How the most powerful environmental groups help greenwash Big Meat’s climate impact

In late 2010, McDonald’s convened representatives from the world’s largest meat companies for the inaugural Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, a three-day affair held in Denver. 

On the surface, the conference was meant to demonstrate that the beef industry was willing and able to reduce its environmental footprint. But in truth, it served as a gathering for industry to discuss its very survival in a world that had become alarmed about climate change. According to a beef industry news site, the 300 conference participants came together to “begin the process of reclaiming, defining and embracing the concept of sustainability to assure the future of beef production, and beef consumption, worldwide.” 

Meat producers and fast food giants had reason to worry. Four years earlier, in 2006, the United Nations had published a landmark report that singled out animal agriculture as one of the most polluting industries on the planet, one that has “such deep and wide-ranging environmental impacts that it should rank as one of the leading focuses for environmental policy.” 

The report was noteworthy in part because it provided the first estimate of animal agriculture’s significant role in global warming. Fossil fuels like coal and oil had already been targeted as environmental villains, and the meat industry had to fear that it would be next. 

So the meat industry did what other industries have done under similar pressure in the past: demonstrate that it could change just enough to avoid being forced to change even more by the government. Ann Veneman, who served as agriculture secretary under President George W. Bush, said as much during her keynote address at the Denver conference. According to another beef industry news site, Veneman “made it very clear that if the industry ignores the problem, then somebody else will get to define the issue for the industry, and in many cases that means governments imposing unworkable regulations.”

The Denver conference led to the creation of a new organization: the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, a network of beef processors, fast food chains, and other industry stakeholders, which has since spun out a dozen national and regional roundtables. The US roundtable’s 154-page “sustainability framework” provides ranchers and others throughout the supply chain with recommendations, like how to reduce water pollution and optimize energy efficiency. But the group explicitly imposes no standards or verification schemes. 

To put it in fast food terms, it’s all bun and no beef. Yet for more than a decade, McDonald’s and other food giants, alongside meat lobbying groups, have pointed to the roundtables as proof they’re taking climate change seriously. 

But after 14 years, McDonald’s, like other arms of the broader meat industry, has little to show for it all, and in fact — as one executive admitted to GreenBiz earlier this year — the company doesn’t even yet know how to measure and validate progress. (McDonald’s and the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef did not respond to a request for comment.)

The story of McDonald’s and the beef industry’s sprawling network of roundtables is just one part of an extensive campaign by the meat and dairy sector to downplay its environmental impact, delay regulations, deflect responsibility, and assure the public and policymakers that its voluntary initiatives are sufficient to avert environmental ruin. And it’s working: From 2010 to 2022, US meat production increased by over 13 percent while the industry successfully staved off calls for regulation at home and on the international stage. 

None of this is terribly surprising — it’s largely the same denial and deflection playbook run by Big Oil to avoid responsibility for climate change, with the usual suspects helping: industry-aligned academics, front groups, loyal politicians, and social media influencers. 

But among those allies are groups that are surprising: some of the world’s largest environmental organizations. 

Take the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, a green giant with over $600 million in assets. WWF and McDonald’s are both founding members of the beef roundtable, and later, the two worked together on other beef-related projects. In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.)

For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US. 

From 2017 to 2022, WWF-US brought in approximately $12 million to $28.6 million from various meat, dairy, seafood, fast food, restaurant, and grocery companies, including Tyson Foods, Cargill, Burger King, Costco, Walmart, Red Lobster, Chobani, and Dairy Management Inc., a dairy trade group. (WWF only discloses donation ranges, not specific dollar amounts, and many of its corporate donations are multifaceted, used to address meat and other parts of a company’s supply chain, like plastics, palm oil, and food waste.)

“One of the key reasons WWF works with large companies like McDonald’s is to drive industry progress, beyond a company’s own operations,” said Sheila Bonini, WWF’s senior vice president of private sector engagement. “Roundtables are a great starting point for bringing the right people together to work toward a common goal.”

WWF is hardly alone. Two of the other largest US environmental organizations — the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — also closely collaborate with large meat and dairy companies, ranchers, and trade groups on a range of initiatives. But outside observers, along with some former and current employees at EDF and WWF, argue that those initiatives often do more to improve the companies’ image than the environment. 

“Companies want to work with the Environmental Defense Fund because it boosts their reputation as climate leaders,” a current EDF employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, told me — speaking about EDF’s corporate partnerships broadly, not just for agriculture. “But instead of calling them out for causing harm, EDF lets them pollute and praises them for what little they do in hopes we’ll eventually convince them to change. So EDF provides cover for businesses by letting them set their own ambition.”

Partnerships between these organizations and industry often fall into two buckets. The first bucket entails borrowing practices from “regenerative agriculture,” an organic-style farming ethos that has broken into the mainstream in recent years and that promises to slash agricultural carbon emissions and conserve nature. The second includes a set of technologies intended to reduce the livestock sector’s greenhouse gas footprint, such as incorporating seaweed into cow’s diets or changing how animal manure is managed. 

Some of these efforts can provide modest environmental benefits and are worth pursuing in the same way that it’s worth pushing for, say, more efficient gas-powered cars. But such partnerships can also quickly veer into greenwashing, in which a product or practice’s environmental impact, with the help of green organizations, is exaggerated for PR effect. 

“The taking over of these organizations for greenwashing has reached such a level that I think we need to be honest about it,” said Silvia Secchi, a natural resource economist and professor of geographical and sustainability sciences at the University of Iowa. “Because it’s pretty obvious that the industry is using them, and whether willing or not, they’re letting themselves be used.”

Most importantly, these partnerships obscure what environmental scientists increasingly say rich countries must do to meet global climate targets: rapidly shrink livestock populations and shift to a more plant-based food system.

There’s a clear parallel with the fossil fuel industry. Rather than acquiesce to phasing out oil and gas, fossil fuel companies have often proposed their own slate of half-measure solutions, like carbon capture and storage, while continuing to expand oil and gas production. 

