In California, a state legislator introduced a bill called the California Climate-Friendly Food Program, with the goal of promoting plant-based foods in schools and reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to livestock.

Within a few months, references to climate change were stripped out of the text and title. The bill instead became the California School Plant-Based Food and Beverage Program.

On the other coast, in Maryland, the state’s Green Purchasing Committee launched the Carbon-Intensive Foods Subcommittee to study which foods have the largest carbon footprints and to steer the state away from buying those foods. The administration of Gov. Larry Hogan disbanded the committee months later.

In both cases, the states’ farm and beef lobbies got their way.

Over the past year, as landmark reports advised consumers to eat less meat and dairy because of their climate impacts—and as plant-based alternatives gained traction—the American beef and dairy industries have been pushed further into defensive mode.

“It is astounding, the level of fear and pushback from the meat industry on our efforts to address the very real, substantial climate impacts of meat production,” said Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of the food and agriculture program at Friends of the Earth, which helped develop the California legislation and is behind other legislation intended to expand state-level spending on plant-based foods.

“They don’t want to cede an inch on climate change,” Hamerschlag added.

Early this year, the EAT-Lancet Commission, in a major scientific report, urged a “comprehensive shift” in the world’s diet. In July, the World Resources Institute, the United Nations and other groups released a massive report finding that the world needs to produce 50 percent more food without expanding the food system’s carbon footprint. And in August, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report calling for a major overhaul in the global food system.

All of them recommend lowering consumption of meat, dairy and carbon-intensive foods, especially in developed countries.

Stripping Mention of ‘Climate,’ Disbanding a Committee

California Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian introduced a bill in February that would allocate $3 million to give schools a rebate for increasing the number of plant-based meals they serve. The original bill contained language that said beef and dairy production released more greenhouse gases and had the word “climate” in the title.

But the state’s powerful beef and dairy industries opposed the bill, largely because of the explicit connections it made between livestock production and climate change. Lawmakers removed the language, the lobby withdrew its opposition—and the bill moved forward. It now awaits further movement in a state committee.

“We were opposed early in the process but removed our opposition in the Assembly Education Committee after substantial amendments were taken to the bill removing the involvement of the Air Resources Board [California’s climate regulator] in the school lunch program, among a handful of other issues with the bill,” said Justin Oldfied, vice president for government affairs with the California Cattlemen’s Association, in an email to InsideClimate News

“The changes they wanted weren’t about the substance,” said Kyle Ash, director of government affairs with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which advocates for vegetarian diets. “It’s about whether they look bad or not because the bill adds legitimacy to the fact that animal-based diets are higher in carbon emissions.”

In Maryland, the state’s Green Purchasing Committee, an interagency government group charged with “promoting environmentally preferable purchasing” by state agencies, launched the Carbon-Intensive Foods Subcommittee to study which foods released higher amounts of greenhouse gases.

After the group produced a list of carbon-intensive foods, which included beef and dairy, the executive vice president of the Maryland Cattlemen’s Beef Association called it a “hit list of foods,” according to a trade media publication. The association and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association sent a joint letter to Gov. Hogan, a Republican, asking him to disband the committee because, they said, it was operating with a political agenda.

The following month, in August, state officials said they were disbanding the committee, writing that “it has become very clear that these are complicated issues that require solutions beyond the scope of the subcommittee.”

“After much review, we have jointly determined that the goals of this subcommittee are similar to those of other state programs, and have decided that our resources would be better focused on bolstering those efforts,” they added.

Message From Scientists Is Clear

Emissions from livestock account for about 14.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, globally, and roughly two thirds of those emissions come from cattle—mostly from methane burped by cows, growing feed and clearing land for grazing and feed crops.

In October of last year, the journal Nature published a study, saying that, in order to feed the expected 9.7 billion people on the planet in 2050—and meet the Paris climate accord goals—the world will need to shift toward plant-based diets, in addition to reducing food waste and adopting new farming technologies.

“We find that no single measure is enough to keep these effects within all planetary boundaries simultaneously, and that a synergistic combination of measures will be needed to sufficiently mitigate the projected increase in environmental pressures,” the authors wrote.

But the message to the world’s eaters was simple: Eat less meat and dairy.

