Meat is a leading emissions source – but few outlets report on it, analysis finds | Greenhouse gas emissions

Food and agriculture contribute to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions – just after the fire of fossil fuels. And yet, the vast majority of the media coverage of the climate crisis neglects this critical sector, according to a new analysis of Senient Media data.

The results suggest that only about a quarter of the climatic items in 11 major American points of sale, including the Guardian, mention food and agriculture as a cause. And of the 940 articles analyzed, only 36 – or 3.8% – mentioned animal agriculture or the production of meat, by far the largest source of emissions related to food.

The data reveal a media environment which obscures a key engine of the climate crisis. Meat production alone is responsible for almost 60% of climate emissions from the food sector and yet its impact is cruelly underestimated: a Washington Post / University of Maryland survey in 2023 found that 74% of American respondents think that eating less meat has little or no effect on the climate crisis.

Sentient Media analyzed the most recent online articles on climate change compared to 11 major American points of sale – The Guardian, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, Reuters, Star Tribune, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The elements of opinion, the unionized stories and the articles which mention climate change only by the way have been excluded.

The last group of 940 stories was collected using artificial intelligence, then examined individually for precision. Of all the causes questioned in the report, in particular mining, manufacturing and production of energy (55.9%); fossil fuels (47.9%); And transport (34%), livestock and meat consumption have been discussed by far.

The editor -in -chief of Sentient Media, Jenny Splitter, who helped supervise the report, said that she had long noticed omission as a journalist covering the intersection of the climate and food. “We thought that a way of starting the conversation with other journalists and editorial rooms was to put figures on the issue,” she said.

Mark Hertsgaard, executive director and co -founder of Covering Climate Now, a non -profit organization that helps the editorial rooms to strengthen their climate reports, said that daily media have trouble emphasizing the deep causes of climate change – often focusing on incremental updates on the why.

“It is not necessarily harmful,” he said. “But as the climate crisis has accelerated, it is increasingly unwavering for the media coverage of climate change so as not to indicate that this crisis is motivated by very specific human activities – mainly fossil fuels. And in second place is food, agriculture, forestry.”

Hertsgaard, who reported the climate crisis since 1990, said that food and agriculture have long been “gross surveillance” in climatic circles. The top of the United Nations climate change did not have a dedicated agricultural orientation before 2015, reflecting its neglected status in the world of decision -makers, thinktanks and NGOs – which have contributed to the illiteracy of the media on the subject, said Hertsgaard.

Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of The Food-Systems concentrated Thinktank Clim-Eat, said that climate organizations sometimes turn away from the subject due to the heavy cultural status of food, which may have helped keep it media projectors.

“No one wants to get there and tell people what to eat-it’s just too sensitive,” he said. “Even in the [climate advocacy] The space, we see that it is quite polarizing. »»

This tension is not always so organic. When a 2019 report published by Lancet showed how reduced meat diets could feed the world without causing an environmental break, an industry -supported coalition has contributed to finance part of the counterpoup. The beef industry groups adopt an active approach to messaging, in particular the staff endowment of a 24/7 “order center” in Denver which scans social media for negative stories and deploys counter-mesing.

Journalist Michael Grunwald said that the food conversation today was lagging around twenty years behind the energy and fossil conversation. He has spent years covering climatic problems for points of sale, including Time, Politico and the Washington Post before starting to see the links between food on our plates and changes in the atmosphere.

“I didn’t know squat,” he said. “Here is this important part of the climate equation of which I was spectacularly ignorant. And I realized that the others were probably too. ”

Grunwald’s new book, We Are Ming The Earth, unpacks how food choices shape the surface of the planet, playing a massive role in its ultimate fate. This is partly due to the fact that the cattle of ruminants – in particular cattle – is a major source of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, which warms the planet 80 times faster than carbon dioxide.

But feeding billions of farm animals also occupies a lot of space. Half of the habitable land of the earth are already devoted to agriculture, and most of that – about 80% – is the pasture of pastures and cultivated land for animal food, which makes meat consumption a major deforestation engine in the world. Today, we clean up the value of a tropical forest football field every six seconds, a loss has endeavored spectacularly by the increasing hunger of humanity meat.

“When you eat a hamburger, you don’t only eat a cow,” said Gruunwald. “You eat pacaws and jaguars and the rest of the Rio distribution. You eat the Amazon. You eat the earth.”

And yet, this toll tends to be widely understood, when it is not completely ignored. Only around 15% of the stories analyzed by sensitive media mention the changes in land in relation to the climate crisis.

Princeton’s principal researcher Timothy Searchinger has spent decades that we cannot solve the climate problem without rethinking the way we use land.

“Each tree, after having released the water, is around 50% carbon. Thus, forests store large amounts of carbon,” he said. “If we continue to clean the forests, we have the capacity to considerably increase climate change.”

This conversion of the forest to agricultural land has an unthinkable toll, a global manager for as much carbon emissions each year as all of the United States. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to increase from 8 billion to 10 billion by 2050. Thus, setting the climate crisis will mean cultivating more food with less emissions on the same amount of land – or, ideally, even fewer land.

“There is in a way no way to solve the problems of land use in the world unless there is moderation of diets – meat consumption, in particular beef – in the developed world,” said Searchinger.

If the consumption of meat of ruminants in rich countries such as the United States refused to approximately 1.5 burgers per week per week – about half of what it is now, still well above the national average for most countries – which alone would almost eliminate the need for additional deforestation due to agricultural expansion, even in a world with 10 billion people, according to an analysis of the World Resources Institute.

Although she acknowledges that the 3.8% figure is low, Jessica Fanzo, a climate teacher at Columbia University, said that she had not blamed the media as much as the challenge of translating scientific consensus into a real action – a structural blockage that has made progress, and therefore the more difficult narration.

“Governments are hesitant to push hard on food changes, cattle emissions or dependence on fertilizers because they trigger cultural sensitivities and risk risking political counterpouss,” she said by email. She also said that it was difficult to take action on the vast decentralized agricultural sector. The climate lawyer and the author Bill McKibben agreed, highlighting in the comments sent by e-mail that 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for most global programs, while food comes down to the actions of millions of farmers.

Meanwhile, American agriculture policy is mainly intended to accelerate the production of basic grains and animal feeding thanks to subsidies – an approach that prioritizes cheap calories on reducing carbon emissions. And solutions available on demand, such as meat taxes or meatless Monday in public schools, risks touching a third cultural rail.

But in this divided environment, the media can play a crucial role, said David McBey, a behavioral scientist from the University of Aberdeen focused on links with the food climate.

“Information campaigns do not change behavior,” he said. “But they put an important base. If you want behavior to change, it is important that people know Why It should change.