Opinion | One major contributor to climate change is being under-reported

After Hurricane Melissa left dozens dead across the Caribbean, experts said the disaster is a stark example of how climate change is transforming weather, in this case infusing hurricanes with heat and moisture until they barely resemble storms of the past.

While U.S. President Donald Trump claims that climate change is a hoax, the science remains very clear: 2024 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures about 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. From record-breaking heatwaves and floods, to wildfires that are now four times more frequent than in the 1980s, the evidence of human-caused climate chaos is undeniable.

What remains far from clear, though, are the causes of this planet-heating — and the solutions. This confusion leaves much of the public in the dark about our own complicity in climate change and about how we can help. And too often, media coverage on climate only deepens that confusion.

In most media coverage about the causes of climate change, fossil fuels, transportation and manufacturing tend to be the targets. Solutions are then presented as things like renewable energies, electric cars and recycling. But second only to fossil fuels is another major cause that is rarely covered in media: agriculture, particularly animal farming.

Nearly a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce food; meat, especially beef, is by far the biggest contributor. Yet, a recent analysis of top American news outlets shows that less than 4 per cent of climate stories even mention animal agriculture as a cause. 

The analysis was led by Sentient Media, a U.S.-based non-profit newsroom that focuses exclusively on factory farming and its impacts on animals, people and the planet. I work as the outlet’s culture and disinformation correspondent, and took part in the data collection process.

For the analysis, my colleagues and I gathered recent online articles that discussed climate change, from The Washington Post, Reuters, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Star Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and The Guardian — 960 articles in total. The analysis was then performed using Anthropic AI, revealing that only 36, or 3.8 per cent of the articles mention animal farming, or meat, as a cause of climate change.

As someone who has been covering this topic in Canadian and U.S. media for the last decade, these findings are frustrating though not unfathomable. As I regularly shout from my lonely island here in the opinion section — or from climate-savvy publications like Corporate Knights Magazine, Vox.com, and Sentient Media — about the role our food systems and eating habits play in the destruction of our planet, I’ve come to understand something else: meat and climate are an uncomfortable pairing for many mainstream editors and readers.

Nonetheless, I can’t help wonder how much longer the media can tiptoe around the cow in the room; because until we treat animal agriculture with the same scrutiny we do oil, transportation and manufacturing, our climate coverage will remain half-told.

As Mark Hertsgaard, executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now — a non-profit that supports stronger climate journalism — recently told The Guardian, this lack of coverage is “not necessarily nefarious.” However, he adds, “as the climate crisis has accelerated, it is increasingly indefensible for news coverage of climate change not to make it clear that this crisis is driven by very specific human activities — primarily burning fossil fuels. And in second place is food, agriculture, forestry.”

Over at Sentient Media, we are presenting this information as an opportunity for journalists and newsrooms to do better, to expand their knowledge and reporting, to more holistically inform the public. And we continue to do our own part to counter meat industry disinformation, hold industries and governments accountable, and highlight the science of sustainable food systems that rely more on plant production than animal farming. 

Because at a time when politics are increasingly working against science, and climate change-infused disasters are becoming too common, the job of journalists to tell the whole story about climate change has never been more crucial.