At the Five Rivers cattle feeding operation in Kersey Colo., nearly 100,000 cattle are fed to market weight. The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of beef, and Five Rivers is the world’s largest cattle feeding company, with nearly 1 million cattle across six states. (Photo credit: Georgina Gustin, InsideClimate News)

The following month, the EAT-Lancet Commission published its study coming to the same conclusion. That was followed by the sweeping report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying that a shift toward less carbon-intensive food presented “major opportunities for reducing GHG emissions.”

“Examples of healthy and sustainable diets are high in coarse grains, pulses, fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds; low in energy-intensive animal-sourced and discretionary foods (such as sugary beverages),” the report said.

“Staying within a 2-degree trajectory—it won’t happen if you don’t bring down animal sources of food globally, and in most regions and places where beef is produced, and that includes the U.S.,” said Marco Springmann of Oxford University, the lead author of the Nature study and and one of the authors of the EAT-Lancet Commission report.

The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of beef. In 1960 it produced 16 billion pounds of beef and in 2018, 27 billion pounds. This year, the U.S. could produce more than 27.4 billion pounds—a record. The average American consumes nearly three times the global average, at 57 pounds per capita.

Industry Wants Supply-Side Solutions

The American beef industry says that the headlines over the past year that blare recommendations to cut beef consumption oversimplify the issue.

In a recent study published in Agricultural Systems, researchers did a full life-cycle analysis—the gold standard for determining a product’s greenhouse gas emissions—and found that beef cattle produce about 3.7 percent of the United State’s total greenhouse gas emissions, nearly half of total agricultural emissions, which are about 9 percent. That analysis includes emissions from birth to slaughter. Most of that comes from methane from cow belches.

“Methane is our biggest challenge,” said Sara Place, a co-writer of the study and senior director of sustainability for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which funded the research. “This industry is interested in solutions.”

Place says there should be more emphasis on the industry’s potential to cut emissions, rather than just recommending people cut back on their beef consumption for climate-related reasons. “There’s this argument that we can’t improve the supply side—that we have to cut demand,” Place said. “That’s our challenge: How can we as scientists cut emissions and bend that curve back down.”

The American beef industry points to Place’s research, which was done with scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as evidence of how the U.S. cattle industry has become more efficient, producing more meat with fewer cattle. In other countries, emissions from cattle are higher, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Some researchers also note that the number of cattle in the U.S. has fallen from 97.8 million in 1960 to 88.5 in 2014, while the number of pounds produced has risen over the same time—a figure that shows how relatively efficient the industry has become.

“Maybe—just maybe—American farmers and ranchers deserve some credit for efficiencies that for decades have decreased greenhouse gases,” wrote Frank Mitloehner, a professor of animal science at the University of California at Davis, a staunch industry defender, in a recent blog post.

Meat Production Has Skyrocketed

Still, critics say, 3.7 percent of emissions is a relatively high number because overall U.S. emissions are so much higher than most countries. And, they note, that total methane emissions from U.S. livestock have risen by nearly 20 percent from 1990 to 2016.

“People say: Oh, it’s not a big number. But if you divide it by total greenhouse gases in the U.S., which you can argue are very high and should be much lower, it is,” Springmann said. “The U.S. system produces the fourth-largest amount of greenhouse gases in the world. It’s a high number if you put it in a global context.”

Beef’s carbon footprint is well established. For every gram of beef produced, 221 grams of carbon dioxide is emitted, compared to 36 for pork. And for every calorie from beef, 22 grams of carbon dioxide is emitted, compared to 3.5 from pork.

Global meat production has skyrocketed—by more than 370 percent — since 1960, straining resources and consuming land. With demand for beef and dairy expected to soar, feeding the world—and staying within a safe carbon budget—will be impossible without major shifts in consumption patterns.

Tim Searchinger, author of another report this year advocating for lower animal protein consumption, agrees that the emissions intensity of U.S. beef is lower than in other countries. But, he says, the demand for livestock-based foods from consumers in the U.S. and other high-income countries has major climate impacts nonetheless. (Among developed countries, the U.S. consumes more beef, per capita, than any other country, after Argentina.)

Searchinger has pointed out that most life cycle assessments (LCA) of beef production don’t account for land-use change and deforestation—to make way for grazing and growing grains—in other places.

