All 10 of the largest U.S. meat and dairy companies have lobbied against environmental and climate policies, resisting climate regulations, including rules on greenhouse gases and emissions reporting. This is according to a study by New York University, which examined the political influence of the 10 largest meat and dairy companies in the United States.
100% of the top 10 meat and dairy companies.
That should be in the title—otherwise it implies that every family dairy in the country has its own team of lobbyists.
Closer to the truth though. Most are part of organizations that include lobbyists that would oppose anything that negatively impacts the industry. I don’t find that particularly nefarious of course.
It’s not that the title isn’t still mostly true—it’s that the impossible statement discredits the rest of the article.
Precisely this, if you’ve got a point to make, don’t sensationalise the headline, it only makes it easy for people to discredit and ignore without even reading the article.
…and that the rest of the article has virtually nothing to do with the environment or lobbying.
It is a sensationalist title, sigh
The title is misleading, however the top companies take up such a huge market share that it might as well be a true statement. I know there are companies trying to make some difference and I hate media sensationalism
however the top companies take up such a huge market share that it might as well be a true statement
How much of the market share do they take up?
Just the 4 largest make up 85% of the beef sector in the US. Dairy is a similar situation
Thanks
For more context for you and @[email protected], this is fairly emergent.
The dairy industry has been a loss-industry for a few decades thanks to pro-big-ag government intervention. Very few farms are able to keep from consolidating because of that.
It’s a mass-scale hostile takeover, and THAT is a much more meaningful headline than us forgetting about the smaller farms that fight to prevent this whole thing from becoming a panopoly
And it would imply companies that make lab-grown meat and animal products, which are often companies formed explicitly in support of environmental sustainability goals, also.
100% of the top 10 US meat and dairy companies
Context.
Huh, well imagine that. The biggest sources of the problem is against doing anything about it.
What I find pretty wild is that our government even helps them do more of it by boosting terrible diet choices, including pushing it onto children.
It’s all about profit. If some new discovery magically made dairy climate friendly but also increased profits by 12%, every producer would be on board tomorrow. They don’t give a fuck about climate one way or the other, just profit. It’s just that one position allows them to keep making their profits without having to make any changes. No points for guessing which position it is.
https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cait-global-emissions-sector.png
Agriculture contributes approximately 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (not including emissions from onsite fossil energy use).
https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/agricultural-greenhouse-gas-emissions-101/
Breaking down this share, production of animal-based foods — meat, poultry and dairy products, including growing crops to feed livestock and pastures for grazing — contributes 57 percent of emissions linked to the food system. Raising plant-based foods for human consumption contributes 29 percent. The other 14 percent of agricultural emissions come from products not used as food or feed, such as cotton and rubber.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-much-do-crops-contribute-emissions
agriculture is only about 20% of global emissions, but I would be fine with it being 100%: we need to eat.
IDK why corporate lobbing is still legal, wtf outlaw it asap
It’s legal because the people who benefit from corporate lobbying are the same people who determine what is legal.
Yup! And it’s exactly why the system will never change on its own. The people in power will never voluntarily give up that power. Why does Congress get to vote on its own salary?!
Ah, what you are missing is that the people who make those laws are the same ones being lobbied, and lobbying means giving money to them.
It exists because it’s ridiculous to expect government to know about every industry’s ins and outs. Sometimes we benefit from lobbying as because some old law is affecting new processes or we need to support funding for something that we didn’t know about.
The issue is when shit is mundane and worthless like the topic op presented. Lobbying against climate policies just means you’re part of the problem. We understand enough to know the policies need to exist and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and money for these giant corps to lobby against them.
I don’t care about corporate lobbying because I think its useful. Lobbying is useful because its just keeping your issues to people who can do something about it.
What I don’t get is why regular people don’t organize and create their own lobby. I know wealthy individuals who do it to change things they don’t like.
They don’t stand in streets and burn energy screaming right before they get their heads caved in by police. You know what’s better, paying $5 into a pool and hiring a firm to develop research and a report that you can give to a lawyer who can start to bring it to representatives.