The environmental community has largely called these activities out for what they are: greenwashing. There are some exceptions — Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy both support carbon capture and storage, but they’re careful to note that such technologies must be paired with an aggressive transition to a renewable energy economy.

But those groups’ careful messaging is absent when it comes to meat production. Both tend to support the livestock industry’s half-measure solutions while neglecting to push for a shift away from our meat-heavy food system. And that avoidance is rarely questioned from the outside, likely due to the public’s own ignorance of animal agriculture’s harms. 

Surveys show that Americans grossly underestimate the toll of meat and dairy on the planet. Some of that is optics: A power plant emitting plumes of black smoke screams pollution, while a pasture of cattle, chickens, or pigs along the highway looks natural and quaint — even eco-friendly. 

But seasoned environmentalists I spoke with told me that even many of their peers don’t grasp the connection between animal agriculture, climate change, and pollution.

Globally, 80 billion land animals and 1 trillion to 2 trillion aquatic animals are slaughtered for food each year, producing greenhouse gas emissions in five main ways: deforestation to graze cattle and grow corn and soy to feed farmed animals; pollution from the fertilizer used to grow those corn and soy crops; manure, which is high in nitrous oxide, a significant greenhouse gas; diesel from fishing vessels and nitrous oxide-rich waste from fish farms; and the largest single source, the world’s 1.5 billion cows who burp out methane, another potent greenhouse gas.

Added up, meat and dairy production account for an estimated 14.5 percent to 19.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to researchers at the University of Illinois and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. That squarely makes it a leading driver of global warming, on par with road transport. While it composes a smaller share of emissions in the US, at around 7 percent according to experts’ analysis of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data, that’s less a function of how much meat Americans eat — which is a lot — than how much more we pollute through our energy and transportation sectors.

But even that estimate of 7 percent is probably too low, primarily because numerous sources of emissions from farming and food are attributed by the EPA to other sectors, including but not limited to on-farm electricity and combustion, food waste, converting land to agriculture, and the entire seafood industry. And while the US is expected to continue to make progress in reducing its emissions from fossil fuels as the country switches to clean energy and electric vehicles, less progress has been seen in the agricultural sector. In fact, in 2015 the US Department of Agriculture predicted that America’s agricultural greenhouse gas footprint would be roughly the same in 2050 as it is today. (In 2020, the USDA established a goal of halving US agricultural emissions by 2050, but is in no way on a path to meet it.)

There is also something unique about animal agriculture that is often underappreciated in the climate debate: It requires a vast amount of land — far more than any other industry and far more than plant-based foods. If we ate fewer animal products, some of that land could be restored as grasslands and forests, which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in trees and soil, effectively canceling out some of the emissions that humans generate while providing habitat for wildlife.

It’s what’s called the “carbon opportunity cost” of meat. In rich countries, which eat a lot of meat, that cost is massive. According to a 2020 study led by Matthew Hayek, a New York University environmental studies professor, a shift to plant-based eating in rich countries would free up enough land to sequester an amount of carbon dioxide approximately equal to the past nine years of their fossil fuel emissions. 

According to several studies, including an influential 2020 paper in the journal Science, we don’t have much of a choice but to move to a more plant-based food system in order to meet global climate targets. Even if we were to end global fossil fuel use immediately, food consumption trends over the next century — namely rapid growth in meat and dairy consumption — would “make it impossible” to meet the Paris Climate Agreement, as the Science paper puts it. “Plant-rich diets,” it found, hold the most promise for making the global food system compliant with the Paris agreement.

That’s the climate impact of the meat we eat. But animal agriculture is also arguably America’s largest source of water pollution and a leading source of air pollution, linked to more premature deaths than coal power plants. It is the leading cause of global deforestation — a leading cause, in fact, of just about everything the environmental movement fights against.

Yet only a couple of big US environmental groups challenge the meat industry. The rest ignore it altogether or collaborate with the industry on questionable initiatives.

To understand how green groups think about meat, I spoke with nearly 40 people in or adjacent to the environmental movement: scientists, funders, lawyers, academics, nonprofit employees, and volunteers. What I found was a movement sharply divided.

Many environmentalists, I discovered, understand the science but are afraid of the political backlash that could come if they are seen as trying to snatch burgers, nuggets, and ribs away from the American public. Many, I was told, also fear criticizing farmers and the powerful agribusiness lobby, given the enduring myths we tell ourselves about American agriculture. 

Even though reducing meat production in rich countries is a critical component of meeting global climate targets, there’s a sense among large environmental groups that sweeping changes to America’s diet and agricultural policy regime are unattainable. It’s created a collective action problem from which the movement can’t seem to break free.

Other greens expressed deep frustration over their fellow environmentalists’ indifference to the meat industry’s environmental destruction, or worse, some organization’s willingness to partner with companies on greenwashing projects.

The environmental movement has taken on powerful industries in the past and won. But thus far, it’s largely been groups dedicated to animal welfare — which have a fraction of the budget and public credibility of environmentalists — challenging Big Meat’s pollution and advocating for a more plant-based food system. Major environmental groups may think they’re playing it safe, but until they join that fight, they will ultimately fail in their goal of averting potential climate and ecological catastrophe.

The curious case of “climate-friendly” beef

While WWF’s work with McDonald’s and the beef industry is one of the green movement’s more high-profile corporate partnerships, a recent project has proved to be even more controversial among environmentalists.

Last year, Tyson Foods — America’s largest meat processor — began selling beef marketed as “climate-friendly.” The company claims that by getting some of its suppliers to graze their cattle and grow the animals’ feed crops in a more sustainable manner, it’s reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent.

But Tyson has repeatedly declined to share data with Vox and other news outlets that could prove its claim. The USDA, which approved Tyson’s climate-friendly beef label, wouldn’t share data either. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more, and the documents it received back were heavily redacted. EWG said the USDA cited the need to protect “trade secrets.”

But let’s assume Tyson could prove a 10 percent emissions reduction. Its beef still wouldn’t qualify as anything that should be called “climate-friendly,” according to Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group. Even though US companies tend to produce food more efficiently than the global average, a 10 percent reduction would still make beef the worst food for the climate — by far. 