“If your LCA doesn’t take into account land use, then your LCA is leaving something pretty important out,” he said. “The amount of carbon we lose from vegetation and soils to produce a kilo of beef is much higher than the emissions from even methane and nitrous oxide from producing beef.”

He says that any land devoted to food could store more carbon if left as forest or restored to its native vegetation. So every acre of land is critical for carbon storage, given growing global food demands.

“We need to have land available to reforest. We need to avoid clearing land. Every time we consume less beef, that provides—at the very least—the opportunity to use less land,” he said. “Each of us has the power to avoid that land-clearing. So if I don’t eat beef, the next guy can eat more without clearing land.”

Pressure Coming From Consumers, Too

These latest attempts by the industry to beat back initiatives linking livestock to climate impacts are only the most recent. During the development of the influential 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are reviewed and revamped every five years, the meat industry, along with its allies in Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, successfully tamped down nutritionists’ recommendations to eat less red meat for environmental reasons.

Much of the pressure on the industry is also coming from consumers as dietary choices are starting to shift.

The number of vegans and vegetarians, especially among millenials, is small but rising, and many American consumers say they’re choosing to eat less meat.

An Impossible burger with fries at Gott’s Roadside in Napa, California. (Photo CC-licensed by Sarah Stierch)

Plant-based alternatives—from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat—are jockeying for shelf space in the meat sections of grocery stores and landing on the menu at fast food chains. Industry analysts have said the market for these plant-based burger alternatives is enormous, potentially reaching $100 billion in 15 years.

The industry has started fighting off attempts to market plant-based alternatives as “steak” and “burger.”

This year, at least two dozen states considered bills to limit those terms to products that come from animals.

“The issue in the legislative debates is whether or not consumers are being deceived,” said Dan Colegrove, a lobbyist for the Plant Based Foods Association, which fought the bills. “We contend, no, that consumers know exactly what they’re doing.”

Colegrove said he was unaware that any particular lobby was behind these bills, or that any “model” legislation was developed by an interest group.

“You don’t see this kind of growth in retail sectors. Clearly something’s going on,” Colegrove said, noting that the lobbying push was being driven by the significant interest in plant-based alternatives. “I think this issue is not going to go away next year.”

Top photo: Japanese Beef cattle CC-licensed by japanexterna.

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A handful of new reports emphasize that climate change and the world’s worsening health are urgent, intertwined crises. One of them calls for an international treaty to address the problem.

A scientific study published Monday also shows how “food production shocks” linked to climate change have been rising globally, putting food security at risk. The researchers identified nearly 230 food production shocks, in 134 countries, from 1961 to 2013, and said the frequency of crop production shocks driven by extreme weather had been increasing steadily. Food shocks threaten to destabilize the global food supply and drive up global hunger rates, which have started to tick up in recent years.

“Land-based crop and livestock production are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events such as drought, which are expected to become more frequent and intense with climate change,” said Richard Cottrell of the University of Tasmania, the report’s lead author.

The drumbeat for change in food and nutrition gained volume this month with the release of a detailed plan by an international commission organized by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The plan urges a major overhaul in food production and diets, or what one of the report’s authors called “nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution.”

A second Lancet-convened commission, this one focused on obesity, issued a report on Sunday arguing for an international treaty to address global diets and climate change, similar to a landmark 2005 global treaty that aimed to cut tobacco use.

Then on Tuesday, 80 investor groups representing more than $6.5 trillion in assets called on six of the largest fast food companies, including McDonald’s and the corporate owners of KFC and Pizza Hut, to set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions from their meat and dairy supply chains.

Food production, globally, is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, largely from meat and dairy production. Nearly 85 million Americans—or nearly a third of the population—eat at a fast food restaurants on any given day. But, as the Lancet report on obesity notes, demand for convenience and protein are rising in the developing world, too.

“This is the largest-emitting sector that doesn’t have a low-carbon plan,” said Brooke Barton, a senior director with Ceres, the sustainability group that co-organized the investor campaign. “While some companies in some high-emitting industries, like the electric power industry, are starting to set goals and transform their business models in line with the Paris climate agreement, the meat and dairy industry is digging in its hooves.”

