For India’s own livestock debate, the timing matters. Dairy and beef sit at the centre of Asia’s food economy, and a new line of research from the United States suggests the world’s most powerful cattle lobby understood its climate footprint more than three decades ago.
According to Inside Climate News, which reported on two new studies in March 2025, the American beef industry knew by 1989 that raising cattle was a major source of planet-warming emissions. In the years that followed, it worked to discredit public efforts to cut beef consumption. Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami and a primary author on both studies, said: “We failed to appreciate how long the meat industry’s been involved in climate obstruction.”
The 1989 workshop
Jacquet’s team went to government records and the industry’s own archives. In 1989, the year after NASA’s James Hansen told Congress that climate change posed a global threat, the Environmental Protection Agency held a workshop on methane from livestock. It then published a report, “Reducing Methane Emissions from Livestock,” which named livestock as a major methane source and estimated that halving global emissions from the sector would bring large benefits.
Representatives of the meat and dairy industry attended, among them a member of the National Cattlemen’s Association, now the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the country’s biggest beef lobby. Several months and a handful of planning meetings later, the group had a “Strategic Plan on the Environment” meant to head off public relations problems and regulation tied to climate change. It proposed reaching “key influencers” with research and upbeat messaging about beef’s environmental benefits. The NCBA did not respond to requests for an interview.
Fighting the “Beyond Beef” campaign
The EPA report never recommended eating less beef. Advocacy groups soon did. In 1992 Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, published “Beyond Beef” and urged readers to cut their beef intake by 50 percent, then went on to lead a coalition that staged protests at McDonald’s restaurants.
The industry hit back. With other groups it formed a “Food Facts Coalition” to rebut Rifkin and launched a campaign not to “blame the cows.” Rifkin was attacked on call-in shows and eventually cancelled a book tour. In 1992 the Beef Industry Council introduced “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.” Rick Perry, then Texas agriculture commissioner, said the fight was “not about beef, it’s about Rifkin’s desire to police American stomachs.” The cattlemen’s association denied it was behind the attacks on Rifkin.
A second study, by Jacquet and fellow Miami researcher Loredana Loy, covers records from 1989 to 2023. It finds the industry paid scientists to produce reports that played down meat’s climate impact, and ran campaigns such as “#yes2meat” after a major report urged people in Western countries to eat less meat. The pressure worked, the authors write: advocacy groups softened their message, for instance moving from halving meat intake to “eat more plants,” or dropped campaigns altogether. “There was a shrinking of ambition,” Jacquet said.
What halving beef could have done
The researchers also put a number on the lost advice. If Americans had halved beef consumption from 1992 and replaced it with other foods, including other meat, as much as 13 gigatonnes of climate-warming gases could have been avoided by 2023. They say that would have been up to 80 times more effective than all the steps taken to curb methane from oil and gas over a similar period.
Analysts note the scale of the problem: agriculture produces roughly 40 percent of human-caused methane, most of it from livestock, and methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a shorter time frame.
Sources
- The American Beef Industry Understood Its Climate Impact Decades Ago – Inside Climate News
- The Livestock Industry’s “Climate Neutral” Claims Are Too Good To Be True