There’s a reason you never see wallstreet bankers or tobacco executives in the streets. Its not how anything gets done
I know a lot of people are new here but this kind of shit should be moderated better… Link to the study, not someone’s blog
Agreed, this is a blog post from 3 days ago but all of the sources they link in the footer are from early 2021… nothing new here and this article is a biased mess.
That said, there’s nothing surprising here anyway, lobbying in the US is just bribery and corruption by another term and obviously these companies are going to do anything they can to defend their profits
Holy misleading headline, Batman!
I’m not saying that there isn’t a problem with the industries, but the 10 largest in one country is NOT “100% of all meat and dairy companies” or anywhere near that!
A sample size of the 10 largest in a country where it’s literally impossible to get to the top 10 anything company without truly despicable practices is some supercharged selection bias!
The 4 largest companies control 70% of the market. Markets tend to be one to three companies taking the lions share and then a long tail.
The top 10 will easily round up to 100%.
I’d also be hard pressed to find a meat producer that actually supported climate initiatives and wasn’t some super small farmer.
https://www.reuters.com/business/how-four-big-companies-control-us-beef-industry-2021-06-17/
They couldn’t be top 10 if they supported those initiatives. It’s selection bias. Only the ones who couldn’t possibly support those policies and still be in their position are counted. It’s pretty misleading, even if it’s a large portion. Besides, it’s the 10 largest US companies. There’s a bunch not in the US, obviously the US doesn’t make up 100% of the industry. It’s just the place that’s most concerned with profit over anything else, it seems.
Wow nothing gets past you.
https://www.reuters.com/business/how-four-big-companies-control-us-beef-industry-2021-06-17/
What about pork, chicken, fish, etc.?
Go look it up and find the same results and that they’re mostly the same companies.
I got some hippy-ass, “one bad day,” native grass open pasture, keep the calves with their moms until they wean naturally, one cow per acre, priced to reflect the true cost of meat cattle ranches where I live. I don’t think they were part of this survey.
Save the world! Go Vegan! [Or at least plant-based]
that doesn’t work
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that… maybe a little styrofoam… maybe… little styrofoam. The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people in Pompeii who are frozen into position from volcanic ash how the planet’s doing. Wanna know if the planet’s all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who build their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room?
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth plus Plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth! The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself, didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question: “Why are we here?” PLASTIC!!! ASSHOLES!!! -George Carlin
Yep, you’ve summed it up. Earth will indeed be here forever. The question is whether it will be habitable. And humans don’t seem to give a single care, as long as their life span will be over before the environment /climate poops out. And as long as they can take in money with no concern about their child, grandchildren, great-,grandchildren, and on down the line.
We can change this, we can mitigate the damage, but the powers that be refuse to acknowledge their negative impact on the future of the planet, they do not care…as long as they rake in the money.
I’ve got children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I CARE. Jesus Pete, how hard is it to see beyond the end of our own noses?
I mean, we all know the memes, but there has to be like a nuanced take take on why this is the case, right? Is it literally the case that they just don’t give a goddamn about climate change and they’re just going to get theirs while they can and to hell with everything else? Because it’s going to be awful hard to keep your cows fed when climate change starts fucking up their feed crops, and we’re pretty much there right now, as far as I understand it.
The entire system relies on infinite growth in a finite world, trying to find logic in it is futile, never mind ethics…
Is it literally the case that they just don’t give a goddamn about climate change and they’re just going to get theirs while they can and to hell with everything else?
Yup, that’s my understanding. They probably aren’t full on deniers, they know it’s real, they just don’t want to do the hard work and take the pay cuts that will progress us forward into the future.
Capitalism will kill us all unless we reject it whole-cloth.
I mean, you’re probably right, but this sent me down a mental spiral that ended with “Oh boy, I can’t wait for my monthly US Communist Party ration of furry inflation porn.”
I don’t even like it, but I guess I could learn to live with it if it means stopping climate change.