Using global averages, beef’s carbon footprint per 100 grams of protein is about 7 times that of pork, 9 times that of poultry, 25 times that of tofu and plant-based meat, and more than 60 times that of beans and lentils.

Tyson’s misleading marketing is predictable — the USDA, which also helped fund Tyson’s “climate-friendly” beef project, gives meat companies significant leeway to exaggerate animal welfare and sustainability claims on their packaging. 

But what’s more troubling is that Tyson didn’t act on its own — it got help from the Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund, both of which provided technical assistance. Tyson also benefited in another way: The company mentions the organizations on its website and in its advertising to boost the credibility of its climate-friendly claim.

When I asked Michael Wironen, director of corporate engagement for food and water at the Nature Conservancy, if he had any concerns over his group’s inclusion in Tyson’s advertising, he said that companies should be scrutinized for greenwashing but that he doesn’t “have an opinion one way or the other about how [Tyson] should be branding that product.” 

The Nature Conservancy was paid a nominal fee for its work, according to a spokesperson, who declined to share the amount. The spokesperson also said the organization’s Arkansas chapter had received money from Tyson Foods for local conservation work and declined to answer whether TNC has received money from other meat companies. 

“I very much agree that it’s critical for companies to be transparent about their climate goals and actions,” said Katie Anderson, senior director of food and forests at Environmental Defense Fund, in an email. “It’s a key pillar of our advocacy with companies across all sectors.” 

Nevertheless, Tyson refuses to disclose its data, even as it hawks beef products with EDF’s name in its marketing. An EDF spokesperson said the company severely limits corporate donations and that after conducting a search of its records over the past 10 years, it hasn’t received a donation from a meat, dairy, fast food, or grocery company. 

Secchi, the University of Iowa professor, criticized the two groups’ work on the project as “shameful.”

This could be just the beginning of more questionable climate claims on meat and dairy packaging that come with the imprimatur of environmental groups. The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, Tyson, McDonald’s, Cargill, Nestlé, WWF, EDF, and TNC — along with the World Resources Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute — are all involved in crafting a new emissions accounting framework that will influence what climate claims food companies can make under new state laws. 

Some environmental groups and academics lambasted the draft guidelines when they came out late last year, saying they would enable meat and dairy companies to make only minor adjustments to how they use land and claim their products are carbon neutral, or even carbon negative. 

“The process was incrementally eroded until it became fully captured by the companies who want to get credit for addressing climate change without changing what they are doing,” Tufts environmental policy professor William Moomaw told the Washington Post. 

The false promise of regenerative agriculture

Most of the practices that Tyson says help it achieve its 10 percent emissions reduction fall under the umbrella of regenerative agriculture, which is often framed as a holistic alternative to the ills of industrialized agriculture.

In recent years, regenerative agriculture has risen from the fringes of farming to mainstream awareness, championed as a major climate change solution by leading environmental groups and figures as varied as Joe Rogan, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jason Momoa, and Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.’s running mate. 

What exactly is it? While there’s no agreed-upon definition, the regenerative solution for growing crops, like the corn fed to Tyson’s cattle, typically entails planting “cover” crops over the winter ​​​​to help prevent soil erosion and avoiding tilling, or disturbing, the soil between harvests, among other practices. 

These practices do have proven ecological benefits, namely reducing water pollution and improving soil health. But many of regenerative agriculture’s most strident proponents go much further, claiming it has the power to significantly slow down or even reverse climate change. The argument is that healthier soil can better remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in farmland, making it a compelling climate change solution. All that carbon from tailpipes and smokestacks? The soil can supposedly draw a lot of it down.

“Soil carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture is the single best way to take carbon out of the atmosphere,” as Al Gore put it last year.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the world needs negative emissions technologies — approaches that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere, as regenerative agriculture supposedly does — to avoid catastrophic global warming. But the research doesn’t bear out the claims many of regenerative agriculture’s proponents make, as there’s still significant doubt and uncertainty around the potential for farmland to store a lot of carbon. 

For one, we don’t have accurate and affordable measurement tools, and carbon sequestration rates diminish over time. No-till farming, one of the most common regenerative farming methods, likely isn’t the climate solution it’s cracked up to be: Most no-till farmers still occasionally till their acres, and each time they do, they release a significant amount of stored carbon. A 2022 meta-analysis found that no-till was effectively no better at carbon storage than conventional farming, though it could have some effect in certain climates and soils. 

“I think the climate argument in general with regenerative agriculture … is pretty bogus,” said Derric Pennington, a former lead scientist at WWF and now a senior sustainability scientist at the University of Minnesota.

Despite that, large meat and dairy companies — like Tyson, Cargill, Land O’Lakes, chicken giant Perdue Farms, pork giant Smithfield Foods, and dairy giant Danone — have embraced these practices, claiming their deployment as a climate win. Doing so gives these companies license to claim that not only are they not a major cause of climate change and pollution, but they can be an active solution. And it’s not uncommon for them to receive praise or support from WWF, the Nature Conservancy, or Environmental Defense Fund for these efforts.

That’s crop farming. But much of the environmental movement’s interest in regenerative agriculture lies with beef, the most carbon-intensive food product, which accounts for about half of US livestock emissions. 

When cattle are left to their own devices on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation. But regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing — part of Tyson’s “climate-friendly” beef program — which entails periodically moving cattle between plots of land. This can help prevent overgrazing because vegetation is given time to regrow, resulting in healthier soil that advocates say can sequester large amounts of carbon.

How much? In 2017, a team of agricultural researchers in Europe and Australia published a sprawling report on the subject titled “Grazed and Confused?” The authors found that variants of rotational grazing have the potential to offset 20 percent to 60 percent of emissions from ruminant animals (including cattle, goats, and sheep), with the higher-end estimate under “very generous assumptions.” 

Newer research results are similarly mixed, with a couple of studies showing sizable effects (which have also generated critique and skepticism), while other experiments have shown little to no effect. 

