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

Amy: [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.

Hope you enjoy this conversation!

Amy: 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.

Kathrin: 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.

Amy: 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

Kathrin: 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.

Silvia: 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.

Kathrin: Yeah.

Amy: 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?

Silvia: 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.

This is a bipartisan [00:08:00] issue.

Kathrin: 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.

Silvia: 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

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: 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.

Kathrin: 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.

Amy: 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?

Kathrin: 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

Kathrin: 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.

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

Kathrin: 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.

Amy: 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?

Silvia: 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.

Amy: 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?

Kathrin: 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.

Amy Westervelt: 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.

European Livestock Voice: 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.

Kathrin: 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.

Amy: 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?

Silvia: 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.

Amy: 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?

Silvia: 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,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: 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

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: 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

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: 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.

Amy: 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 Is Pop: Agro é pop, agro é tech, agro é Paulo.

Amy: So even that level of like cultural power is interesting.

Silvia: 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,

Amy: yeah,

Silvia: all narratives associated with that.

Amy: 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?

Kathrin: 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.

Amy: Yeah.

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

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: 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.

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: 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.

Amy: 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.

Kathrin: 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.

But there's a huge emphasis on essentially, oh, we are gonna do efficiency increases. We are going to reduce how much emissions we produce per kilogram, but we're not going to talk about how much we produce overall. We are going to talk about relative kinda emissions intensity. And the kind of technologies that come in here are feed editors, for example, vaccines et cetera.

A lot of these might do something, but a [00:32:00] lot of these are really tricky to scale. And again, there's a really, there's a lot of authoritative reports including, for example, from the World Bank that say the most cost effective thing we can do to address livestock emissions is to reduce consumption. And the fourth narrative we picked up on was that regulating livestock emissions or consumption is unfeasible or damaging.

So this kind of ties to the benefits that it illustrates. So that essentially scaling down production of consumption, it would really harm food security, it would harm livelihoods, it would harm the environment. And that's also connected to kind of claims that agriculture's already doing enough to solve the problem through techno fixes. And then lastly, and this actually animal rights activists have probably received that to most, but you get a lot of arguments that the people that are advocating for meat reduction are extremists, are misguided. We saw that really strongly around the launch of the Eat Lancet Planetary Health Diet a couple years ago.

And it'll be interesting to see what happens when the next one comes out in October. So [00:33:00] yeah, this is really a common as well, and I think a lot of scientists get this, but yeah. And animal rights activists are probably most familiar with those kind of arguments.

Silvia: let me give you a couple of examples

an emeritus professor from Davis actually wrote a paper with "woke" on the title attacking the Eat Lancet study as being written by extremists. You know, so, and by the way, he was a, he's an agricultural economist, so, they

Amy: Not a scientist then. Yeah.

Silvia: they take the consumption levels that the industry wants for granted.

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: I think another good example of these strategies, which ties in with a lot of like what Drilled has discussed is this issue of bio digesters,

right? Because bio digesters are an end of pipe tech fix

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: doesn't really change anything upstream. They have been really pushed by California, right? The the low carbon fuel standard

Amy: Yep.

Silvia: [00:34:00] expanded this technology beyond the, the borders of California.

Amy: Yep.

Silvia: and I think in terms of the narrative, what they say is a little bit like in, in the case of ethanol, they, they say, oh, we are part of the solution.

Look at all the things we're doing to be part of the solution, when These solutions are causing, still pollution to occur, in some cases more pollution

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: you have more production associated with them, but also they're super heavily dependent on public money, which could be spent elsewhere.

And it's never mentioned, right? I mean,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: the digesters because California pays a premium for renewable natural gas associated

with that. And so they really they, they are, the industries got really, really good at you know, DARVO, you know, like that people talk about with abusers. You

uh, put the blame on the on the on person who is abused on, [00:35:00] on consumers and taxpayers

Amy: yeah,

Silvia: kinda like, make yourself to be this fantastic entity.

