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.
100% of the top 10 meat and dairy companies.
That should be in the title—otherwise it implies that every family dairy in the country has its own team of lobbyists.
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
however the top companies take up such a huge market share that it might as well be a true statement
How much of the market share do they take up?
Just the 4 largest make up 85% of the beef sector in the US. Dairy is a similar situation
Thanks
For more context for you and @trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.com, this is fairly emergent.
The dairy industry has been a loss-industry for a few decades thanks to pro-big-ag government intervention. Very few farms are able to keep from consolidating because of that.
It’s a mass-scale hostile takeover, and THAT is a much more meaningful headline than us forgetting about the smaller farms that fight to prevent this whole thing from becoming a panopoly
Thank you.
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.
It’s not that the title isn’t still mostly true—it’s that the impossible statement discredits the rest of the article.
Precisely this, if you’ve got a point to make, don’t sensationalise the headline, it only makes it easy for people to discredit and ignore without even reading the article.
…and that the rest of the article has virtually nothing to do with the environment or lobbying.
It is a sensationalist title, sigh
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100% of the top 10 US meat and dairy companies
Context.
Well I promise they aren’t upset with having their industry lobbied for.
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.
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IDK why corporate lobbing is still legal, wtf outlaw it asap
It’s legal because the people who benefit from corporate lobbying are the same people who determine what is legal.
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?!
Ah, what you are missing is that the people who make those laws are the same ones being lobbied, and lobbying means giving money to them.
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I’ve got $20, will that do it?
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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.
Huh, well imagine that. The biggest sources of the problem is against doing anything about it.
What I find pretty wild is that our government even helps them do more of it by boosting terrible diet choices, including pushing it onto children.
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.
https://www.c2es.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cait-global-emissions-sector.png
Agriculture contributes approximately 10 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (not including emissions from onsite fossil energy use).
https://www.rff.org/publications/explainers/agricultural-greenhouse-gas-emissions-101/
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.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-much-do-crops-contribute-emissions
Holy misleading headline, Batman!
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!
The 4 largest companies control 70% of the market. Markets tend to be one to three companies taking the lions share and then a long tail.
The top 10 will easily round up to 100%.
I’d also be hard pressed to find a meat producer that actually supported climate initiatives and wasn’t some super small farmer.
https://www.reuters.com/business/how-four-big-companies-control-us-beef-industry-2021-06-17/
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.
Wow nothing gets past you.
https://www.reuters.com/business/how-four-big-companies-control-us-beef-industry-2021-06-17/
What about pork, chicken, fish, etc.?
And wheat, corn, basically anyone who grows anything. Lol.
Go look it up and find the same results and that they’re mostly the same companies.
70% of the market (…) easily round up to 100%
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 🙄
Can you read? He said 4 companies make up about 70%, he didn’t say 4 companies make up 100%… he said 10 companies would round up to 100%. You are illiterate
It was super early and I hadn’t had my coffee yet, so I missed that detail. My overall point still stands.
Ok sorry for calling you illiterate, but yeah I do agree the title shouldn’t just be a blatant lie (even if it’s close to the truth in terms of market share)
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That’s some incredibly misleading editing of my comment which is already above so why bother. It’s just weird. I do hope you get better.
More important, as long as people keep looping all the small farms with “big ag”, especially in the US, there will never be a reasoned discourse.
We all hate big ag. More agricultural subsidies than people realize are paid by small farms (not individuals) and received by big ones.
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
It’s pretty niche. The place I go started a program to help breed pigs back down to a reasonable size. Apparently they have painful problems from being over bred, like hip dysplasia. They are networking with other small farms to breed their pigs progressively smaller and healthier.
But yeah, not really putting a dent in the factory farming problem and not accessible to most.
And as such, the headline is wrong 🤷
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.
Easy content to make. That simple.
Very dishonest click bait. Moderators should clean this stuff up in order to prevent redditification.
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.
I did look around earlier and saw that the top 4 companies controlled more than 50% of the market…add in the other six, and that is only going to increase.
https://www.iatp.org/companies-dominating-market-farm-display-case
I agree, which is why we should have a problem with articles that pretend the rest of farmers are the same as them. It just helps them because nobody is left to side with small farms.