At first glance, it appears to be a mildly promising approach to cutting emissions from cattle. But just like with regenerative crop farming, it comes with a series of caveats that deflate much of its potential. It must be done under the right conditions, which are rare; climate gains are reversible — stored carbon can be released if a rancher changes their practices; and carbon sequestration rates diminish over time.

And there’s another catch. Even assuming that cattle grazing under the right conditions can sequester and store lots of carbon, regenerative ranching requires more land. A lot more — 2 times to 2.5 times that of conventional ranching. Currently, cattle are grazed on over one-third of US land, so it stands to reason that switching even a modest share of the US beef cattle herd to regenerative would cause a massive spike in land demand.

“Regenerative agriculture is important, but you cannot produce the amount of meat we do now regeneratively, because there just simply isn’t enough land,” said Sarah Lake, a longtime food and climate activist and now CEO of PlantWorks, a new philanthropy focused on shifting diets. This is especially true in light of rising meat production: The USDA projects a nearly 15 percent increase in both beef and overall meat production over the next decade.

“It’s not the cow, it’s the how,” is a common refrain from the regenerative beef crowd. Cows aren’t a pollution problem, they claim — it’s how they’re farmed that’s the problem. But there is no escaping the fact that it is the cow, and especially the number of cows — and pigs and chickens. 

In a survey of more than 200 climate and agricultural scientists released earlier this year, experts said global livestock emissions must peak and then fall rapidly in the coming years. By far the most effective way to do that, experts agreed, is to raise and consume fewer animals. High- and middle-income countries — which eat much more meat than the global average — must lead the way. 

Soil carbon sequestration, the main selling point of regenerative agriculture, ranked second to last. 

Technology can’t make meat and dairy climate-friendly

Regenerative agriculture represents one side of the meat and dairy industries’ apparent efforts to delay climate action and rebrand themselves as sustainable. The other side entails a suite of technologies aimed at directly reducing livestock emissions. Often, the industry will combine the two approaches into one project.

One example comes from the US Dairy Net Zero Initiative, which was launched by an industry research and marketing organization in 2020. The plan purports that the dairy industry can reach net zero emissions, or carbon neutrality, by 2050, and it’s received support from WWF, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Nature Conservancy. 

Dairy products, just like beef, also generate far more greenhouse gas emissions than most food products. For example, the carbon footprint of cow’s milk is around three times that of various plant-based milks.

The industry’s claim that it can achieve carbon neutrality was bolstered by a 2021 WWF white paper, which outlines how some large US dairy farms could reach net zero emissions — or even be carbon-negative — not by 2050, but astonishingly, within just five years. The organization says it could be achieved by farms using a mix of regenerative practices and new technologies, like changing cows’ genetics and feed so they burp out less methane, and “biodigester” machines, which capture methane from animal manure and convert it into usable energy. 

In recent years, such machines have been popping up on factory farms across the country, built in part with taxpayer dollars. Critics say the benefits are overstated and that they stand to further enrich, entrench, and expand factory farming. 

“The science is clear that, while some mitigation can be achieved by improving meat and dairy production, climate-neutral or zero-emissions meat and dairy is not a possibility in the foreseeable future,” said Hayek, the New York University environmental studies professor, speaking about net-zero claims in animal agriculture broadly, not the WWF report specifically. 

Jason Clay, senior vice president of markets for WWF and author of the report, said in an email that he doesn’t disagree with this statement. The paper, he noted, models what’s possible “if we had the right conditions in place — that includes government incentives, corporate investment, and commitment across the dairy supply chain.”

Much of what’s possible relies on those government incentives — subsidies or regulatory changes that are favorable to industry. These recur frequently in the paper, which illustrates a fundamental aspect of animal agriculture’s business model. Over the last century, states and the federal government have poured money into building the factory farming system while slashing its environmental regulations. By one estimate, subsidies cover almost half of dairy farmers’ production costs. Now, industry can only clean up the mess it’s made of our air, climate, and water if taxpayers cover the bill.

Some of the supposed net-zero solutions in the WWF paper rest on shaky science, like regenerative agriculture practices, while others seem far-fetched. For example, a significant amount of the emissions reduction detailed in the paper relies on farms not just turning manure into energy, but their communities’ food waste too. A small number of dairy farms already do this, but expanding the practice to the country’s thousands of large dairy farms would require a range of policy changes and inefficient subsidies, not to mention the complex logistics of trucking heavy food waste from population centers to rural mega-dairies. 

If you remove just this one practice from the paper, the imaginary net-zero dairy farm is no longer net-zero.

The paper has been cited numerous times by the US Dairy Net Zero Initiative, which has called it an “independent review,” even though the findings were informed by data from the industry trade group behind the initiative — Dairy Management Inc (DMI). According to WWF documents, DMI gave WWF $125,000 to $250,000 from 2017 to 2019. A DMI spokesperson said its funding to WWF was for “services,” not as donations. This funding began in 2011, the DMI spokesperson said, but declined to share the amount given from then to 2017.

Clay said that several pilot farms have “effectively achieved” net zero emissions and when asked for details on the claim, a WWF spokesperson referred Vox to DMI. A DMI spokesperson confirmed there are pilot farm studies underway but did not comment on whether they had achieved net zero emissions. “The pilots will help demonstrate how a commercial farm can feasibly progress toward neutrality,” the spokesperson said, but “it is not expected that all farms will reach neutrality.” 

To be sure, over time the US has managed to produce meat and dairy with fewer emissions per kilogram of food than many countries. But those emissions savings haven’t kept up with rising meat and dairy consumption, which has contributed to a steady increase in US agricultural emissions, even as total emissions from energy and transport have fallen. 

Each of the technological fixes in development from industry certainly hold some potential to further reduce, albeit marginally, meat and dairy’s climate impact. But even that measured improvement can only be achieved if the farming practices and technologies work, farmers are offered generous subsidies and regulatory tweaks to adopt them, and they’re fully deployed throughout the industry’s complex supply chains. 