Amy: yeah. I remember when, there was like the initial sort of boom in these bio digesters and the, the talk around renewable natural gas, which I should say, 'cause every time we mention it, I feel compelled to say , could never do more than, at most 12 to 15% of natural gas demand.

It gets used to lock in natural gas. So this is like an area where the fossil fuel guys and the animal ag guys unite. You know, I remember when it first started happening, there was a guy who was a PR guy for, you know, an animal ag industry group who was on Twitter having this, these like very disingenuous conversations about how like, I don't understand, like, what do the environmentalists want?

I don't understand why they would be against this. And, I was like, I, I don't think you're asking in good faith, but I'll explain it to you.

Silvia: I looked into this in [00:36:00] Iowa where we have also deregulated these, these bio digesters, and almost half of the dairy expansion we've seen in the last four five, six years is associated with bio digesters because

Amy: you go.

Silvia: they're super

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: You, these things make sense. And so it really increases concentration and then you have all the associated problems with that, by the way,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: the digestate still needs to be spread somewhere.

Amy: Right,

Silvia: like all the, the, the nutrients, all the pesticides, all the other stuff goes away. We don't know very much at all about how how things may be mobilized. As the manure goes through the biodigester, there's no money to study it, really, because we don't wanna know some things, right.

Amy: right. Okay. We talked about narratives. Let's talk about tactics. What are some of the tactics that get deployed to, to, you know, keep regulation at bay? And it's like amazing to me that they've been so [00:37:00] effective preventatively, like they don't even have to fight regulation 'cause they've managed to keep it at bay for so long.

So what are some of the tactics that get used to do that?

Kathrin: Yeah, so when something does come up, what we see quite a lot is really similar to kind of what we know from other industries. So we see traditional lobbying, we see political donations by companies and their representative groups, and some less. Less transparent groups, for example. But one thing that we wanted to pick up on that we thought was really important to pick up on in the chapter is essentially the extent to which they've ramped up their presence in global spaces.

Because not much is happening at the national level, and that's for a reason. Currently in global climate governance in particular, there's, there's a bit of pressure to pay more attention to methane and, you know, to do more about those short lived, really potent gases. And there's been a lot of push to essentially get climate COPs and, you know, other global food governance spaces to pay more attention to the climate impacts of animal ag.

And you can tell that animal Ag knows this and they've kind of really ramped up their presence [00:38:00] over the last couple of years. Over the last, say three or four COPs in particular, and DeSmog has done a really good tracking of how many agribusiness representatives come to every COP. And that's been going up over the last couple of years.

And I'm sure we're gonna see a lot of them at COP 30, in Belem this year. But that's really important and a lot of their focus at, in those spaces has been very much on positioning animal ag as a solution rather than a problem. So this is all about how we can help, you know, increase soil carbon. This is all about how they can, you know, how they can basically turn cows into a solution

but then also one thing we've seen at the national level is that industry groups can get pretty aggressive around things like the Eat Lancet report that I mentioned earlier, which personally really surprised me 'cause you do still see that quite rarely. To that extent. And to do that, you know, it's important to note that these are not powerless actors. Like they've paid PR firms like Red Flag for example, and Red Flag. I actually knew that from my tobacco days. They've worked for tobacco, for chemicals. It's an Irish company that has supported several animal ag initiatives.

[00:39:00] Like for example, the Irish Meat and Dairy Facts Platform and the Protein Pact for the US Meat Institute that used to be the National North American Meat Institute. So they do have money to pay, you know, PR firms as well. And I think they were recently linked as well to the pushback to the Eat Lancet diet more directly in some reporting.

Silvia: thing that we, we see is theyre, the industry has been really good at pushing the can down the road. And so I think that the best example of this is EPA years ago started this air quality, national air emission monitoring

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: and it's 20 years and they still are not done with it. In the meantime, basically they surveyed, I don't know, a couple dozen operations, but everybody was grandfathered in if they asked to be exempt, right? And so

Amy: Wow.

