Inside Big Beef’s ‘90s Campaign to Rewrite Its Climate Story

At least as early as 1989, the top U.S. lobbying group for beef producers had an opportunity to change the course of the climate crisis. Around that time, an internal document showed that the National Cattlemen’s Association (NCA) was not only aware of the beef industry’s contribution to global warming as one of the biggest sources of methane, but it also knew there were ways to reduce livestock emissions.

Instead, as the agricultural industry’s relationship to global warming emissions started gaining widespread media attention, the association launched a long-term campaign to cast doubt on the science, seed newspapers with misinformation and influence public opinion through strategic messaging, including claims about the cattle industry’s “positive environmental contributions.”

Today’s “emissions speak to the strategy’s success,” note the researchers of a new PLOS Climate paper. The authors, professor Jennifer Jacquet and postdoctoral researcher Loredana Loy of the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, reviewed NCA documents from 1986 to 1996 to see how the organization responded to rising concerns about global warming in the 1990s.

“We found ample evidence that NCA responded to global warming with a strategic communications effort with which NCA chose to deny or question global warming and the role of beef production in it as well as convince the public that beef production and consumption should not be a focal point of global warming mitigation,” Jacquet and Loy wrote.

Sentient reached out to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association for comment, but has not received a response as of publication.

Billing itself as “the oldest and largest national trade association representing America’s cattlemen and women,” the NCA says it has more than 25,000 members and aims to promote the interests of U.S. cattle farmers. In 1996, it changed its name to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA).

In the 1980s and 1990s, the NCA leapt into action to fight the narrative that beef was bad for the environment. The cattle industry’s methane output had become a focus of environmentalists, with books like Beyond Beef and Diet For A New America suggesting that eating less beef could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight global warming. The NCA went to work crafting a counter-narrative.

According to Jacquet and Loy’s research, the NCA did this in several ways, some more overt than others. It issued press releases and talking points, distributed pro-beef literature at community events and even prevented a Ninja Turtles ABC book from being republished because it contained a section about cows’ methane emissions.

But most significantly, the NCA commissioned studies to show that beef’s methane emissions were negligible, and used them to influence media coverage. It hired an animal science professor to assist in these efforts, and a later analysis suggested that their media efforts were successful.

According to the EPA, the agriculture sector is the largest source of methane emissions in the United States. Around 25% of all methane emissions in the U.S. are enteric, meaning they originate in an animal’s digestive system. Beef cattle alone were responsible for about 72% of these enteric methane emissions, and if dairy cows are included, that number jumps to around 98%.

Yet according to the analysis, the NCA promoted the false claim that cattle are responsible for less than 0.5% of global methane emissions. Some examples of these publications are listed by the authors in a table of key dates, including a 1990 New York Times article and 1990 USA Today op-ed.

The claim appears to have originated with F.M. Byers, an animal science professor at Texas A&M, who was commissioned by the NCA in 1990. Byers was not a climate scientist, but he “produced reports that estimated and framed methane emissions from U.S. cattle in a way that got amplified as ‘scientific’ findings, although Byers’ reports have no methods section, are not reproducible, and do not appear to have been peer-reviewed,” Jacquet and Loy wrote.

In one of Byers’ studies, he wrote:

“Cattle are not a significant source of greenhouse gases. The methane produced by all beef cattle in the U.S.A. amounts to less than 0.5 percent.”

“I can’t recreate Byers’ 0.5% statistic and given how much of a massive underestimate it is, I am led to believe it was both wrong and dishonest,” Jacquet writes in an email to Sentient. They note in their published findings, “The difficulty in reproducing Byers’ 0.5% figure is not particularly surprising given how few details were provided in the reports.” Byers’ original report was reviewed by Jacquet and Loy in the archives, but unfortunately, it is not available online.

The vague methods weren’t enough to stop the New York Times from republishing Byers’ claim, although the newspaper also provided a dissenting quote from an EPA regulator, who called Byers’ number “rather low”.

The same year, Byers wrote an op-ed in USA Today with the headline “Eating meat won’t harm the environment.” He provided some clarity on his original claim, writing this time that “the methane produced by all beef cattle in the USA amounts to less than 0.5% of worldwide annual production from all sources.” The op-ed is not available online.

The NCA “questioned scientific evidence, claimed there was no causal link between cows and global warming,” wrote Jacquet and Loy, and the beef organization also “adjusted the scale of analysis to make the contribution of the U.S. industry appear small relative to global totals, and emphasized that industrial systems were more efficient than non-industrial ones.”

Whether global warming was even real was another part of the NCA’s narrative.

In 1994, the Chicago Tribune ran an article about an EPA grant for research into cattle’s methane emissions. This prompted a letter to the editor from NCA employee Greg Ruehle, who stated that not only is cattle production an insignificant source of methane,” but there is also “increasing evidence that global warming is not really occurring.”

The NCA’s efforts to downplay cattle’s methane emissions made it into some news coverage. In 1991, the group commissioned an analysis of news coverage and found that of 196 articles that mentioned methane emissions, 25 published the claim that U.S. beef cattle account for only 0.5% of global methane emissions.

To push the idea that cattle ranching is good for the environment, the NCA spent $100,000 on full-page ads in the New York Times and USA Today, the researchers found. These include messaging such as “Every Day Is Earth Day For American Cattlemen,” as well as dairy cows referred to as “Mother Nature’s Recycling Machine.”

Even a children’s book was targeted by the NCA’s strategic campaign. In 1991, Random House published Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: ABC’s for a Better Planet. Each page contained a letter of the alphabet with a corresponding topic and a tip for reducing one’s environmental footprint.

“M is for Meat,” the book’s page for the 13th letter reads. The page noted that “cattle expel methane, a gas that makes the greenhouse effect worse.” Under the “what can you do?” section, it reads, “how about not eating so much meat in the first place?”

According to the authors, reporting at the time suggests the NCA successfully pressured Random House not to reprint any more of the books.

Although the documents Jacquet and Loy reviewed for this study only spanned from 1986 to 1996, a previous analysis by the two found that the beef lobby continued challenging climate science long after that.

In 2006, the UN published a landmark study highlighting the livestock industry’s contributions to global warming. Once again, this prompted the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association to pay a professor to author studies challenging the notion that beef is a significant contributor to climate change.