Nonetheless, EDF and WWF have championed some of them as critical climate solutions. 

EDF and the Nature Conservancy are also founding members of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a coalition of meat, dairy, and agricultural trade groups, many of which lobby aggressively to block environmental policy. But the alliance is a vehicle for their other goal on Capitol Hill: ramping up subsidies for regenerative agriculture and technological solutions. It’s similar to how the fossil fuel industry lobbies to both block climate regulations and subsidize carbon capture.

One of the other founding members is the American Farm Bureau Federation, which one former Republican Senate staffer has described as the NRA of agriculture. The organization fights climate action, supports fossil fuel expansion, and as recently as a decade ago argued that humans aren’t responsible for climate change. 

“We don’t expect to see eye-to-eye with our partners on every issue,” said Ben Thomas, senior director of agriculture policy at EDF, in an email. “We find where there is common ground, and we work to make joint progress there.”

The Nature Conservancy didn’t respond directly to several detailed questions about its work with companies and industry trade groups, but said in part that the organization recognizes that “dairy or livestock systems cannot easily achieve carbon neutrality only through emissions reductions,” but that “significant emission reductions are possible and worth supporting.” 

TNC and EDF also belong to other industry coalitions, like the Midwest Row Crop Collaborative and Field to Market, a nonprofit whose membership is dominated by industry.

More recently, EDF helped launch — at a UN climate summit, no less — a new alliance between several major dairy companies that have agreed to report their methane emissions but, critically, aren’t required to pledge to reduce those emissions by a certain amount. 

Some in the meat business are paying close attention. Late last year, the chief strategist of the trade association the Meat Institute said his industry should consider similar partnerships with nonprofits at future climate summits to “advance solutions together and really bring that proof to the table” that it’s taking climate action.

When I asked Environmental Defense Fund for specifics on its goals to reduce animal agriculture emissions, how it’ll measure progress, and what progress it has made so far, I was directed to a website that shows the organization aims to, by 2030, “help the land and oceans feed us, so 2.5 billion people benefit from climate-resilient, equitable food systems globally.” 

That’s a lofty aspiration, but it’s unclear what it means and how their work will help achieve it. When I followed up for more detail, the organization didn’t provide any.

The organization also wants to reduce global methane pollution by 40 percent to 45 percent by 2030 and has been actively working to reduce the harmful gas for years, including launching an impressive satellite to track it. It’s essential work, as methane accounts for about one-third of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. 

But the use of EDF’s satellite to address emissions from livestock, which domestically and globally spew more methane than oil and gas, will be limited. The organization says there are fewer oil and gas operations than farms, which makes oil and gas a more manageable target, and that oil and gas operators have more resources to tackle the problem. (There are also some technical challenges to tracking livestock methane with EDF’s satellite.)

One of the current EDF employees I spoke with said that the organization’s solely technological approach to livestock methane is “rooted in a pessimism that more ambitious change isn’t possible,” which becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The organization believes that people won’t change their diets, the employee said, so technological solutions are the best it can do. “But focusing on methane at the expense of systemic change turns our institutional pessimism into reality.”

Elizabeth Sturcken, managing director of business at EDF, said over email that in the US “there are no prospects” for companies, especially in food and agriculture, to be required through regulation to reduce methane emissions. “Voluntary corporate action can help fill in this gap.” 

When I asked WWF about its goals related to agriculture, I was told the organization aims to reduce the climate, water pollution, and biodiversity impacts of animal protein in the US by a staggering 50 percent by 2030 against 2005 levels. The goal, the organization says, will be achieved through the adoption of “responsibly sourced, regeneratively produced cattle, poultry, swine, and aquaculture [fish farm] products.”

After repeated requests for details on how it would measure this goal and its progress so far, a spokesperson said, “We are in the process of revising and finalizing our long-term goals to ensure they are measurable. As part of this process we are examining what is possible to track, in what regions we are working, and how to set baselines in animal protein systems.”

No one I interviewed for this story believes environmental groups shouldn’t engage with the private sector. Quite the contrary. However, these organizations’ relationships appear to have a narrowing effect, in which they work with the industry on projects that the industry is comfortable taking on, rather than what is needed to meet global climate targets or slash pollution. 

WWF’s Bonini said as much: “We encourage companies to work on all fronts, particularly where they can have the biggest impact, but ultimately how they choose to address these impacts is up to them. And from there we work with companies to set goals and drive down negative impacts.”

As one of the current EDF employees I spoke to put it, “EDF provides cover for businesses by letting them set their own ambition.”

But systemic change is hard, and through such collaborations the organizations get to show their donors what appears to be a win, said Secchi, the University of Iowa sustainability professor. Pennington, the former WWF lead scientist, said that for the corporations,“the biggest benefit with partnering with these large [nonprofits] is having your name, having your logos together on the same document.”

Last year, Sturcken of EDF said in an interview with the news outlet Civil Eats that “PR benefits” were one of the benefits to businesses embracing food sustainability.

This line of work with corporations may also have a silencing effect.

WWF-UK canceled the publication of a report in which one of its corporate donors at the time — Tesco, the British grocery giant — was implicated in chicken farming pollution. WWF-UK told the Guardian the report did not meet its “rigorous standards” and that the decision was not connected to its corporate relationship. WWF-UK ended its formal partnership with Tesco in 2023, though they continue to collaborate. (Notably, a former Tesco CEO is the chair of WWF-UK’s board of trustees.) 

“I don’t think that it creates a conflict of interest,” said Bonini of WWF when asked about its corporate donations in general — not about Tesco specifically. “We’ve seen a lot of positive momentum working and collaborating with companies, but we continue to push them. That’s our job. And if we don’t see them making progress, we will walk away.”

“Wherever your funding comes from has an effect on your work, and to say anything else is insanity at this point,” said Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami and author of a book on greenwashing, The Playbook. “Greenwashing serves a lot of purposes. It’s not just about [preventing] regulation — that’s always part of it. But it’s about maintaining the social license to operate … the economic license, the moral license.”

