Agriculture Needs to Change to Address the Climate Crisis

But too much of the effort just reinforces the unhealthy industrial animal agriculture system.

By Steve Roach, Safe and Healthy Food Program Director.

FACT supports a just transition away from our current system of producing meat because it is unhealthy, inhumane, and terrible for the environment. One of the many environmental harms of the industrial model of meat production and likely the most important in the long term is its contribution to climate change. FACT supports shifting away from the current approach to animal agriculture through policies that increase support for pasture-based animal agriculture, including regenerative grazing, that regulate pollution from giant livestock raising facilities, and that address inequities in the food system. You can read more about our approach to climate change in our position paper. We also oppose policies that further entrench the current industrial agriculture system. Three recent reports describe approaches to climate change that likely provide little climate benefit and instead just prop up the current unhealthy system.

Before spending money on efforts to fight climate change, and there are tens of billions of public dollars going to agriculture for climate, you should make sure it actually will help and that it will help more than spending that money on other things. As an example of how spending money on climate change can go wrong think about planting a forest to capture carbon from the air. This can work but it is not a sure thing. First, your efforts actually have to capture carbon. If you plant a bunch of trees but do not water them and they all die, you are not helping with climate change. Your efforts also have to be permanent. If you plant trees but then a drought comes and kills all your mature trees and they burn up in a forest fire, you have not helped with climate change.

The next two issues -  additionality and leakage are a little more complicated. If you are planting a forest to protect your town’s water supply, that benefit is already there, so paying the town to plant the same forest to fight climate change won’t get you any additional benefit since the town was already doing it. Those dollars are better spent doing something else. Leakage occurs when your actions to solve a problem cause the problem to get worse elsewhere. If you plant the forest on grazing land, but the rancher then clears a new forest to graze those cattle this is leakage. Leakage can make the problem worse since you have the climate cost of both planting the new forest and clearing the other forest. When people are paid to take climate action there is also the problem of double dipping. If the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pays you to plant a forest to fight climate change, it does not make sense for you to then get paid by an airline in a pollution trading scheme so they can claim they are fighting climate change. You were already paid for the climate benefit of those trees so paying again does not create an improvement in the climate. You and the airline benefit, but the climate does not get improved by the additional dollars. Finally, there is a justice component to climate change. If you kick people out of their homes to plant your forest, then your climate solution is harming people and very often these are the most vulnerable people since they live where land is cheap.

Now let’s look at the three recent examples of bad approaches to fighting climate. FACT’s allies Friends of the Earth and the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project released a new report on producing methane gas from factory farms. Their report shows that the USDA and other climate-fighting agencies promoting biogas production are further entrenching the unsustainable factory farm system. Paying farms for methane enables them to get bigger and more concentrated, creating even more environmental problems. The increase in size reduces the impact of the effort and makes other problems such as water pollution and the inhumane treatment of cattle worse. Adding new cows to a farm for the climate dollars is an example of leakage – each cow is a source of pollution so adding more adds to the problem. The additional other pollution (e.g., water and air) is an equity problem since it impacts the people living near the dairy. There are also problems with knowing how effective these biogas facilities are and problems with double dipping.

The second bad climate approach is described in a report from FACT’s friends at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). EWG looked at activities that the USDA recently added to a list of climate-smart practices that the agency would pay for through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). Almost nine billion dollars has been allocated to pay farmers to implement these practices but as EWG shows many of them are unlikely to actually help reduce climate change. EWG specifically called out the funding of practices that benefit large livestock confinement facilities.

The last bad climate solution is a pollution trading scheme created by the animal drug maker Elanco and the giant dairy cooperative Dairy Farmers of America. The pollution trading scheme allows giant dairy farms that feed Elanco’s growth-promoting drug monensin to claim that the growth promotion benefits count towards making dairy products good for the planet. This ignores the huge amount of pollution including methane and other greenhouse gasses produced by the dairy industry. This one has huge problems with additionality. The dairies were already using the growth promoter since it reduces their feed cost. It may help Elanco boost sales of its drugs but that is not a climate benefit. The climate dollars may also lead the dairies to expand, so more leakage.

Climate change is a very real problem but it is also becoming an excuse to spend money to prop up the industrial animal agriculture system. FACT is fighting for an alternative – the humane and healthy production of animals on pasture.