Silvia: we, by the way, EPA did the same thing couple of years ago for water quality. [00:40:00] and air quality is more important in this case because the Clean Air Act does not exempt, confined animal feeding operations or treats them any way differently than any other point, source or polluter, right? But basically they, they, we need to study this some more, right? We are not opposed to this, but we need to study this some more and I'll see you 10 years from now. Right? And in the meantime then they give money to academics who are favorable to their positions. They, they say, oh, we're doing good stewardship.

We just don't know enough. There's too much uncertainty, right? As Kathrin said, this is like one of their big tactics that we point to in the chapter. So, we have so many examples of we need to study it some more. They pacify academics by giving them money to study things that we already have plenty of evidence about.

That's why we rewrite the same papers, you know, every 10 years. It's a cycle. It's because we're studying it again, you know? [00:41:00] And and, and that's why we are where we are.

Amy: Yeah. that's a great lead in to my next question, which is about how they work to capture science and, you know, information, public perception in general. So we've talked about this like, you know, repeat study thing. We've talked about mittler, we've talked about like organized response to scientific reports, which I think is really interesting and maybe a little bit unique to the, the animal ag or ag industry in general.

Like, you occasionally see this from the fossil fuel guys too, but not as coordinated and not as global, I would say. Anyway, so yeah. What are some of the other ways that they work to sort of capture the information ecosystem around this stuff?

Kathrin: I think we've covered a lot of them, but it's gen essentially. This is like, like other industries, but I think maybe to a slightly larger extent, this is about kinda shaping, like promoting and highlighting the certain types of evidence that work really well for them that kinda show what they want it to show and undermining others.

And I think they've been part particularly [00:42:00] aggressive in the undermining and attacking the science that threatens them, that particularly is about dietary change and herd size reduction. So that's been really striking. And there's also a more recent paper that I think came out after we finished the, the chapter, but that showed the kind, I think they looked at the impact of industry funding on science about cardiovascular health and meat consumption. And they found that industry funded science was a lot more likely to conclude that there was no link between cardiovascular disease and meat consumption. So there's, it's really good that work is happening slowly on this, but there's not been a huge amount of systematic research.

But we know anecdotally, and we know from a couple of really well studied cases that industry is really active on this, and there's a lot happening here. And I think when we talk about science and evidence, one thing that's also really important to members is that they're really good at using scientists as messengers.

So this is not just about shaping the science and that scientific outputs. This is also about using people that have credibility in the public [00:43:00] eye to, you know, to convey the messages that they want conveyed. And I think particularly nutritionists come in here as well, that you mentioned that earlier, but there's a lot of really popular nutrition scientists that have been saying the industry lines. For quite a long time. Yeah.

Silvia: I think one good example here is well, you know, I'm speaking to you from Iowa where we produce one third of America's pigs, right? and my alma mater, Iowa State University is one of the centers of this quote unquote scientific approach. And the National Pork Board gave eight and a half millions to I consortium led by Iowa State for the Real Pork Trust Consortium. And so this was led by an animal scientist, but it incorporated those other specialties disciplines that Kathrin was talking about. What's really interesting about this, by the way, is that they just terminated their contract [00:44:00] and they're giving the money straight to PR. So maybe you know, the

Amy: Wow.

Silvia: Of the Trump tariffs is moving the industry towards more straight up. We need to move towards PR, but if we're talking about PR in the United States, we have the checkoff system. And so basically farmers pay into this kitty, right, that can be used for promoting their industry. And, you know, you, Got Milk? campaigns, all sorts of very successful marketing strategies have been

Amy: Yep.

Silvia: on the checkup.

So there is a whole ecosystem,

Kathrin: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: that reinforces this message. And there's various actors from the universities, from the PR firms. The checkoff money is also some of it goes to promoting exports of American meat.

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: state contributes to those market access programs.

So there, there, as I said, there is a whole [00:45:00] ecosystem of funding moving in various ways to promote the message.