‘The Global Syndemic’

The Lancet Commision on Obesity, made up of more than 40 experts from 14 countries, says that, while its original mandate was to address obesity, it reframed its mission to address the pandemics of obesity, malnutrition and climate change—or what it called “the triple-burden challenges of The Global Syndemic.”

“We decided we have to look at this with a systems approach. It’s not people’s fault,” said Vivica Kraak, a professor of food and nutrition policy at Virginia Tech who contributed to the report. “The environments they live in foster overconsumption and unsustainable choices.”

The authors say that malnutrition, obesity and other diet-related conditions are the leading cause of poor health globally and that climate change will amplify them.

“It’s about poor diet quality whether you’re in a high-income country or a low-income country. And with climate change, you have greenhouse gas emissions with animal agriculture, but we also have a lot of food waste,” Kraak said. “We really need to radically change the food system and the way we eat. It’s all connected.”

The report says that obesity is increasing in every region of the world largely because “the systemic and institutional drivers of obesity remain largely unabated” and are being driven by “powerful commercial interests.”

As with climate change, the commission says, “the enormous health and economic burdens caused by obesity are not seen as urgent enough to generate the public demand or political will to implement the recommendations of expert bodies for effective action.” But, it says, the dangers are as critical.

Industry Pressure and Dietary Guidelines

In the Lancet’s other recent report on climate change and diet, the EAT-Lancet Commission called for a “comprehensive shift” in global diets, including cutting meat consumption roughly in half, and for governments to factor sustainability into their dietary guidance.

This week’s report underscores the urgency of that guidance and points out how industry pressure has undermined the process.

“For example, when the USA and Australia tried to include sustainability in their national dietary guidelines, vested interests from food industries leaned heavily on their governments to eliminate sustainability from the terms of reference,” the report says.

“Reducing the consumption of red meat is a cornerstone for healthy, sustainable diets,” the report adds, “but achieving this will be formidable given the current supply and demand dynamics. Western-style fast foods might also be part of aspirational diets for some populations in low-income countries.”

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, and is reprinted with permission.

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A team of 38 researchers spent more than two years looking at “natural climate solutions”—a range of strategies that includes planting trees in cities, preventing the conversion of natural grassland to farmland, and shifting to fertilizers that produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

In a study just published in Science Advances, researchers report that these solutions, if deployed across agricultural lands, forests, grasslands, and wetlands, could mitigate 21 percent of the country’s net annual greenhouse gas emissions, getting the U.S. closer to meetings its goals under the Paris climate agreement.

“It’s the same as if every car and truck in the country stopped polluting the climate,” said Joseph Fargione, the study’s lead author and the science director for  The Nature Conservancy North America region. “There’s much bigger potential than most people realize.”

Importantly, the study finds that these cuts could happen at relatively low costs. In order to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, carbon would have to be priced at $100 or more per megaton, the report said. But the report finds that many of these solutions cost a fraction of that—or nothing at all—and have additional benefits and incentives, including cleaner water, better air, and more productive soil.

“There’s a range of reasons that people might choose to invest in these natural climate solutions beyond carbon,” Fargione said. He pointed to the wildfires raging in California, and noted that certain forest-thinning practices not only store carbon better but also reduce wildfire risk.

The authors say their findings prove that developed countries—especially the U.S., one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters—should adopt land-based strategies, which are as crucial for stabilizing the climate as reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power generation or transportation.

Their report comes weeks after another authoritative report, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reached similar conclusions. The IPCC found that countries must find a way to reach net negative emissions to keep global warming in check, and it homed in on agriculture and land-sector strategies as cost-effective, near-term solutions for storing massive amounts of carbon.

The Potential of Reforestation

Researchers have looked previously at the potential for agricultural, forested, and other lands to store carbon, but this study is the first to assess the potential of all these landscapes in the U.S., and with updated, comprehensive data, Fargione said.

“We defined 21 distinct natural climate solutions,” Fargione explained. “We looked at all the opportunities or pathways that were available and demonstrated in the scientific literature.”

The researchers found that reforestation had the single largest maximum potential to store carbon or take it up from the atmosphere—nearly 307 million metric tons. Most of the potential lies in forests in the Northeast and south-central regions of the country. “Natural forest management” strategies, which include extending harvest cycles or reduced-impact logging, could mitigate an additional 267 million metric tons. (The researchers calculated the overall net emissions of the U.S. as 5.8 billion metric tons, factoring in existing carbon sinks.)

