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.
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
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.
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.
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?!
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.
Furthermore, for a lot of issues, there are a select few people who have a big enough incentive to vote solely on one issue, and the rest of people don't care because the harm is does to them is relatively diffuse.
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
You're all down voting but you know lobbying is for anyone right. Check out the link below to see an example. Would you want to remove groups like this from bringing their cause forward. Lobbying itself isn't bad. What is bad is that more people aren't using it which leaves only the corrupt ones
Lobbying is useful because its just keeping your issues to people who can do something about it.
Actually, lobbying is hurtful because it puts a goddamn pricetag on getting anything done. What happens when I have a million fucking dollars and you don't, but your need is far greater? Go fuck yourself until you get more scrilla!
SHUT THE FUCK UP UNTIL YOU HAVE THE MONEY -- that is what you're supporting right now.
What I don’t get is why regular people don’t organize and create their own lobby.
Oh boy, you sure are clueless, which is pretty lame since you're pushing some bullshit opinions here
In the United States, a political action committee (PAC) is a tax-exempt 527 organization that pools campaign contributions from members and donates those funds to campaigns for or against candidates, ballot initiatives, or legislation.[1][2] The legal term PAC was created in pursuit of campaign finance reform in the United States. Democracies of other countries use different terms for the units of campaign spending or spending on political competition (see political finance). At the U.S. federal level, an organization becomes a PAC when it receives or spends more than $1,000 for the purpose of influencing a federal election, and registers with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), according to the Federal Election Campaign Act as amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as the McCain–Feingold Act).[3] At the state level, an organization becomes a PAC according to the state's election laws.
Contributions to PACs from corporate or labor union treasuries are illegal, though these entities may sponsor a PAC and provide financial support for its administration and fundraising. Union-affiliated PACs may solicit contributions only from union members. Independent PACs may solicit contributions from the general public and must pay their own costs from those funds.
Who can create a PAC?
An individual or group can set up a "nonconnected committee" when it wants to set up a political action committee (PAC), and that PAC is not one of the following: A political party committee. A candidate's authorized committee. A separate segregated fund (SSF) established by a corporation or labor organization.
There’s a reason you never see wallstreet bankers or tobacco executives in the streets. Its not how anything gets done
you fucking moron. The reason you never see them in the streets is because they're the ones who built the goddamn system to favor THEMSELVES. That's why they DO join us on the streets, just above us -- to laugh at us pawns who are fucked from the start.
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.
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.
Except it's mostly animal agriculture that's destroying the planet. Animals are not at all efficient in converting crops to meat, dairy and eggs. It can take up to 16 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of certain animal products. 77% of agricultural land is used to farm animals, despite it providing just 18% of the world's caloric intake. Researchers at the University of Oxford have found that if everyone went vegan, global farmland use could be reduced by 75%, the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined. Just imagine how much land could be rewilded.
And no, you absolutely don't need animal products in your diet to be healthy and thrive.
Wtf is with quality on lemmy world these days. How is a medium article written like an ethics 101 student using ai assistance news worthy. It's formula 1 sentence summary linked to an article source, with one sentence over generalized conclusion... Over and over and over.
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!
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.
That's some real special math you have there, willfully ignoring probably millions of people as irrelevant and probably just as bad as some of the worst in the world 🤦
and wasn't some super small farmer
But I thought you just said that such a thing doesn't exist! 70% being 100% and all..
Besides, you know that sustainable farming co-ops exist and many of those deal in meat and dairy, right?
Some of them are quite large, in spite of your insistence on eliminating them to defend a headline that reads as something a crazed PeTA activist would shout at people 🙄
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.
Same. My farmer, Justin, also makes sure the animals don't travel far to the abattoir. That said, I feel like (though hope I'm wrong) our farmers do not make up a significant part of the industry. I wouldn't even consider our guys part of the same "industry" that the big shops are part of
Not sure how it is clickbait - it's just the headline is overstating the case by claiming 100%, when it should say 100% of the 10 largest companies - which are responsible for how much of the nation's market of meat and dairy? If it's like just about every other market, a few top players grab up most the market share and set the overall agenda.