Amy: Yeah, my my favorite example of the Dairy Checkoff is the the butter board thing. Do you know this story? Where they paid Edelman, … Edelman was their main PR firm for a long time, and now they've kind of been ousted and replaced by someone else. But they were paying them for a really long time to do like they did the undeniably dairy thing as a counter to nut and plant-based milks where it was like it's real dairy. But they also had this team of influencers that they tasked with coming up with dairy forward recipes and putting them out on like TikTok and Instagram and, you know, whatever. And the one of them came up with this butter board idea from a chef.

It was like in a chef's cookbook, and then she just sort of copied it and put it out there and it went super, super viral. And then Edelman and DMI took credit. They were like, that was us. That was [00:46:00] us. And then they got into a whole like, debate about it because she was like, actually I submitted that recipe, but you guys said you didn't like it.

And I did it anyway. And that's why I didn't label it as sponsored and blah, blah, blah. That one recipe got picked up by the New York Times. B, BC did something on it. All of these, like morning shows were like, how to make the viral trend, blah, blah, blah.

And it was entirely funded and And strategized by the dairy industry.

Silvia: from the butter cows at the state fair. Right.

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: To the

Kathrin: Yeah.

Silvia: This, by the way, is punctuated by the story during World War ii, again, at my alma mater,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: Theodore Schultz, who was an economist, wrote a had his group write a pamphlet that said you could eat margarine instead of butter. And they basically got him fired.

Kathrin: Wow.

Silvia: Now, don't worry about the guy he went to the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize for [00:47:00] economics,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: But you can see the influence of the dairy industry in wanting to control the narrative. That pamphlet was not paid by taxpayer money. It was paid by foundation money because Schultz knew that he was gonna get in trouble otherwise,

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: But he still had to go, and all his research group was dismantled.

Amy: Wow.

Kathrin: Wow,

This is really also not unique to the us. I know you have a lot of, we have a lot of examples from the US 'cause it's also really well documented over there. But we have a similar situation in the UK here. For example, there's a board called Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board that's a levy funded organization similar to the Checkoff.

And they've recently had a campaign that was called Let's Eat Balanced, where it's all meant to be about balance, but essentially what it shows is just a bunch of meals that all contain quite significant amounts of meat. So it's like, it's like this whole, like they, the campaign was essentially about promoting British beef and lamb.

But it's kind of framed as this kind of healthy, like balanced health [00:48:00] campaign. But essentially it just showed, you know, it just looks like you're meant to eat meat in every single meal. And I think there's a lot of those exist across the European Union as well. So,

Amy: Yeah.

Kathrin: yeah,

Amy: Yeah. I feel like the European Union each country has so much of this, cultural campaigning around meat too, where it's like it's part of our identity that we have this one particular meat and like the US does it too. But I don't know. There's something special about the European

Kathrin: Indeed. And we briefly touched on that in our chapter, but the European Union's Common Agricultural policy also has a budget for promotion of European products and a huge amount of that goes through promoting meat and dairy products. And there was a whole debate about it a couple of years ago where Greenpeace, I think challenged that and, you know, tried to get it reviewed in line with Farm to Fork and the European Green Deal.

And that didn't go anywhere. Perhaps, unsurprisingly.

Amy: those radicals at Greenpeace that don't want anyone to eat anything. Okay. Okay. So I wanna talk about the [00:49:00] the USDA land grant complex. 'Cause it's so weird and I'd love to have you just explain what it is and then what role it plays in climate obstruction. '

Silvia: So, we go back really to manifest destiny here, right? Because USDA and the land grant universities were created through separate acts in the same year, 1862. And the land grant universities are universities that received. Land grants in the, in the east, there was no land to be granted.

