [00:23:00] 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 and 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 COP in Brazil in a couple months too, so yeah. What's the situation there?

 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 agribusiness and the protection of the Amazon. And these days, more and more we appreciate the Cerrado,

 as, as a ecosystem to protect. And so in Brazil, this kind of like tug of war of the agribusiness in [00:24:00] particular has a long history. There is a Ruralist caucus

 in the 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 soybeans or Brazilian beef who put some conditions on where these things would be raised and grown. But of course. A lot of this was upended by Bolsonaro and we're still kind of like to figure out where we go from there. One thing that I would say is that [00:25:00] Lula is much more progressive, of course, in Bolsonaro, but these interests in Brazil, both the agribusiness in the oil interest, let's not forget that powerful. And so even though there's more protection for indigenous 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, a group of reporters there, and they were just trying to explain to me the Agro Is Pop campaign. They're like, do you know that agro is pop? And I'm like, no.

 Agro é pop, agro é tech, agro é Paulo.

 So even that level of like cultural power is interesting.

 I mean, per capita, I think Argentina is by far the biggest consumer of beef, right? And Brazil is not very far behind. And so you really see the, [00:26:00] the culture associated with a certain type of patterns of consumption. And of course the industry latches onto that,

 yeah, yeah. Okay. So seems like governments in general, and especially in countries where animal ag is a big industry economically, have been very resistant to to regulating this industry. I would say maybe more so than the energy industry, like. There's something about it that makes 'em not wanna touch it.

So I'm, I'm curious for your thoughts on that. Why, 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 [00:27:00] treat the same way as other industries. And that's got something to do with the cultural importance.

I think that we 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 the US and Brazil has really worked in their 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 kinda being treated as if they're, you know, in need of protecting.

And I know there's a lot of nuance to this, but I think that's a major factor.

 I think they've been very successful in terms of achieving bipartisanship,

 multi partisanship. So, a a, a really good example that ties in with Kathrin's Farm to Fork conversation. [00:28:00] Both the first Trump administration, and then when Biden came in at the USDA under Vilsack were absolutely opposed to the Farm to Fork strategy.

I think Vilsack calls it in, in one clip, the Farm to Empty Fork Strategy. And they really question, right? They're really afraid, clearly of the introduction of the consumer side of things and the dietary aspect, right? Being brought in through legislation and regulation.

 I think that's that's very indicative, right, of the type of opposition you see. So in Brazil, you know, it's 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 protected, you know, animal operations, pork from the Netherlands.

It's not [00:29:00] particularly culturally appropriate or anything like that, but that's not the story you hear.

 That's really interesting. Okay. I wanna talk about some of the common narratives. We've talked about them a little bit, but what are the narratives that get used to kind of tell this hands off of animal ag 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 kinda, you know, in the scientific space in particular, basically saying there's no consensus. We need to do more work. You know, bringing other scientists that say it opposite essentially like Dr. Cle that we talked about earlier. So that's really common. But then also within that, you also get the, oh, animal ag is actually only a small part of the mission, so we should really focus on fossil fuels.

And we don't deserve to [00:30:00] 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.

'cause 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 all the kind of dystopian narratives like the Sylvia said the Farm to Empty Fork or one of the European livestock groups said that farm to fork was going to lead to societal chaos which is, you know, incredibly dystopian.

But yeah. And then you also, you know, you get 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 [00:31:00] grazing is really important to maintain land, which is.

There's never any discussion of scale and of how much meat could we tech, we could we really eat if we were to graze all animals that we eat? So yeah. And connected to that idea, often get a lot of green branding of grassfed beef, for example. That's been challenged a lot like Tyson's Brazen Beef, for example.

The third narrative that we picked up on was that any climate impacts that Agriculture Animal Act does have that they do accept can be addressed through technical fixes. And Silvia summarized that 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 ag to greenhouse gas emissions.

Transcription

For decades, the meat and dairy industries managed to successfully avoid any attention for the planet-heating emissions they pump into the atmosphere; once governments started talking about regulating methane, though, they started working on efforts to avoid them. You can 

Climate Obstruction

S14, Ep7 | How the Animal Ag Industry Obstructs Climate Policy

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

S14, Ep7 | How the Animal Ag Industry Obstructs Climate Policy

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