The Academics Helping the Meat Industry Avoid Climate Scrutiny: A new paper says two university research centers have essentially functioned as a P.R. arm for the meat industry.
by HenryCorp
The Academics Helping the Meat Industry Avoid Climate Scrutiny: A new paper says two university research centers have essentially functioned as a P.R. arm for the meat industry.
by HenryCorp
3 comments
> The [new paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-024-03690-w), published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate, comes from University of Miami environmental science professor Jennifer Jacquet and Viveca Morris, executive director of the Law, Ethics and Animals Program at Yale Law School (I worked briefly at the latter as a college student). In the years following the U.N.’s report, they find, the animal agriculture industry responded by funding the work of industry-friendly academics, eventually bankrolling two of “the most prominent U.S. university centers engaged in shaping public understanding and public policy related to the livestock industry’s climate impacts.”
> This is a page straight out of tobacco and fossil fuel companies’ playbooks: funding so-called “[merchants of doubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt)” to distort public conversations away from solutions in line with scientific consensus.
I come from a family of cattle ranchers. I have an aunt that commonly puts those UC Davis “studies” up on LinkedIn.
These studies are just so fundamentally flawed and contrary to every other take on climate change out there. The simple version is that they believe methane is okay because it breaks down in the atmosphere over time This implies agriculture is fine as long as methane emissions stay within some undefined threshold.
It’s pretty sad. Particularly since my family takes great pride in their stewardship of the land, their environmental impact, and preserving the ranch for the next generation. They’ve been duped by a bunch of industry funded BS into thinking that cattle ranching is a low impact activity because it’s what they want to believe.
When colleges began to be run like profit centers instead of institutions of higher learning, the floodgates opened for corruption, outright bribery, and selling research facilities along with its faculty to the highest bidder. This is why we see so much conflicting “research“ flooding the media. It’s because industry associations paid for it.