Imagine someone offered you a clever accounting hack that would make your student loan disappear. It would wipe away your mortgage with the flourish of a pen. In fact, this metric would reverse the books, so that the bank now owes you money. Sounds too good to be true? That’s because it is.

This is basically what the meat and dairy industry wants us to believe is possible when it comes to their climate pollution. They want to change the way their pollution is calculated, so it seems like they’re solving the problem. In reality, they’re the ones creating the problem. You shouldn’t buy the meat and dairy industry’s hype – and here’s why.

Does meat and dairy cause climate change?

Yes, the meat and dairy industry causes climate change. In fact, it is the single biggest source of methane emissions. Methane is responsible for about a third of all global warming to date.

Over the last two centuries numbers of cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens have exploded. The consequences of that have been major impacts on animal welfare, pollution from animal urine and faeces contaminating lakes, rivers, and drinking water, enormous amounts of deforestation. But it has also resulted in damage to the atmosphere we rely on for liveable temperatures and predictable seasons.

The gases produced by the livestock industry are upsetting the balance of the atmosphere. In particular we’re talking about methane, which comes from the burps and farts of animals like cows and sheep, as well as pig and chicken effluent. These superheating gases are cooking the climate faster than carbon dioxide – and we all pay the price.

So why is methane pollution from meat and dairy such a big issue?

Because of the massive boom in livestock production, concentrations of methane in the atmosphere are around two and a half times higher than they were before industrialisation. And they are still rising.

Reducing methane from the meat and dairy industry is a critical lever that will influence how quickly or slowly the world heats up in the near-term. To get there, the world needs to reduce livestock production. We need far fewer cows, pigs, sheep and chickens. We need to replace some of the milk and meat we eat with plant-based protein, grown in ways that nourish the land instead of depleting it. Doctors agree that this would have the added bonus of making us a lot healthier.

But this goes against the meat and dairy industries’ efforts to expand production. Because it’s become impossible to ignore their emissions and the need to restrict them, they’ve come up with a new concept to escape climate action scrutiny: no additional warming.

What is no additional warming?

The livestock industry wants us all to eat more meat and dairy. They are spending billions on advertising campaigns to encourage it. Climate change (and health for that matter) is an inconvenient truth. And, much like the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry before them, the livestock industry is working hard to wriggle out of any accountability.

Cue no additional warming: the convenient get out of jail free card for the livestock industry. Through a clever accounting trick, the industry suggests that they don’t actually need to cut pollution at all. In fact, they argue, livestock farming is good for the climate.

Say what?

Based on a tool developed by industry-friendly academics, meat and dairy companies are essentially misapplying a mathematical metric to try to argue that they can get out of jail free.

What is GWP*?

GWP stands for Global Warming Potential. It’s a way of making different greenhouse gases comparable with each other. By using GWP, you can compare methane to carbon dioxide. Different greenhouse gases have different lifetimes in the atmosphere. So the timeline you measure over makes all the difference. Right now, methane is measured over a 100 year timeframe or a 20 year timeframe. These are known as GWP100 and GWP20 respectively.

What the livestock industry wants us to do with GWP* is to forget past emissions altogether and only measure additional warming. They want us to ignore the absolutely massive boom in livestock numbers over the last couple hundred years. Instead, they say we should only measure additional pollution from basically today onwards.

Importantly, they also want us to measure every little drop in pollution from today’s baseline. Why? So that they can record it as negative emissions. And so, climate villains can be turned into climate saviours, with a simple trick of mathematics.

Would you stand by and watch a house burn down?

Climate change is like a raging house fire, and the meat and dairy industry’s methane pollution is a stream of petrol pouring onto the flames. With no additional warming and GWP*, the meat and dairy industry is asking us to ignore the house fire. Instead they’re telling us to focus on measuring how much new petrol they’re pouring onto the flames.

Any sane person would turn off the petrol pump and scramble to put out the fire. It’s burning up our only home, and our kids are inside.

But the livestock industry wants us to turn on the tunnel vision and watch the meter tick up and down. They’ve turned a moral choice about how many lives we’re going to save into a theoretical mathematical experiment.

Convenient for the meat and dairy industry. A disaster for millions of people and creatures who will suffer the impacts of extreme heat, floods, landslides and fires.

Does Old McDonald still have a farm?

Those of us who grew up speaking English learned that Old McDonald had a farm, but the reality of modern meat and dairy production is less rustic. The vast majority of meat and dairy products we consume are processed by major corporations. Those corporations use huge amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides as well as vast industrial processes to make our food.

