PAY-TO-SAY: Animal agriculture’s secret weapons — ‘expert’ academics
Similar to fossil fuel companies, U.S. animal agriculture companies responded to evidence that their products cause climate change by minimizing their role in the climate crisis and shaping policymaking in their favor. The industry has done so with the help of university experts. These experts and their universities have influence in public opinion and policy in such a way that agriculture and emissions from agriculture in the U.S. remain largely unregulated, despite subsequent years of research demonstrating its negative impact on the climate.
GEORGINA GUSTIN: When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands. Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion.
In the following 17 years, the report has been scrutinized by researchers, attacked from every angle, and referenced again and again, held up as a clarion call for worldwide veganism on one side, and on the other, a symbol of the climate-hysterical global nanny state bent on stealing everyone’s cheeseburgers.
But as the public has been whipsawed over its findings, new research says it has become increasingly clear why. Since the publication of the U.N. report, the livestock industry has worked strategically to unravel or downplay the report’s findings, and the findings of subsequent research that has reached similar or related conclusions.
A new study, published late last month in the journal Climatic Change, tracks the industry’s response to the report after it was published and in the ensuing years, charting how livestock, dairy and grain companies, along with the agriculture lobby, have spent billions courting a crucial and influential voice— the academic specialist.
“Similar to fossil fuel companies, US animal agriculture companies responded to evidence that their products cause climate change by minimizing their role in the climate crisis and shaping policymaking in their favor,” the authors, Viveca Morris of Yale Law School and Jennifer Jacquet of the University of Miami, write. “Here we show that the industry has done so with the help of university experts.”
The industry’s efforts, the authors argue, have helped these experts and their universities influence public opinion and craft policy in such a way that agriculture and emissions from agriculture in the U.S. remain largely unregulated, despite their significant impact—and despite subsequent years of research demonstrating the impact of animal agriculture on the climate. They also argue that, while livestock industry funding has supported research before, funding universities’ research is uniquely influential and problematic.
At the time of the livestock report’s publication, nearly two decades ago, its message was brand new. None of the major U.N. climate reports had addressed livestock’s greenhouse gas emissions, and research on the climate impacts was scarce. The world had barely grasped that burning fossil fuels was altering the climate…
But in the U.S., home to some of the world’s biggest meat and dairy companies, the industry developed a strategy as scrutiny on their stock-in-trade intensified.
In 2009, three years after the publication of “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the Beef Checkoff program, a promotional program run by the beef industry, gave $26,000 to Frank Mitloehner, then a specialist in the animal science department at the University of California, Davis, to look into the U.N. report, the study said…
Mitloehner and his co-authors, Maurice Pitesky and Kimberly Stackhouse, later in 2009, issued a rebuttal of sorts in a paper published in the journal Advances in Agronomy called “Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change”… Using new models, and after pressure from the global livestock industry, including U.S. companies, a later U.N. report lowered the livestock emissions figure to 14.5 percent of total global emissions…
“Clearing the Air,” in turn, got a barrage of media coverage that effectively said Mitloehner and his colleagues’ work had disproven that livestock were a major contributor to greenhouse gases. The meat industry’s largest lobbying group, the North American Meat Institute, launched a “Media Myth Crusher” brief, claiming that the 18 percent figure was “widely challenged by scientists”…
In the following years… the livestock industry gave millions to Mitloehner and later to Stackhouse as they launched research centers at their respective universities… By analyzing company records with disclosures, Mitloehner’s CV, press releases, research papers and tax documents, the authors cross-checked Mitloehner’s financial reporting. His CV says he has received nearly $5.5 million in industry funding, representing about 46 percent of his total $12 million of funding reported from 2002 to 2021.
The study notes that some of Mitloehner’s testimony, papers and CV don’t disclose some of the funding he received. His CV shows he received $4 million from Elanco Animal Health, but subsequent papers, from 2012 to 2023, did not acknowledge that funding.
His CV also omits funding he has received from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the cattle industry’s biggest lobbying group. Mitloehner is also listed as a director of Distributors Processing, Inc., a privately held feed additive company… More recently he has advocated for a new accounting method to measure the warming impact of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, from cows, the largest source of methane in the U.S. This method has gained significant traction in industry publications, but is debated by climate scientists. SOURCE…
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