Solutions in the Soil

The researchers looked at a number of solutions in agriculture, including avoiding the conversion of grassland to cropland, using cover crops planted in the off-season that add carbon to the soil, and using fertilizer more judiciously. The solutions also included biochar—a form of charcoal made from a number of sources, including agricultural residue, that can be used to build healthier soil—and the practice of “alley cropping,” or planting trees between crops.

Altogether these agricultural practices have the potential to mitigate nearly 440 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, the researchers found.

The authors, who come from 22 different groups and institutions, were conservative in their estimates. They also didn’t factor in lands considered necessary to produce food and fiber.

But, even within these limitations, the researchers found that more than 12 million acres of cropland could be restored to grasslands, forests, and wetlands, without impacting food production. That’s an area roughly the size of the acreage taken out of the Conservation Reserve Program, run by U.S. Department of Agriculture, which pays farmers to take environmentally sensitive, “marginal” lands out of production. Since its peak enrollment in 2007, farmers have disenrolled millions of acres, choosing instead to plant on the land because of high crop prices.

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, and is reprinted with permission.

Top photo: Herders cultivating fodder or animal feed that is more resilient to extreme weather changes, using plants that adapt to droughts. The Strengthening Carbon Financing for Regional Grassland Management is promoting climate smart agricultural activities. (Photo credit: Asian Development Bank)

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In a paper published recently in the scientific journal Nature Plants, an international team of researchers lays out the prospects for “enhanced rock weathering”—a process that uses pulverized silicate rocks, like basalt, to speed the ability of minerals to store carbon in soil.

The team, led by the University of Sheffield in the U.K. and including U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, says the technique of enhanced weathering on swaths of the world’s cropland could potentially offset a meaningful chunk of global carbon emissions.

Though their estimates are preliminary, the authors say if farmers added enough pulverized rock per acre on a majority of the world’s cropland, they could remove up to 4 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, per year, by 2100. That’s about a tenth of today’s global greenhouse gas emissions. (Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use are currently about 8 billion metric tons.)

This could happen fairly quickly. “Conceivably, roll-out could take place within a decade or two,” said David Beerling, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation at the University of Sheffield and the lead author of the study.

In nature, this takes millions of years. Rain, which is slightly acidic, chemically breaks down rock in a process that converts carbon dioxide to bicarbonate, which eventually washes into the ocean where it’s stored for hundreds of thousands of years. This natural process absorbs about 3 percent of global emissions from fossil fuels.

But pulverizing the rocks turbocharges the process, allowing the minerals to be released faster and to store carbon within several years, Beerling explained.

When farmers apply the powdered rock onto croplands, they’ll see added benefits, the paper says: increased plant nutrients leading to higher yields and a potential drop in fertilizer and pesticide use.

The authors note that the best candidate for enhanced weathering is the land already being farmed—about 11 percent of the globe’s land area—where farmers already apply limestone to improve soil and counteract  acidification. That means the infrastructure for applying pulverized rocks is effectively in place.

Lots of Questions Remain

But the process, which sounds tantalizingly easy, hasn’t been studied widely, prompting the authors to call for more work on the subject.

“While enhanced weathering could make an enormous contribution to climate change mitigation, it remains one of the most poorly understood methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Phil Renforth, a professor of engineering geology at Cardiff University, who was not involved in the paper. “As the authors suggest, we need to do a lot more work to establish if these large carbon drawdowns can be achieved, and to assess the positive and negative impacts of this approach.”

Among some of the possible negatives: The energy used to pulverize the rocks could account for as much as 30 percent of the CO2 that’s stored. Meanwhile, it’s not clear how much rock would be required and what the environmental impacts on soils and waterways would be.

Another Tool for Climate Control

Another question mark is the cost. Current estimates range from $52 to $480 per metric ton of stored CO2, although boosted crop yields and lower fertilizer use could offset some of the price tag. Another “negative emissions” strategy, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, costs between $39 and $100 per metric ton.

But, the authors note, enhanced rock weathering could be one of the tools in the climate-control toolkit.

“Strategies for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere are now on the research agenda, and we need realistic assessment of these strategies, what they might be able to deliver and what the challenges are,” Hansen said in a press release.