So actually in Iowa, for example, we granted land to the to Penn State, uh, and Rutgers and Cornell, right? So, these universities together with USDA were created to promote a certain type of agriculture, the kind of agriculture that is super proud technology. So, you know, the tech fixes that we talked about, that's really their wheelhouse. It was [00:50:00] also the, they were also institutions created to promote agriculture as an export industry. Historically, in the United States, the agricultural sector has done well. When we have exported out, we have excess production capacity. So think about. The 1970 Earl Butts friends wrote to Frow, right? When we were selling to the Russians. But before then, think about the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, when we were the United States was giving aid to Europe for reconstruction after the war, right? And those were the thriving years of agriculture in this relationship that goes back almost 200 years now, between the universities and USDA, you have a very porous, kind of like barrier.

People get jobs at USDA from the land grants. They serve in USDA panels or from the land grants. Professors at land grants get money from industry and USDA. Their students [00:51:00] go to work for industry. They have partnership, private, private partnerships that USDA supports. You know, this complex that ranges from, you know, agronomy soil science to animal science, to rural sociology and economics has really produced a certain type of science that is of service to the industry. I call that small science. science that takes for granted, for example, the consumption levels of meat and doesn't question them, doesn't even think about. You know, doing scenarios where we reduce meat consumption and what things would look like if we did right. It's, it's science that is, you know, it's, it's properly done, but the questions that you are asking and the support that you are receiving to ask those questions, it's all directed to being of service to the industry and furthering a [00:52:00] certain type of very productivist, I would argue, extractivism agricultural system.

Amy: Yeah, that's super interesting. Can we talk about coalitions and trade groups and how important they are to all of this? What do they kind of do for the industry?

Kathrin: Yes. So actually a lot of the most aggressive and concerned lobby being is happening through trade groups. So that's animal agriculture, specific industry associations, farming, more broad farming industry, agribusiness, industry associations, but also some of the mixed associations that contain different sectors.

So they're really central to a lot of the lobbying. Across the different regions that we looked at. One thing that we wanted to highlight in terms of when we think about alliances and coalitions is actually something that kind of gets forgotten sometimes, is the these kind of alliances that are really important for separating the message from the messenger.

So one of those groups would be, you know, one of the kinda categories of allies would be environmental groups. So we know that some more motivated environmental groups, for example, have [00:53:00] worked with the industry to help them do small changes, you know, small fixes around, you know, how can we increase soil carbon storage, how can we you know, make small things better?

How can we improve biodiversity on grazing land, et cetera. But, you know, I'm not, I'm not contesting that those initiatives in some cases might have some small positive yields, but the problem is that essentially in some cases, it can look a lot like legitimizing something that essentially is the status quo and.

You know, in that case, some of those environmental groups in effect have ended up helping companies like JBS greenwash their products. And so that's quite important to note. And if you wanted to include that, we have a short clip where someone from the Canadian Cattle Association puts that into words essentially saying that if we say cattle is good for an environment, no one's going to believe us.

So people won't take us as seriously. Whereas if the environmental groups say that, people will believe them. So for [00:54:00] industry, working with those environmental groups, having those independent voices in the room is really important for laundering the message.

Dennis Laycraft, Canadian Cattle Association: We've been to the last six COP meetings, the climate change meetings. We've also been involved in the biodiversity discussions, and now we're part of the Canadian delegation. And I'll, to give you an idea, that wasn't the simplest task. We have one of the most climate change- focused governments in the world.

They're talking about having the the highest carbon tax in the world. We spent a lot of time talking about the significant environmental role and the positive role that cattle ranching, farming and feeding, uh, creates both for our economy, for the environment, and along the way. One of the things that we found to amplify our message was we, we knew the conservation groups [00:55:00] were groups that we'd worked with for, for decades.

So when we go to a forum, we go with Nature Conservancy and we co-host the Forum in Canada. We may have Birds Canada and Ducks Unlimited that are helping us co-host the forum. And when they're saying the cattle industry is good for the environment, people pay attention to that more than if we say it's good for the environment.

Amy: I mean, that happens on the fossil fuel

Kathrin: yeah.

Amy: too. You know, you've got like Environmental Defense Fund is the best known

Kathrin: Yeah.

Amy: RMI is really getting in on that action lately.

Kathrin: Yeah.

