A newly surfaced document reveals the beef industry’s secret climate plan

It’s now well established that for decades, major oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming, and yet did everything in their power to obstruct climate policy. They intensively lobbied policymakers, ran advertising campaigns, and funded think tanks to cast doubt on climate science.

According to two new papers recently published in the journals Environmental Research Letters and Climate Policy, another industry knew of its role in climate change decades ago and engaged in similar tactics: the US beef industry.

The story begins in February 1989, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a workshop for a report on how to reduce livestock methane emissions. Experts at the time knew that cattle produce significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change at a much faster pace than carbon dioxide. (Today, almost one-third of methane stems from beef and dairy cattle).

There was also increasing awareness among scientists and environmentalists about livestock’s impact on other environmental issues, like water pollution and biodiversity loss.

A representative from the nation’s largest and oldest beef industry group — the National Cattlemen’s Association (NCA) — attended the EPA workshop, and soon after, an arm of the organization began crafting a plan to defend itself against what they anticipated would be growing attacks over beef’s role in global warming and other environmental ills.

The Cattlemen’s plan — an internal 17-page memo titled “Strategic Plan on the Environment” — went unnoticed for decades until two University of Miami researchers, Jennifer Jacquet and Loredana Loy, recently unearthed the document in the NCA’s archives.

Notably, the beef industry plan had barely a mention about addressing cattle pollution. Instead, it centered around how the public and policymakers would perceive that pollution.

“Public relations activity directed toward key influencers is a fundamental thrust of this plan,” one part reads. Other goals of the plan: to positively influence legislation and regulations, and commission experts to write papers in response to critics as part of its “crisis management” strategy. They hired one such expert to address the EPA’s report, which came out in August 1989 and called livestock “one of the larger” sources of methane.

In 1996, the National Cattlemen’s Association merged with another group to become the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The organization didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

Looking back now, the plan seems to be the blueprint for how the beef industry, and the broader animal agriculture sector, would go on to respond to climate scientists and critics for the next 35 years.

That blueprint has been incredibly successful. Despite a vast body of domestic and international research detailing the immense environmental impact of meat and dairy production, the industry remains largely unregulated, while surveys show that the public still greatly underestimates meat’s toll on the planet. Although per capita US beef consumption has moderately declined since the 1990s, overall meat consumption is higher than ever and is projected to rise over the next decade.

While these delay-and-obstruct tactics largely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry, there’s one way the two sectors radically differ in their public relations wars: what role they say consumers should play to combat climate change.

What polluting industries want you to do — or not do — on a heating planet

Over the past decade, many environmentalists have become critical of focusing on individual actions — such as purchasing a hybrid vehicle, using efficient light bulbs, or flying less — as meaningful solutions to climate change. Critics argue that putting the responsibility of fighting climate change on individuals has been a tactic purposefully employed by fossil fuel companies to help them evade accountability.

That’s largely true. BP popularized the personal carbon footprint calculator while Chevron — which, to be clear, is an energy company — has run ads encouraging its customers to use less energy. A 2021 analysis of ExxonMobil’s communications concluded that the company is “fixated” on individual responsibility.

But when it came to the meat industry, Jacquet and Loy found the opposite: It really doesn’t want people to take the individual action of eating less meat.

“Rather than embrace notions of individual responsibility, the animal agriculture industry hired scientists, pressured the media, and formed business coalitions to obstruct” initiatives that encourage people to eat less meat, the two researchers wrote in the Climate Policy paper.

One of the earliest examples of such obstruction occurred in the early 1990s, when economist and activist Jeremy Rifkin published the book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. Rifkin paired the book launch with a large coalitional campaign featuring advertisements, mass protests at McDonald’s locations, and a book tour, all aimed at persuading people in 16 countries to cut their beef consumption in half and replace it with plant-based foods.

A beef industry publication considered Rifkin’s actions a declaration of war and the industry organized a “determined counterattack,” according to the Chicago Tribune. That counterattack included an advertising campaign telling people not to blame environmental problems on cows and the formation of an alliance of 13 industry groups to push back against activists like Rifkin, which included tactics like handing out hamburgers at one of his events. Around this time, the Beef Industry Council launched the infamous but influential “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” marketing campaign with a budget of $96 million in today’s dollars.

It was effective: According to a 1992 story in the Washington Post, people screamed at Rifkin on call-in radio shows, his publisher received angry letters and phone calls, and his book tour was canceled early on because people called event hosts to either disparage him or pose as his publicist to cancel. Rifkin chalked it up in part to aggrieved cattle ranchers, a claim that the National Cattlemen’s Association fiercely denied at the time.

This back-and-forth fight over the American diet has continued ever since:

So why do fossil fuel companies and livestock producers seemingly have such a different take on personal responsibility? Jacquet says much of it comes down to the simple fact that consumers have relatively little flexibility in reducing fossil fuel use, so messages that encourage people to make lifestyle changes pose little actual threat to fossil fuel companies’ bottom line.

Individuals are “locked into a fossil fuel energy system,” Jacquet said. But “food is not like that,” she added. “You really do have a lot of flexibility in your diet, and you make those decisions three times a day. … These are really dynamic decision spaces, and that’s a threat” to the meat industry.

To state the obvious, individual dietary change alone is insufficient to reform the cruel, polluting factory farm system. But it is a start. To pass even modest regulatory reforms, policymakers will first need to see public support, and one way the public can show it is by eating less meat.

Not only is it considered one of, if not the most effective individual actions to reduce carbon footprints, but dietary change also has cascading positive effects. Animal agriculture is arguably the leading source of US water pollution, a major air polluter, and far and away the main cause of animal suffering — around 25 land animals are factory-farmed each year to sustain the average American’s diet.

According to agricultural economists Jayson Lusk and F. Bailey Norwood, eating less meat, milk, and eggs does affect how many animals are raised for food. It’s not on a 1:1 basis, but if more people reduce their animal consumption, they’d collectively send a signal to the industry to raise fewer animals.

“It may be hard to see the consequences of our decisions,” the two wrote in their 2011 book Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare, “but let there be no doubt, each purchase decision matters.”