Sometimes, industry players will say that quiet part out loud. In a 2022 news release issued by a cattle breeding association about a project to change cattle genetics to lower their emissions, an industry-aligned academic said “This is going to help us maintain the license to operate. I think that is a key term we all need to understand.”

“Making conservation easy, one burger at a time”

In addition to working with companies, some groups also have extensive programs designed to persuade individual ranchers to take up regenerative practices. 

The National Audubon Society, the beloved bird conservancy organization, rewards regenerative ranchers with its seal of approval in the form of a label that reads “Grazed on bird friendly land” and “Audubon certified.” Such beef can be purchased at about 250 retail and online stores.

“Making conservation easy, one burger at a time,” reads the program’s website.

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WWF has a similar program with 90 ranches enrolled, though with no certification or marketing scheme. The organization launched it with $6 million from McDonald’s, Cargill, and the Walmart Foundation. 

The Nature Conservancy owns 500,000 acres of grazing land, which it uses to run experiments and demonstrate to ranchers how they can adopt regenerative grazing plans. Ultimately, it wants to see 240 million acres — about the size of Texas and Colorado combined — under regenerative grazing plans by 2025. 

Rob Manes, the group’s co-director of North American regenerative grazing lands strategy, said the Nature Conservancy doesn’t yet have details on what metrics it will use to assess how its regenerative grazing plans, when enacted, help the environment. But he’s confident it will work: “We know that those plans will result in greater biodiversity, better water quality, and in some places increased soil carbon.” He said measuring ecological change can be slow and that it’s “difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to measure those things over millions and millions of acres.” 

For the time being, he said, “we find ourselves sometimes measuring effort.”

Jonathan Foley, an environmental scientist and executive director of the climate research group Project Drawdown, said the regenerative narrative that nature can heal much of livestock’s environmental impact has political and cultural power that is as significant as it is distorting. Scenes of cattle grazing in beautiful grasslands and interviews with humble farmers can be highly effective propaganda: It’s “Americana,” and “the apple pie and the flag all rolled into one,” he said. “It’s a very powerful set of symbols” — one that the meat industry has used to its benefit, with help from some of the world’s most powerful environmental groups.

It also prevents us from asking “hard questions about diets, subsidies, and political power within the food system,” he said.

It’s worth noting that a couple of the largest green organizations, like Earthjustice, go up against the industry, but they appear to devote disproportionately few resources to it. The Natural Resources Defense Council once did, but it’s now focused on regenerative agriculture and declined to answer detailed questions about its related goals. 

Others, like Greenpeace US, don’t challenge the industry or advocate for shifting diets at all — though some of its chapters in other countries do, as do some of WWF’s. Bonini of WWF told me that the organization “has had success in the UK with retailers focusing on sustainable diets” and that it’s looking into how it could adapt that work for the US.  

Just how hard it is to move environmental organizations on meat was made clear to me by someone who has been deeply involved in one of the oldest and biggest green groups in the country. 

Todd Shuman has been a devoted Sierra Club volunteer, holding leadership positions on various committees for almost 15 years. He got involved in the 1990s when the organization was campaigning to stop cattle grazing in national parks and other public lands. But he’s slowly become disillusioned with the Club’s resistance to taking on Big Meat. 

Shuman’s frustration has reached a boiling point in recent years, as he and some like-minded members have tried and failed to pass two proposals centered on animal agriculture. (Unlike most nonprofits, the Sierra Club is highly democratic and volunteers can have some influence in setting organizational policy.)

“We’ve been trying to prod the Club to act politically,” Shuman said. “Take on this industry! Challenge this industry!” 

Their first proposal entailed getting the Sierra Club to endorse and advocate for what Shuman calls a federal methane cap and fee policy, which would set a cap on methane emissions for polluters — including those in the livestock industry —  and require them to pay for each ton of methane emitted. It’s a classic “polluters pay” policy, and the Biden administration has proposed similar regulations for the oil and gas sector, but not the livestock sector, even though it emits more methane.

A council of representatives from regional and state chapters passed Shuman’s resolution in September 2022 and it was then kicked up to a high-level internal committee. That committee declined to endorse the resolution and never voted on it, which Shuman considered a rejection — and one that he believes was made largely out of fear of political backlash.

Second, he and others wanted to revise the organization’s agriculture and food policy to emphasize the need to reduce meat and dairy consumption and remove language that Shuman and others felt uncritically promoted regenerative cattle grazing. 

The proposal has been tabled indefinitely, Shuman said, which he thinks is because some in Sierra Club leadership strongly believe that regenerative agriculture is a critical environmental solution. 

The Sierra Club declined to comment on Shuman’s efforts, but shared information about a few federal bills the organization has endorsed in recent years that challenge the factory farming system.  

“If you can’t get the Sierra Club to [support a methane tax], how the fuck are you going to get anyone else in society to do that?” Shuman told me in exasperation. “If your environmental organizations — that people expect to kind of lead on this — are too scared to do that, what hope is there for our species on this planet?”

Why meat is the third rail of public and personal politics

Shuman’s belief that the Sierra Club shies away from taking on the meat industry due to fear of political backlash — fears that seem to come into play much less when environmental groups take on fossil fuels — was something I heard throughout my conversations for this story. 

When I posed this analysis to leaders of large environmental nonprofits, they mostly told me that while they agree people in the Global North need to eat less meat, working on policy to change diets or stop factory farming just doesn’t align with their organizations’ strengths or theory of change. 

“We started as a land trust — buying and managing land — and really, that’s kind of the heart of what the Nature Conservancy does,” said Wironen. Reducing meat consumption “is not something that we as an organization really have a comparative advantage in.” 

When asked why Environmental Defense Fund doesn’t have any programmatic work on shifting diets in the Global North, Anderson said: “While consumer behavior changes can be part of the path to lower food emissions, banking our climate future on that alone isn’t practical.”

Melissa D. Ho, senior vice president for freshwater and food at WWF-US, stressed the value of being “a middle-of-the-road organization” that can “try to bring disparate voices together,” like agriculture groups, meat producers, food companies, and Republicans and Democrats. 

