IT’S ‘CLEAR’: How the agriculture industry funds pro-beef ‘science’
The beef industry in recent years has been mounting counterattacks on climate science, using cherry-picked data and misleading arguments to depict beef as a neutral, even 'climate-friendly' choice.
MOLLY TAFT: One of the country’s most prominent academic centers that purports to “advance sustainability in animal agriculture” is almost entirely funded by industrial agriculture interests, new documents show. And the industry has used its connection to help push messaging around how beef isn’t that harmful to the planet… Beef’s impact on climate change cannot be understated, and the world’s leading climate scientists agree that cutting back on emissions associated with the beef industry—particularly its damaging methane emissions—are crucial to avoiding runaway warming. But… the beef industry in recent years has been mounting counterattacks on climate science, using cherrypicked data and misleading arguments to depict beef as a neutral—even “climate-friendly”—choice…
Documents obtained from the University California Davis show that nearly all the funding for The Clarity and Leadership for Environmental Awareness and Research (CLEAR) Center, prominent research center located at the university, comes from industrial agricultural interests. While some of this has been previously made public, the amounts of money were previously unreported. The report is based on documents obtained through a public records request by Unearthed, the investigative arm of Greenpeace UK, as well as documents obtained independently by the New York Times…
If you do enough research on the connection between beef and climate change, the name of the CLEAR Center — and its founder, Frank Mitloehner — is bound to come up eventually. Mitloehner, a professor in the Department of Animal Science at UC Davis, is one of the most outspoken academic figures in the field defending the beef industry, appearing in multiple media outlets over the past decade and testifying in Congress about the beef industry’s impact on the environment. He also was one of the key academic figures leading the pushback against a bombshell report that came out in 2019 that advised that countries around the world needed to stop eating so much red meat in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The documents show that the CLEAR Center was created in 2019 with a $2.9 million gift from the Institute for Feed Education and Research, or IFeeder. IFeeder is the charitable arm of the American Feed Industry Association, which counts agribusiness giants like Cargill and Tyson as members, the Times reports. This gives it a curious loophole when it comes to California disclosure requirements. While the state requires academics to disclose funding for research from private entities, nonprofits are exempt from those disclosure requirements. Because IFeeder is a charity organization, the CLEAR center and Mitloehner did not have to disclose its funding of their research…
Downplaying the climate impact of livestock seems to have been the purpose for the CLEAR Center’s funding. In a confidential 2018 memo proposing the CLEAR Center obtained by the Times and Unearthed, IFeeder said that Mitloehner would provide “a neutral, credible, third-party voice” that could “show consumers that they can feel good” about eating meat. The CLEAR Center, the document said, would be able to provide an alternate viewpoint to what IFeeder called “a small but vocal minority with hidden agendas” — high-profile figures, the IFeeder claimed, who were leading people astray from eating meat. And the Times found that the Center has provided valuable messaging for pro-meat propaganda campaigns. SOURCE…
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