Are they top 10 of dairy, meat, or both? What share of the market do they hold in each respective field, and combined fields? It's pretty arbitrary for claiming 100% of. Would you consider the same concept acceptable elsewhere with different subject like..
100% of Rappers and Democrats voted for Kanye in 2020. Top 10 selling rappers and Democrats on Spotify voted for Kanye.
Obviously I made that up... but I think you'd consider it dishonest clickbait.
Not only is the headline dishonest, but the article tries to maintain the dishonest attitude of the headline. And then, the article doesn't really talk about environment lobbying at all, it talks about why the author thinks people should be vegans.
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.
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
Medium is a blog, however in this case the article cites the sources they used and is well argued.
If someone wants to make the argument that their sources don't say what they argue they're saying, I'm open to removing it, but it will be because the content is wrong, not because of who is hosting the content. :)
The FAO report found that current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of "CO2-equivalent" greenhouse gases the world produces every year. It turns out that producing half a pound of hamburger for someone's lunch a patty of meat the size of two decks of cards releases as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere as driving a 3,000-pound car nearly 10 miles.
We should at least start passing on the true cost of harmful things like meat onto the consumer and putting subsidies behind better alternatives. That will start to shift things. Trying to tell people they are doing the wrong thing won't matter to a lot of people who have no to little morals. But start to encourage them economically and it will have better outcomes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a severe salicylate allergy to the point that 90% of veggies cause an allergic reaction for me. Aspirin tolerance therapy hasn't been an option because of the severity of my allergy. I have several documented nut allergies, among other true food allergies to various foods from shellfish, other fish, bananas, sweet potatoes ( and their family), as well as mustard etc etc, and then an impressive list of IgG reactions (food intolerances) that cause immune response in my digestive system. Amongst them is most grains, nuts, milk, yogurt, some cheeses. Although I'm not allergic to MSG because it's debated that's even possible, I do have severe migraines w/ aura triggered by foods with high glutamates like textured vegetable protein, aside from salicylate content of those proteins. What to hear what my body things of nitrates? I used to be a guy who could roll around in poison ivy without breaking out and was allergic to almost nothing. Then my autoimmune disease started and my body went nuts. Granted I'm a vast minority of people, but I'd rather not lose any more foods.
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.
Nobody thinks it's JUST these companies that do it bud. Are you implying that means we can't call them out on it?
From the article:
The meat industry has lobbied against climate policies like cap-and-trade, the Clean Air Act, and regulations that would require farms to report emissions. They have also spent millions on political campaigns
I'm not so sure every other name brand company is fighting these specific initiatives tailored towards farming/agriculture
b-b-but other companies do it too!!!
Fucking and??? These scumbags deserve to be called out AND FUCKING SHAMED. Fuck you for trying to defend them with this milquetoast whataboutism
I think we need to slow down on placing all the blame on cows and other ruminants. It’s not the farming that’s causing problems, it’s the fact that we’ve gotten away from regenerative agriculture, and how to actually work with the land.
My Wife is a part of a farm that just got the USDA Climate Smart grant. The grant basically outlines how to sequester more carbon into the soil by using cattle and other ruminants and doing pasture grazing rotations, using trees, and some other things. The thing that blows most people away when she talks about it is that cows are and never were the problem – it’s Big Ag.
The way of farming cattle nowadays is very inefficient and a problem for the environment. This is because of the ways cattle are finished before processing. Instead of being grass fed - grass finished, farmers send their cattle’s out to feed lots in the Midwest. They are jam packed in areas where they can’t adequately space out, which leads to an excess of their excrements in one spot. THIS is the problem. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
This problem only stems from the larger issue that Big Ag doesn’t care how land is managed or farmed as long as it’s baseline is about production. But it’s not like non-GMO and organic is easy to do, both growing and the paperwork, so it’s just bad all around….
Grassfed Cattle needs an infeasible amount of land. The only efficient or environmentally 'friendly' way would be substituting them with plant-based alternatives.
Cows obviously are not the problems. It's us humans who breed them for the sole purpose of exploiting them when there are other, greener and more eithical alternatives