How Big Meat influences climate policy
In case your climate propaganda radar is hyper-focused on the oil industry, Vox has a solid roundup this week of how the meat lobby is also a major player in influencing climate policy. If you read The Counter regularly, the muscle of Big Meat won’t likely shock you, nor will its aims: to downplay industrial agriculture’s complicity in climate change. Still, it’s a lot to see the data in one place, like the hundreds of millions spent by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association, and the American Farm Bureau Federation to lobby “against climate policies like cap-and-trade, the Clean Air Act, and regulations that would require farms to report emissions.” And that doesn’t even account for lobbying from individual companies like Tyson, or industry-funded climate research that produces iffy conclusions. Almost makes you wonder if the “climate activists want your burger” movement was a paid messaging op.