I mean, how about this. Did you know that many of the meat and dairy subsidies that people get up-in-arms about are paid as meat- or dairy-specific taxes by farmers, and only the bigger farms reap the benefit?
Those big farms profit from the fact that they and vegans have a common enemy… small meat/dairy farms.
How do you think that translates to Meat and Dairy market? I’d imagine adding more market, that 50% is going to shrink. Definitely makes that 100% in the title seem a lot click baitier
They are 100% of the 10 companies this investigation started with.
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.
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100%
10 of the biggest
Always handy when a pop-sci article discredits itself without having to read it.
100% is 10 out of all the 10 companies they investigated.
Part of the investigation were all Meat and dairy companies which had lobbied against environmental protection bills in the past
So those who had lobbied continued to lobby? Shocking…
The article tries to make it sound like all meat and dairy companies are guilty, and then goes on to make claims about health risks of eating meat and claims about animal rights.
It’s not a meaningful argument about the environment, it’s propaganda.
I also wonder how many of them also lobbied in favor of similar policies. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s also 100% of them.
Oh no! Who could’ve known this? What’s next? Oil companies lobbying against environmental and climate policies?
Don’t worry, the headline is demonstrably false.
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.
Not really. Small farmers generally couldn’t care less about lobbying, and represent over 90% of the meat and dairy farms in the US. Literally, they cherry-picked Big Ag and the clickbait headline extrapolated conclusions about a completely different demographic.
The headline is clickbait. They are phrasing it as 100% because they mean all 10 of the companies they investigated lobbied against climate change.
As I replied elsewhere, I’d rather use the word “propaganda”. The article isn’t about the environment at all. It’s about throwing a bunch of reasons at the reader to become vegan. And clickbait headlines always put the full story in the body, but it continues to leave out the fact that 90% of the meat and dairy industry (the non-big-ag) isn’t represented in their 100% figure.
I know a lot of people are new here but this kind of shit should be moderated better… Link to the study, not someone’s blog
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
I’m pretty sure this headline is impossible
Also, medium is a blog.
Came here to say this. I have a friend that’s a meat and dairy company, and she (yup, 1 person for-profit farm) doesn’t lobby for or against shit.
That gets us under 100% already.
From reading the sub heading out looks like they mean 100% of the top ten largest
They just wanted the click bait headline
Personally, I think the moment they decided to use that picture of a cow with the headline it stopped being clickbait and started being propaganda.
And there are two reasons I know this, and can back it up.
- Not once do they mention small farms in the article to correct the obvious misleading nature. People who know nothing about agriculture will conclude the same thing as the headline. When an article is clickbait, the body is very clear about the truth of things. That didn’t happen here. Because this is about willfully misleading readers to push them towards misinformed action.
- Most of the article has nothing to do with the environment or climate. Instead, it talks about animal rights, hokey diets that involve veganism to allegedly end diabetes, and how meat is supposedly bad for you.
In summary, it’s anti-meat smut that leans on the usual 3-legged gishgallop, staying quick and shallow enough on all 3 topics to not draw an objection from readers on any of them.
Added to the filter! See yha never medium!
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. :)
Sources cited:
Citations:
[1] https://www.pcrm.org/news/blog/us-meat-and-dairy-companies-spend-millions-lobbying-against-climate-legislation
[2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22379909/big-meat-companies-spend-millions-lobbying-climate u [3] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/
[4] https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2021/march/meat-and-dairy-companies-slow-to-commit-to-net-zero-emissions--n.html
[5] https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/ceh/images/recent-news-images/The meat industry is doing exactly what Big Oil does to fight climate action - The Washington Post.pdf
[6] https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/big-meat-dairy-firms-act-collectively-to-lobby-against-climate-action-new-study-finds/
fucking meat factories are killing the animals and the goddamn planet
We need BDS but for the meat industry.
B for beef, D for… uh ducks? S for… umm. fuck…
That’s only if you believe the bull shit op-ed articles.
Oh, there is no cost to it?
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.
Did I say there’s no cost to it? And no morals? Really? If you had an argument- you lost it right there.