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, and is reprinted with permission.

Top photo credit: SounderBruce

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But the world’s consumers don’t always eat what their government nutritionists tell them. So it might take a little more prodding—and that prodding could be on the way.

This week, the two-year-old investment network Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) released a report saying that countries could begin taxing meat—the way they tax sugar, alcohol, or tobacco—to drive down consumption and to hit their carbon emissions targets under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

A few countries, including Germany, Denmark, and Sweden, have considered behavioral, or “sin taxes,” on meat, but the taxes haven’t yet gained support. This type of tax aims to cut meat consumption for health reasons—reducing the healthcare costs associated with a high-fat, animal-based diet—as well as for environmental reasons.

“Agriculture emissions alone will be so high by 2050, that that alone will push temperatures above 2 degrees,” said FAIRR Director Maria Lettini, referring to the target set in Paris of limiting warming to at most 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “We think, in the absence of other interventions, this is one that should be in the basket of tools.”

FAIRR has a clear objective of steering its investor network, which it describes as managing $4 trillion in assets, away from factory farming over animal welfare concerns. Its report acknowledges that the concept of a meat tax is “at an embryonic stage,” but says “it is on a clear path that ends with taxation in some form.”

“We do see some similarities with what happened with sugar and tobacco,” Lettini said. “Because investors are always worried about what’s coming down the pipeline in terms of regulation.” At least 16 countries have recently imposed taxes on sugar, for example, the report says.

Lettini conceded, “This is not going to be without contention”—a view echoed by agricultural economists in the U.S.

“It would face a lot of opposition,” explained Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “A tax on meat would reduce meat consumption. Lower prices for livestock and poultry would reduce meat production. Less meat production would reduce feed demand, and thus the prices for corn, soybeans and other crops. Farm income would fall.”

Dietary Standards Can Already Cut Emissions

Currently, to the extent that countries influence how their citizens eat, they issue voluntary nutrition standards, and increasingly those standards—particularly in developed countries—are calling for a reduction in red meat consumption to varying degrees.

A report issued earlier this month by researchers in the Netherlands took a first-ever, country-by-country and overall look at the greenhouse gas reductions—or potential increases—if consumers actually followed those guidelines.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at the average diets of people in 37 countries, representing 64 percent of the world’s population, and compared those diets to the government-recommended diets. The researchers put that information into a massive database that allowed them to track the environmental impacts of producing food through the supply chain, from growing to transporting it.

The lead researcher of the study, Paul Behrens of the University of Leiden, and his colleagues found that adhering to government-recommended diets could lead to a drop in emission of up to nearly 25 percent in high-income countries, including in the U.S. (In lower-income countries, if consumers hewed to the dietary recommendations, emissions could go up because some developing countries’ recommendations urge more protein intake because of higher levels of malnutrition.)

Still, Behrens said, only four countries in his report mention environmental impacts in their nutritional recommendations, with Sweden’s the most progressive.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines, for example, make no mention of the environmental impacts of diet, despite discussions to factor in “sustainability” as the last version of the guidelines was being developed. This, critics said, was largely because of pressure from the meat industry.

“It’s fairly well-known now, by the public and policymakers, that beef has huge environmental impacts,” Behrens said. “There may be a reason why some countries that have this in their guidelines don’t have those powerful groups.”

Agriculture Becomes a Big Player in Climate

The discussion comes as global appetite for animal-based food is soaring along with growing incomes in some countries, notably China. From 1993 to 2013, demand for animal products globally rose 62 percent, though population only rose 29 percent, Behrens’ report says.

As consumption goes up, animal agriculture—and agriculture more broadly—is becoming a bigger part of the conversation around climate targets. Food production accounts for as much as 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, including land use, deforestation, transportation, and food waste; and livestock for about 14.5 percent.

At the international climate talks last month in Germany, agriculture-focused sessions were more prominent than in previous rounds.

“People are taking climate very seriously in agriculture,” said Bruce Campbell, director of the research program on climate change, agriculture and food security for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which tracks how many countries have focused on agriculture in their plans to meet the Paris targets.

That, FAIRR believes, means meat taxes could help some countries reach their emissions targets.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, and is reprinted with permission.

Photo CC-licensed by Stephen Ausmus for the USDA.

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