Amy: There are a lot of these

Kathrin: Yeah,

Amy: that are, you know, around methane actually in particular.

Kathrin: Exactly. And in terms of those partnerships with NGOs, but we also see a lot, we see a lot of this in the biodiversity environmental space,

Amy: yeah.

Kathrin: again, is kind of compare sometimes comparing these like extensive types of, you know, cattle ranching with grazing, with really intensive [00:56:00] agriculture that essentially is incredible, we know is incredibly bad for biodiversity.

So it's kind of comparing, you know, bad with worse or it's kind of measuring those things that can only ever end up making cattle ranching look like a positive. And I'm saying cattle ranching, because that's the main sector where I've seen this. But yeah, it's pretty.

Amy: seen this also from a lot of the, like the eco modernist people too, have have this whole thing they're like very pro concentrated animal ag and pro GMO and whatever, and it's like, they make this argument that basically like by containing it, you're limiting the, the impact on biodiversity.

Kathrin: Yeah, I mean you also get the, on the other side where people are saying that ranching, extensive ranching is good for biodiversity because it helps maintain, you know, it's, I think Canadian Cattle Association had this partnership with Ducks and Limited, I think it was. And you know, you get on both sides, but there's just so many [00:57:00] trade offs on, you know, with every type of animal farming that we just can't, you know, it's just really hard to do any of this without reducing the numbers.

Silvia: one thing to think about is that a lot of these NGOs are based in the global North, so this is to me, creeping new colonialism. You know,

Amy: yeah.

Silvia: EDF is more of an American institution, but the Nature Conservancy has global operations

Amy: Right.

Silvia: they provide a lot of cover to the industry with these partnerships and trying to make things better.

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: I think the Conservancy is a particularly interested institution because. They hire excellent scientists

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: and they have pretty independent state level chapters. So I'd like to compare it a little bit to the Catholic church actually, in terms of

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: structure and I think that the role that they are playing is is [00:58:00] under scrutinized in terms of like how these organizations, where a lot of the money flows are from the global north, where they have you know, lots of interests from, you know, big donors industry and participate in these coalitions

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: that make decisions that impact the global south.

Amy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Super, interesting. Okay. We talked about, or sort of briefly mentioned the, the farmer protests in Europe, and I wanna talk about one of the, the big ones that really made news everywhere. What is the Dutch nitrogen crisis and why were so many farmers taking to their tractors about it?

Kathrin: Yeah, so this is what the Dutch actually called the nitrogen crisis. This is not something that we came up with. But essentially that's something that happened after a court ruling in 2019 that ordered the Dutch government to finally act nitrogen pollution because they essentially said they haven't been doing enough.

This [00:59:00] is not compliant with EU nature legislation. Again, this is a really good case for why EU legislation is so important also at holding national governments to account. But essentially after this ruling, one of the proposals that came out from the Dutch liberal Dutch green liberal party was that we should, they should be halving livestock numbers because livestock is a huge source of nitrogen pollution and nitrogen turns into NI oxide, which is a huge, you know, also greenhouse gas.

But I think the main case was around impact on nature and. Pollution more directly. Essentially after and after the green liberal party announced that proposal protests led by farmers and farmers groups broke out, and they lasted on and off until about 2023. So they lasted for a very long time and kinda at some point started intermingling with the European level protests because they were happening all over Europe at the time.

So, I'm, I'm not gonna get into that level of detail, but essentially they were in the beginning relatively peaceful disruptions. They turned a bit more extreme. As time went on when group psych to [01:00:00] Pharmac defense force got involved. And it's really tricky. It's very complex. These things are never about one thing alone.

But obviously the kind of threat to livestock farmers in particular was one of the reasons, and they're very unhappy with that proposal and the timeline, which was very ambitious. The. Policy proposal that the gut Dutch government ultimately published was I think aiming to reduce livestock size livestock numbers by a third, by 2030 and half nitrogen emissions.