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Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are fucked! Difference! The planet is fine! Compared to the people, THE PLANET IS DOING GREAT: Been here four and a half billion years! Do you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years, we’ve been here what? 100,000? Maybe 200,000? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion and we have the conceit to think that somehow, we’re a threat? That somehow, we’re going to put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun? The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us: been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, sunspots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages, and we think some plastic bags and aluminum cans are going to make a difference?
The planet isn’t going anywhere… we are! We’re going away! Pack your shit folks! We’re going away and we won’t leave much of a trace either, thank God for that… maybe a little styrofoam… maybe… little styrofoam. The planet will be here, we’ll be long gone; just another failed mutation; just another closed-end biological mistake; an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance. You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people in Pompeii who are frozen into position from volcanic ash how the planet’s doing. Wanna know if the planet’s all right? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who build their homes right next to an active volcano and then wonder why they have lava in the living room?
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth plus Plastic. The Earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth! The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place: it wanted plastic for itself, didn’t know how to make it, needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old philosophical question: “Why are we here?” PLASTIC!!! ASSHOLES!!! -George Carlin
Yep, you’ve summed it up. Earth will indeed be here forever. The question is whether it will be habitable. And humans don’t seem to give a single care, as long as their life span will be over before the environment /climate poops out. And as long as they can take in money with no concern about their child, grandchildren, great-,grandchildren, and on down the line.
We can change this, we can mitigate the damage, but the powers that be refuse to acknowledge their negative impact on the future of the planet, they do not care…as long as they rake in the money.
I’ve got children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I CARE. Jesus Pete, how hard is it to see beyond the end of our own noses?
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Actually, vegan meats have won multiple blind taste tests over real meat. Google it, it’s happened on multiple occasions – in actual studies as well as DIY tests.
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Here’s an actual scientific study where participants chose fake meat over beef burgers: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0963996923003587)
While not a scientific study, we also have some funny events like:
Sausage expert, trying to prove that plant based sausage isn’t as good as the real thing, accidentally praises it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-11485203/Sausage-expert-tricked-praising-vegan-alternative.html
Professional chefs were often wrong about which meat was real and which wasn’t in blind taste test: https://www.livekindly.com/professional-chefs-cant-tell-the-difference-between-vegan-and-animal-meat-in-blind-taste-test/
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Hey everyone, this person is brilliant. Let’s get cracking on making food less yucky and producing banana commercials. Gosh, what would the world do without this? The meat and dairy industry won’t know what hit them.
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I base my actions on historical precedence. Slavery in the United States did not end by marketing abolition in a friendlier way, nor was it halted for lack of better alternatives. Civil rights were not enacted because of civil obedience.
I’m not sure it falls on the vegans to do any of this. What should really happen is that true costs are passed along for harmful diets and instead we subsidize foods that are good for you.
But I hate bananas. Can I get a peach instead?
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I don’t know under which rock you have been living, but this is exactly what has been happening at a super rapid pace the last few years. I am not sure where you are from, but where I am from the vegan sections in the supermarkets are growing super fast with new and new vegan restaurants are popping up left and right.
Take this for example: https://plantbasednews.org/news/economics/lidl-vegan-food-price-meat-equivalents/ https://plantbasednews.org/news/economics/plant-based-food-retail-sales-record/
Also, it’s always non-vegans who complain about what vegans should do. The world is dying, hundreds of millions of animals are killed each day and vegans are trying every fucking thing they can to try and stop the hurting. Let me tell you: vegans are out on the streets demonstrating, forming political parties and lobbying, transforming the food sector, doing medical research to show the (nearly entirely positive) effects of the diet, creating recipes and cookbooks, opening restaurants, helping people make the transition, doing critical animal studies, making documentaries, going undercover in slaughterhouses and factory farms, trying to get lab grown meat onto the market, arguing on the internet, etc. You’ve got no clue how much effort is being expended to try people like you to stop being part of the problem. How about you taking some responsibility? We’ll keep trying in the mean time.
Ah water is indeed wet.
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.
The entire system relies on infinite growth in a finite world, trying to find logic in it is futile, never mind ethics…
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.
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I mean, you’re probably right, but this sent me down a mental spiral that ended with “Oh boy, I can’t wait for my monthly US Communist Party ration of furry inflation porn.”
I don’t even like it, but I guess I could learn to live with it if it means stopping climate change.
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.
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?
disclaimer in 1pt font: *100% margin of error