Of course, not every organization can take up every issue, and social movements need a multitude of tactics and approaches to succeed. But when most of the environmental movement feels that going up against Big Meat doesn’t fit with their mission, we’re left with one of our most ecologically destructive industries largely unchallenged by a movement that purportedly exists to stop ecological destruction.

It’s a given in the environmental community that governments and corporations need to phase out — or at least drastically reduce — fossil fuel production. Despite scientific consensus that significant changes to the Western world’s meat and dairy production are necessary to meet global climate targets, few environmentalists are willing to go there. 

There’s no doubt it would be a difficult, even toxic fight. In Europe, which has long been more ambitious than the US on climate policy, farmers have protested en masse against policies designed to cut livestock pollution. In the US and elsewhere, conservatives have begun taking up meat as a cause célèbre of the culture war. Even liberals occasionally join in, and only a handful of members of Congress can be counted on to introduce legislation to regulate factory farms or increase access to plant-based food.

Some politicians paint calls to stop pollution from factory farms and eat more plant-based meals as anti-farmer, a potent charge given both farming’s close association with America’s national mythos and the disproportionate political power that rural states hold. Farmers have also been continually characterized as stewards of the land, rather than business people capable of significant pollution. 

“These narratives have been used by the industry in a very skillful manner,” Secchi said. 

They’ve certainly influenced some environmental groups and leaders.

“[Livestock groups] are very sensitive to feeling criticized and demonized, and understandably so, because when you hear things like ‘meat is evil’ … I think they feel that their whole identity is being attacked,” Ho of WWF-US said. “They don’t feel that people appreciate the hard work and toil that they do to grow food to feed people … it really cuts to the bone and they take it personally and I understand why.”

Yet even while environmentalists recognize the fraught politics of challenging Big Meat, some believe it is nevertheless essential. 

“The planet doesn’t care what is politically tenable and what’s good on Fox News and what Twitter bots will come after you for,” said Foley. “Why do [environmentalists] keep on waving the white flag before we even fight the battle on this issue?”

Sarah Lake, CEO of the philanthropy organization PlantWorks, is worried about how conflict-avoidant environmental groups are on the matter: “They bring the clout, the reputation, the ability to pivot an entire field, and them not being willing to [call for] meat reduction is quite problematic.”’

There’s also the uncomfortable fact of personal habits. Being an environmentalist doesn’t require being a vegan, but several people I talked to speculated that environmentalists may not care to change America’s relationship to meat because they’re unwilling to change themselves.

“People have told me about their [organization’s] leaders not willing to eat the vegan meal and going out and getting a steak or whatever,” one longtime activist told me, requesting anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the issue in the environmental movement. “I hear stories and I just think, ‘That’s like a person working on renewable energy and driving a Hummer.’ … If we can’t change ourselves in the environmental community, then how would we expect to change the general population?”

Many environmentalists have come to criticize individual action as ineffectual and naive. The burden to mitigate climate change and pollution falls on politicians and corporations, they argue, not the average person. Leading climate voices, such as Michael Mann and David Wallace-Wells, have even dismissed meat reduction as “virtue signaling” and a “cop-out.” 

Of course, policy change is the only route through which we can overcome the enormity of the climate and ecological crises we ourselves have created. But policy change requires public support. It’s hard to see how politicians — aside from a brave few — will stick their neck out to push for significant meat industry reforms if even environmentalists are disinterested in shifting social norms around meat consumption.  

The idea that environmentalists shouldn’t try to influence how people eat “is a win for industry … It’s their script,” said Jacquet, the University of Miami professor. Environmentalists who repeat this, she added, have “become sock puppets for industry, and they don’t even mean to be.” 

A second current EDF employee I spoke to, who would only speak on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said when they brought up these issues internally, they were told that people’s diets are private. But, the employee told me, “it’s not private if it’s affecting everyone’s air and water.” 

Some environmentalists and journalists will encourage people to simply swap their beef for chicken, as chicken has a lower carbon footprint — about 10 percent that of beef’s. Vox obtained a copy of an internal Environmental Defense Fund policy that bars employees from purchasing meat from ruminant animals — cattle, sheep, and goats — at EDF offices and events due to their high carbon footprints, but says nothing of other meats, like chicken. Poultry production, however, comes with its own set of nasty air and water pollution problems.  

“We try to be very conscious of the environmental impact of our operations,” an EDF spokesperson said, when asked about the environmental impact of other animal products. “That policy is still being drafted, and we don’t have any more detail for you.”

Pete Smith, a leading climate scientist, warns against the “swap beef for chicken” advice because poultry production also requires a significant amount of farmland to grow corn and soy to feed the birds. 

“They’re eating products that are grown on land that could be growing food for humans instead, so it’s still a really inefficient thing to do to swap out ruminant [beef, lamb, goat] products for other different types of meat,” Smith told me.

Considering that much of the environmental movement also cares deeply about animal life, it’s worth noting that perhaps no farmed species is treated worse than chickens raised for meat. The birds’ genetics have been significantly altered to make them grow bigger and faster, which in turn has reduced their carbon footprint. But it’s come at a severe cost to their welfare; their legs cannot handle the rapid growth of their breasts, making it difficult for many chickens to walk or even stand. 

Nevertheless, EDF and WWF are founding members of the industry coalition US Roundtable for Sustainable Poultry & Eggs, which encourages chicken producers to use “genetics” — among other things — to make animals more productive. While these organizations work to protect wild animals, they approve of one of the most abusive practices inflicted on domesticated animals.

Britt Groosman, vice president of climate-smart agriculture for EDF, didn’t directly answer a question about the greenhouse gas and animal cruelty tradeoff, but said in an email: “It’s important that progress on one issue doesn’t exacerbate another issue, and we need to be thoughtful about solutions to environmental challenges.” WWF didn’t respond to a question about its involvement in the poultry roundtable.