It’s really simple, that second sentence is what it is. Hard to believe, but when you create a system that puts profits above everything else in the world, that’s what they’re going to do.
It’s that they need to justify their existence to the capitalist machine. Making changes to account for climate change means lowered profits. It means diversifying, it may even mean shutting down the business entirely.
It’s not just about direct profit, of course. Lots of jobs depend on them staying in business, and even if they just change their business model a bit, many of those jobs disappear. And as most people are encouraged to have a monolithic skill set instead of being more diversified, all those people are suddenly back to square one. Needing to learn a completely new trade just to live.
That’s, of course, just a small part, but it’s one that ensures that people turn out to vote against government reps who campaign on change and climate acceptance.
I’m pretty sure this headline is impossible
Also, medium is a blog.
Came here to say this. I have a friend that’s a meat and dairy company, and she (yup, 1 person for-profit farm) doesn’t lobby for or against shit.
That gets us under 100% already.
Oh no! Who could’ve known this? What’s next? Oil companies lobbying against environmental and climate policies?
Don’t worry, the headline is demonstrably false.
The headline is clickbait. They are phrasing it as 100% because they mean all 10 of the companies they investigated lobbied against climate change.
As I replied elsewhere, I’d rather use the word “propaganda”. The article isn’t about the environment at all. It’s about throwing a bunch of reasons at the reader to become vegan. And clickbait headlines always put the full story in the body, but it continues to leave out the fact that 90% of the meat and dairy industry (the non-big-ag) isn’t represented in their 100% figure.
Well it appears to be the top 10 companies, so it is almost certainly quite close to 100%. Still not 100% though so it’s wrong of course, there’s no point saying something incorrect even if it’s pretty close to the truth.
Not really. Small farmers generally couldn’t care less about lobbying, and represent over 90% of the meat and dairy farms in the US. Literally, they cherry-picked Big Ag and the clickbait headline extrapolated conclusions about a completely different demographic.
You know that this can’t possibly be true, because most meat and dairy companies do not have a lobbying arm, right? Right in the first sentence it says it’s the top 10 largest, but let’s go ahead and put some bullshit in the headline anyway right?
disclaimer in 1pt font: *100% margin of error
Ah water is indeed wet.
Not at all biased when the article starts out with a likely out of context picture of a cow looking terrified and as if it’s crying. Fuck corporations, all of them, fuck them all, but there are a few of us with severe enough allergies that without meat we would starve. Ableist bullshit to believe everyone can stop eating meat.
Two words: lab-grown meat. That’s the only way for sustainable meat consumption.
what does sustainable mean?
If it ever becomes affordable I would love to see that and would certainly consider it. Until then…
So if experts in the field conceded that there is an unbreakable ceiling for lab-grown meat that it will never be as sustainable as organic meat, would that change your view?
Because the most efficient lab grown meat requires incubator technology that scales negatives; that is, you lose efficiency as you scale up, so you would need lots of small, prohibitively expensive, in a massive perfectly contaminant-free clean-room. Short of starting from scratch and discovering a completely new technique that has never been envisioned, lab-grown meat will always be worse for the environment and for sustainability than organic meat.
Some people don’t like this guy, but this is a fairly honest video on the problems with lab-grown meat.
Personification is a dangerous tool
I sincerely doubt that you can only eat meat…
That’s not what I said, but it’s what you wanted to hear. I wish your doubts could change the facts of my existence but they can’t . I said I would be severely limited and I am. I have a salicylate allergy so severe I can’t eat 90% of veggies. There are several other true allergies and then there are tested IgG sensitives to most grains and nuts. Congratulations, you’re an ableist and if there’s one thing I’m used to it’s ableists telling me what I should be able to do. Luckily extremist vegans will never achieve their goals.
You know who else lobbies against these policies? Almost every other name brand company.
can’t help but think the cow in that image knows what’s up.
I don’t know if y’all know this but short term profits are much more important to rich old people that won’t see the earth they created for their grand kids.