So it's pretty, pretty ambitious, but only because they haven't been doing, hadn't been doing nearly enough. So that was the kind of quite immediate threat for farmers. But that at some point started to kind of get mixed up with politics around immigration which is not something that we get into in a chapter.

But essentially one thing that we thought was really interesting is that the the protests the farmers that were getting really loud in the protests and the farmers groups that were really active in organizing liberal protests, did receive funding from feed industry from the feed industry and from some meat and dairy processes, which is really, I think it's really telling in terms [01:01:00] of who has a voice in those debates, because by far not all farmers are against climate action. Climate action is really important because farming is really at risk for climate change, including livestock farming. So to us this was really interesting case showing kind of who gets a voice and who amplifies those voices. But we have to acknowledge that the farmers protests were about a lot more than just climate policy and environmental policy.

What happened in a Dutch case is that they, I think last year they pushed the target back to 2035. We're not sure if that's actually going to happen now. This might be a really interesting debate around is this compliant with the EU legislation? And at the same time also in the last couple of years, the Dutch Farmers Party which is called the BBB has massively risen and they're part of the government now.

So, there's a really interesting dynamic that's essentially like a small Petri dish of what's been happening at the EU level as well. And again, at the EU level there, you know, protests are never just about one thing. We've also had manure dropped at the European Parliament in Brussels. And [01:02:00] yeah, at the same time, this has been accompanied by a huge reduction in ambition around climate policy and climate and agriculture actions in particular.

Silvia: I may add something to what Kathrin said. She said because nothing had been done about this in the past. I think this is a really important point. If you think about cost of abatement,

Kathrin: Yeah,

Silvia: industries already

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: done something and so their cost of abatement is higher in agriculture, we haven't really done anything,

Amy: Mm-hmm.

Silvia: actually another

Kathrin: yeah,

Silvia: to say we should do something because some of these abatement activities are, don't cost anything.

Kathrin: yeah.

Silvia: actually make things better.

Amy: Right.

Silvia: I think

Kathrin: Yeah.

Silvia: that it's kind of like, you know, it's, there's really a lot of low hanging fruit here because we haven't done anything at all. Now that we, we get that kind of reaction but the reaction is not commensurate to the actual cost of some of the policies.

Kathrin: Yeah.

Amy: Yeah. I feel like too the with the, [01:03:00] that farmer protest in particular really made me think about just the, the level at which this like the farmer as like an archetype has been created and promoted and all of this stuff. And I'm just like, I can't think of any other industry that has quite as much of a, an effective argument around like, I should be able to get to keep doing my job in exactly the same way that I've always done it, and it's like an core part of my identity that everybody should protect.

I'm like, I mean, how like every industry has been impacted by, you know, the digital revolution or new technologies coming or whatever, whatever. It's like why does this one get to be so protected?

Silvia: Well Europe and the U.S., not only do you get to keep doing what you're doing, but you do it on the public dime.

Amy: Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Kathrin: I think this also gets back to the whole agricultural exceptionalism point because there's a huge [01:04:00] exceptionalism for farmers and farming. But also I do think it's important to remember that this is not all farmers and this is just a specific, you know, a specific subgroup. And they're just a lot, like in the European Union context, there's other farming associations.

You know, Copa Cogeca is really noisy, but you have a lot of other farming associations that are a lot more supportive of climate, climate action, but they're really, you know, they don't get covered that much in Politico or they don't get as much you know, airtime. They're not anywhere nearly as big in terms of how many lobbyists they can send into European Parliament.

So it's really important to kind of note that imbalance in representation between the different corners of the farming community.

Amy: and you're, I mean, you said this before, but it's true like farmers are being impacted by this all the time. They're like, they're very aware of all of the different. Climate, you know, changes that they're having to deal with and how unstable that makes their livelihoods and all of that stuff.

Way more so like, I, I don't know. I've talked to my, both my [01:05:00] grandfathers were farmers too, so I'm like, you know, I'm not anti farmer. I think that like, yeah, this one very vocal minority has been very effective. It's

Silvia: another topic. If you do a season to think about unpacking the you know, the National Farmers Union in the United States has very different positions from the Farm Bureau Federation, for example,

Amy: Yeah.