Where the environmental movement might go from here

While our food choices are personal and guided by our preferences, they’ve also been heavily shaped by policy, and so the few environmental groups that do challenge the meat industry spend little if any of their resources trying to tell people how to eat. Instead, they’re working the system to hold factory farms accountable for pollution and to make our food environment — cafeterias, grocery stores, restaurants — more sustainable. And some of the work they’re doing demonstrates that change is possible, if only more of their peers would join them.

Making it easier for consumers to choose plant-based options “comes by changing the policy context,” Lake said. It’s analogous to efforts to make it easier for consumers to choose electric vehicles or heat pumps and solar panels — key parts of President Biden’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Right now, the policy landscape is tipped heavily in favor of meat and dairy production. There is publicly funded animal feed crop insurance, meat and dairy R&D, and a sprawling set of grants and programs for producers, as well as a number of regulatory loopholes that allow farmers and companies to pollute with few consequences. A 2023 analysis published in the journal One Earth found that, from 2014 to 2020, the US meat industry received about 800 times more government funding than did meat and dairy alternatives. 

A lot can be done to tip the scale in the other direction, and in ways unlikely to spur political backlash.

World Resources Institute and Friends of the Earth work with institutions like schools, hospitals, and universities to serve more plant-based meals, while the Breakthrough Institute advocates for the government to fund R&D for the alternative meat sector. (Disclosure: My partner worked on a short-term consulting project with Friends of the Earth earlier this year.) 

Earthjustice sued the EPA to restrict water pollution from slaughterhouses and won, though the agency wants to exempt most facilities. Waterkeeper Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, and Food and Water Watch, along with many local environmental groups, also campaign against factory farm pollution.

In Europe, the environmental community has contributed significantly to building a more plant-based food system.

Meat consumption in Germany has steadily declined since 2011, and some of the change was driven by the country’s Green Party and its broader environmental movement. 

In the Netherlands, a government environmental advisory board has pushed the country to pursue transitioning 20 percent of its protein consumption from animal sources to plant-based by 2030. It could be working: Meat consumption fell modestly in the years that followed.

Denmark has been the most ambitious, setting aside nearly $200 million USD to work with chefs, food businesses, farmers, and more to shift diets and expand organic food production. The plan was crafted by a diverse coalition of interests, including both environmental and farming groups. That diversity helped build political will. 

The country is even on the cusp of enacting the world’s first carbon tax on meat, which was negotiated between a center-right government, farmers, meat industry representatives, and labor unions.

What these accomplishments have in common is that environmental groups were willing to grab the third rail of politics. None of these groups in the US or Europe advocate for removing meat from menus altogether or curtailing consumer choice, but they do want to level the radically uneven playing field on which animal-based and plant-based foods compete.

In recent decades, the US movement to protect farmed animals from cruelty — which, in full disclosure, I took part in prior to joining Vox — has won political and corporate campaigns that also show it’s possible to reform the factory farming industry. Those include banning some of the cruelest farming practices, like tiny cages for hens and pigs, in over a dozen states and working with large food companies to serve more plant-based meals. 

That movement has a mere $91 million annual budget. Much more might be possible if the US environmental movement, with an $8 billion budget — 88 times larger — were more engaged in the fight. 

I’ll be the first to admit that reforming the US food system so it’s less reliant on animal products won’t be easy. Through a decade of advocacy, and now several years as a journalist on the beat, I’ve seen firsthand how resistant many Americans are to change on this issue, and the immense power agribusiness holds over Congress and in state legislatures.  

It’s certainly far more difficult than the push for clean energy, and one that will take far longer to yield progress. People can’t tell whether their home runs on solar power or coal — as long as it flows, an electron is an electron — while food preferences are personal and influenced by culture, tradition, advertising, social norms, and more. 

But over the last 15 years, more environmental advocates have been able to cross the Rubicon to confront Big Meat, and Faber of the Environmental Working Group said the movement is increasingly turning toward environmental challenges posed by agriculture.

It’s critical they get it right. Foley, the climate scientist, is concerned that a lot of the energy to reform agriculture is headed in the wrong direction by overinvesting in the regenerative approach: “I worry that we might lose years and decades pursuing what is kind of a bit of a fairy-tale solution, or at least highly exaggerated as the silver bullet solution, for all climate change issues in food.”

“Unfortunately, environmental groups depend on large philanthropies, so I wouldn’t put all of the blame at the feet of the environmental groups,” said Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, which campaigns against meat companies implicated in deforestation. “There’s not very many funders focused on food and agriculture in general. It is hard to raise money for our agricultural work, especially in the United States.” 

One major exception is the Bezos Earth Fund, which has committed $100 million to fund research into alternative meat technologies. 

Such works matters: Several people I spoke with felt that the emergence of better plant-based meat and dairy products over the last few years — despite stagnating sales — has served as an opening for some organizations and funders to think about the issue differently, offering a less politically risky approach than antagonizing industry. 

That approach — along with redesigning cafeterias, restaurant menus, and grocery store shelves to be more climate-friendly — may be most palatable in the near future to funders and other powerful stakeholders.

But considering the public’s limited understanding of meat’s environmental and social harms — and the companies inflicting them on society — we’ll also need old-fashioned public awareness campaigns to build political support for reform. 

Currently, there’s only political upside for environmental groups to ignore the problem or solely advocate for solutions that the industry is amenable to making. And there’s only political downside to campaigning against industry. Until that calculus changes, it’s hard to see how good policy could advance.

“It needs to be a political liability to choose false solutions over effective climate policies,” said Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. 

It can be maddening to see, year after year, most of the environmental and agricultural community continue to avoid doing what leading climate scientists agree we must do to significantly decrease emissions and pollution, and was viable yesterday: Create a more plant-based food system. 

Such a system in the US isn’t inevitable, or coming anytime soon, but it is possible. If it has any chance at taking off, buy-in from the broader US environmental community will need to precede it. For that to happen, its leaders will have to take their own advice: Follow the science wherever it leads, including to the inconvenient truth that changing how we farm alone won’t cut it. We have to rethink our relationship with meat.