That industrialisation has gone hand-in-hand with consolidation. More and more family farmers are selling up to big corporations as the cost of competing with industrial-scale farms goes up. Nowadays, the meat and dairy industry is primarily made up of multi-billion dollar corporations that treat millions of animals and farmers as inputs into the production process, used to turn a profit for shareholders. The top ten meat processing companies control 75%, 70% and 53% of the slaughter of beef, pork and chicken respectively. Less Old McDonald. More Monopoly Man.

Ultimately, these are huge businesses with millions of dollars to spend on their own science, on professional political lobbyists and on massive marketing campaigns. Just like the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry before them, they are deploying these resources to downplay their impact on the climate, the environment and people’s health. It’s all about thwarting any regulation so they can carry on producing more and more meat and dairy products without restrictions – and that’s exactly why they want to introduce GWP*.

Is GWP* and no additional warming right for New Zealand?

No. GWP* is not right for measuring and comparing emissions from any country or company. But we now have a former livestock industry lobbyist in the New Zealand Government. ACT MP Andrew Hoggard was, up until 2023, President of Federated Farmers. He was one of the driving forces behind pushing no additional warming and GWP*. Federated Farmers’ report was roundly criticised by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, but Hoggard pushed ahead with getting it into ACT’s coalition agreement with National.

The National Party traditionally represents farmers but now sees it’s at risk of losing votes to ACT. So National is working hard to win back the favour of the farming sector – from looking to adopt GWP*, to the Prime Minister himself joining Federated Farmers’ Restoring Farmer Confidence Tour in 2024. It is virtually unheard of for the Prime Minister to align themself so closely with a lobby group. And we should all be questioning that out loud.

The battle of the Climate Commission vs. the Methane Review Panel on GWP*

Setting emissions targets is the job of the independent Climate Change Commission. This commission was specifically set up to provide evidence-based recommendations, grounded in science and independent of politics. 

But here’s the thing. No additional warming has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. The officials advising government ministers on the issue of methane and GWP* have said so right from the get-go. So the Government had to set up a separate Methane Review Panel, with very strict terms of reference and industry-friendly panellists, to be able to get the answer it wanted. This is both very unusual and quite extraordinary.

The Methane Review Panel report and the Climate Change Commission report both dropped in December 2024, literally within 24 hours of each other. And they had very different conclusions on the question of methane.

The politically-independent, science-based Climate Change Commission said we need to strengthen our methane target. Based on the latest science, we need to take bolder action to cut livestock emissions if we’re to pass on a liveable future to our kids.

The industry-aligned, specially-appointed Methane Review Panel said that we could reduce our methane target if we base it on no additional warming. Specifically, if the rest of the world doesn’t work hard to cut emissions, we don’t have to either. In other words, we can join the crowd in condemning our children to an unlivable future. That’s what happens when you’re laser focused on measuring the wrong thing.

New Zealand is at a climate turning point

Now the Government must review both reports and make a decision on GWP* and no additional warming. Technically they have 12 months to decide but it could be sooner. And so much hangs on which path New Zealand will follow.

For a number of years, livestock lobbyists have actively been drilling the no additional warming message into policymakers in Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and the European Union. They are watching this moment carefully to see whether New Zealand will make the first move.

If New Zealand legitimises this clever accounting trick in policy, a domino effect could follow. The consequence? Livestock companies and their enabling governments will essentially write off methane emissions from meat and dairy, severely undermining our ability to slow global warming and avoid dangerous climate tipping points.

It’s time for the meat and dairy industry to be accountable for its pollution

Clever accounting can’t magic away debt and the livestock industry isn’t exempt from the laws of physics. The meat and dairy herd has exploded to such a size that it has become one of the biggest drivers of global heating, with real consequences for people’s lives today and into the future.

Big meat and dairy has borrowed from our children’s future and now it’s time for them to pay back the debt. It’s time to stop livestock expansion, reduce herds and transition to more plant-based ecological farming. The industry should be required to fund the transition to ways of farming that cut climate pollution and help us adapt to a climate-changed world.

We can have a farming sector that serves rural communities, instead of big business. We can have agricultural systems that work within a restored natural environment. And we can begin to cool the climate to liveable temperatures and predictable seasons so that our children and theirs can grow nutritious food long into the future. The only way to get there is to confront the power of big agribusiness.

Join us in calling on Fonterra to end their use of palm kernel, and find out more about how you can take action to confront big meat and dairy.

Landcover, forest clearance and plantation development in PT Megakarya Jaya Raya (PT MJR) palm oil concession. PT MJR is part of the Hayel Saeed Anam group which has a number of palm oil related interests including Pacific Inter-Link which controls HSA's palm oil refining and trading interests.
PETITION: Stop Fonterra using Palm Kernel

Call on Fonterra to end the use of rainforest destroying palm kernel on its farms by banning palm kernel in the Farmers’ Terms of Supply.

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