Article by Eric Worrell
“…Organizations like the WWF are laundering money for the meat industry’s propaganda. …”
How the most powerful environmental group is helping green Big Meat's climate impact
Organizations like the WWF are whitewashing the meat industry’s propaganda. What's the fare?
By Kenny Torreira August 7, 2024 8:00 PM GMT+10
Kenny Torreira is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, focusing on animal welfare and the future of meat.…
The Denver meeting led to the formation of a new organization: the Global Sustainable Beef Roundtable, a network of beef processors, fast-food chains and other industry stakeholders, and has since hosted more than a dozen national and regional roundtables. …
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In fast food terms, it's all steamed buns, no beef. Yet for more than a decade, McDonald's and other food giants, along with the meat lobby, have viewed the roundtable as evidence they are serious about climate change.
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None of this is surprising—it’s much the same denial-and-deflection strategy employed by Big Oil to avoid taking responsibility for climate change, with help from the usual suspects: industry-aligned academics, front groups, loyal Politicians and social media influencers.
But among these allies there are groups yes What’s surprising: some of the world’s largest environmental organizations.
Take the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for example, a green giant with over $600 million in assets. Both WWF and McDonald's were founding members of the Beef Roundtable, and the two have since collaborated on other beef-related projects. In fact, the inaugural conference in 2010 was officially called the WWF Sustainable Beef Global Conference. (WWF helped establish similar roundtables for the poultry and soybean industries (much of which is used to raise farmed animals), as well as seafood certification programs.)
For its cooperation, McDonald's ensured that WWF received generous compensation; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.
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Learn more: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/362224/environment-groups-meat-industry-lies-global-warming-climate-change-wwf
My first thought was, I had no idea a McDonald's burger contained any meat.
Jokes aside, journalist Kenny Torreira goes on to say in the article that raising beef is an opportunity cost of carbon sequestration or producing other foods. But cattle can be raised on land that is completely worthless—land close to the desert that cannot support other forms of food production. In my view, the claim that reducing beef production will increase food supply is questionable and contains the very dubious assumption that land withdrawn from beef production can be used for other productive purposes.
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