Kathrin: Yeah.

Silvia: had the Farm Aid concert, right? That kind of, those kinds of

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: a little bit more progressive than the National Cattlemen's Association.

So unpacking those groups and who

Kathrin: Yeah.

Silvia: a louder voice would be a good thing to look into.

Amy: Yeah, it's interesting. Okay, so I wanna just as like one last question I do wanna ask you guys about efforts that have been successful at countering this level of obstruction or that are maybe starting, that are promising. What have you seen in terms of trying to [01:06:00] get past this roadblock?

And especially anything that seems like it's actually worked. I'm curious to hear about.

Silvia: Well, in the US we've had the Mighty E arth complaint to the SEC about the claims that JBS has made on their net zero bonds, right? And I think that that was a, a good effort. But in the current administration you know, one, one thing that we have seen work at the local level is the nuisance lawsuits. You know, in places like North Carolina where they have had a moratorium, a new confined animal feeding operations, things are driven by local concerns more than global. And so I think people have to be strategic in terms of the kind of things that may resonate with local populations. These agricultural operations, produce dozens, if not hundreds of pollutants. Right? And [01:07:00] so which one you go after really depends on which one is the most regulated and where the impact is, whether it's a watershed, airshed, or whatever. So I think people working at the local level you know, you know, in places where they've had moratoria or where they've had limits that I, I see that as going forward because at the federal level in the US we're not gonna see anything for quite a while.

So.

Kathrin: Yeah. And kind of in a similar vein there's a, this is a, a small win in the grand scheme of things, but in terms of similar to nuisance lawsuits in the US there's also been a Spanish case this year where a Spanish court ruled that local authorities have breached their residents' human rights by failing to act on water and air pollution from mega farms, which was, I think mostly pig farms.

But I thought that was really nice. And there's a lot more of those kind of cases underway, underway which is again, I think tackling that a lot more immediate and water pollution. And there's been some more greenwashing cases as well. But one thing I thought was really important to note is that it's really nice [01:08:00] to see the level of investigative work, investigative journalism coming out on this topic.

It's really, really nice to see what I think is a ramping up in attention and

Amy: I, I've

Kathrin: yeah.

Amy: too, I think.

Kathrin: Yeah,

Amy: Yeah. Yeah.

Kathrin: I think that's amazing. And I really wanna commend everyone doing this work, and I think that would be really important. Maybe not, I think it might be tricky to get the tangible outputs, but I think this would be really important in just kind of de normalizing the proximity between animal ag and decision makers when it comes to what do we do about climate change and animal ag, that the, the lack of separation.

I found that really, really stunning and I think does that kind of work, showing the obstruction and showing it over and over and over again, I think it's really important in, you know, going towards de- normalizing that a bit more.

Amy: Yeah. Yeah. I do feel like they might be the most ingrained in government of, of like any, in any industry. It's wild.

Kathrin: Because I guess you do have [01:09:00] those kind of agriculture departments and agricultural agencies that have this long history of working with industry where this was the point of their existence, that they promote production, they promote more production, food security, you know, security of production you know, promote as much income as possible.

This is, this was the point of them. And then suddenly we're asking them to, oh, you know, maybe regulate 'cause it's, you know, climate change. So it's just a lot trickier, like when we bring those things in afterwards, you have this really ingrained system of aligned interests. It's tricky.

Amy: Yeah.

Silvia: I mean, let's not forget that when Silent Spring was published USDA,

Amy: yeah,

Silvia: went after Rachel Carson and basically, you know,

Amy: yeah,

Silvia: because they were aligned with industry and they were promoting this heavily tech, right? We wanna use pesticides. This was the time where they wanted to eradicate things, you know, so there is a long history of these institutions not necessarily working towards the public good, but more like the sectoral good, and even parts of the [01:10:00] sector, right?