Beef is a major driver of climate change. Reducing beef consumption is a straightforward choice the public, and policymakers, could make to fight climate change.
For the beef industry though, a reduction in cattle means a reduction in profits, so they set out to fund science and scientists to focus on how to produce meat more efficiently, greenwashing the industry as getting better and better for the climate. Meanwhile, research into ways to simply reduce production and consumption of cattle remains, by contrast, starkly under-resourced.
In a new study, “Becoming Part of the Family: Greenwashing, Animal Agriculture, and the Strategic Capture of Climate Research,” published today by the Oxford University Press’s Oxford Intersections journals, Mercer University associate professor and research fellow at the Brown U. Climate Social Science Network Vasile Stănescu exposes how the Canadian Beef Cattle Research Council (BCRC) mentorship program funds and shapes early-career academics and their research in ways that will benefit the industry.
The industry considers the effort a way to bring researchers into the Canadian beef industry for their entire career, as the program creates the funding opportunities that help create career paths for those who focus on industry-preferred lines of research. Executive director of the Beef Cattle Research Council Andrea Brocklebank is quoted as describing the mentorship of researchers as a way to “make them part of that family.”
Stănescu told CAAD that “The BCRC mentorship program’s real aim is to limit the kinds of questions researchers can ask about animal agriculture and climate change. Industry support goes to narrow, technical questions—like how to compost feedlot manure or which feed additive reduces methane—precisely because they avoid challenging the system of cattle production itself.”
More broadly, Stănescu continued, “What we see is an industry-funded hijacking of the word ‘sustainability.’ It now often means only the profitability and continuation of animal agriculture, rather than genuine environmental sustainability. In practice, ‘sustainable’ has been redefined to mean ‘sustained industry profits.’”
In the same way the tobacco industry used public relations to stave off regulations, and the fossil fuel industry is still using the disinformation playbook and its tricks like fake experts, Stănescu shows how “unfortunately, the response of animal agriculture to the growing body of scientific knowledge documenting its role in climate change has been to treat the problem as one of public relations. Rather than making substantial changes, the industry has focused on controlling communication around discussions of its climate impacts.”
Polluting industries don’t have to use disinformation to cover up their harms, when they could choose to stop the harm outright. But until governments respond to the overwhelming public demand for climate action and action on disinformation, the public will be repeatedly deceived and damaged by these sorts of industrial disinformation campaigns and the pollution they attempt to conceal.