Op-ed: The New Food Pyramid Is a Climate Disaster

The industrial animal agriculture industry is trying to dilute and distort the data even more through heavy greenwashing. For example, it’s aggressively lobbying for a new metric that measures changes in greenhouse gas emissions compared to emissions in any chosen baseline year. That means a livestock operation would be considered “climate neutral” if it continued polluting at the same rate as the baseline year, even if that baseline showed sky-high methane emissions.

Under this ridiculously permissive metric, industrial operations with huge methane footprints would falsely appear to be “carbon neutral” as long as they continue business as usual, but a small farmer in the Global South would look like a big polluter if they increased their herd from 15 to 20 cattle.

Another industry-favorite false solution is biogas conversion, which is the practice of capturing manure methane from dairy cows and turning it into fuel via anaerobic digestion. This has incentivized companies to produce massive quantities of liquid manure to convert to gas.

In addition to prompting the creation of more manure, biogas production endangers frontline workers and neighboring communities. It’s also been shown to increase nitrous oxide pollution and deemed unlikely to ever achieve carbon-neutral energy at scale.

The industry claims that it can handle its manure problem through waste management tactics such as covering the manure to trap emissions and using manure as fertilizer.

But waste management facilities are hazardous and difficult to manage, posing frequent risk of accidental breach and leakage. When manure lagoons flood, they damage surrounding communities, spilling millions of gallons of fecal waste containing contaminants like pathogenic bacteria, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, insecticides, and pharmaceuticals.

And using manure as fertilizer increases the likelihood of runoff and water contamination down the line. Manure is already a primary source of water pollution from nutrient discharge. Animal agriculture manure runoff leaches nitrogen and phosphorous into surface and groundwater, depleting oxygen levels in water bodies and creating “dead zones” that kill aquatic life and can cause toxic algal blooms that are harmful to humans as well.

There is growing support in some quarters for factory farming “efficiency” as a way to reduce emissions, but it’s a false solution. Industrial animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority of deforestation, air and water pollution, toxic pesticide use, and other threats to our climate, environmental health, and biodiversity. It’s hard to believe that the very thing that caused the problem will be its solution.

Moreover, the efficiency theory fails to take into account the reality of corporate control of the food system and its sway over policy, which results in lack of regulation and increasing expansion and consolidation.

The Trump administration, for instance, has worked hard to end pollution research and oversight. Last April, it blocked the release of the EPA’s annual report estimating the sources of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution across every sector. It put “under review” Agriculture Department web pages that had collected and reported critical data about agricultural sources of carbon emissions.

In September, the EPA proposed a rule to remove manure management from the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, authorized by Congress under the Clean Air Act to require big polluters to report their annual emissions.