Politico: The Red Meat Issue Biden Won’t Touch

Joe Biden isn’t going to go there.

You have his word as a Biden that he will not cave to the progressive activists who are pressuring him to tackle America’s meat obsession. He isn’t going to ban red meat in order to reduce carbon emissions to achieve his own climate goals by 2030. It is fake news. It is a total nothingburger.

Politico:

“President Joe Biden is not going to ban red meat. In fact, his administration isn’t doing much to confront the flow of harmful greenhouse gases from the very big business of animal agriculture.

The Agriculture Department’s newly published “climate-smart agriculture and forestry” outline says almost nothing about how Biden aims to curb methane emissions from livestock operations. But environmentalists argue that any effort to shrink the farm industry’s climate footprint is half-baked if it relies on voluntary efforts and doesn’t address America’s system of meat production. …

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is largely focused on offering new financial incentives for farmers and ranchers to adopt more climate-friendly practices. In terms of livestock emissions, Vilsack touts innovations like feed additives that reduce the potency of an animal’s gas and feces, or digester systems that capture methane fumes from manure pits and convert them into a source of energy.

Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit environmental group, argues that such methods only have marginal benefits for the environment.

“There’s simply too much meat and dairy being produced right now for any of those small tweaks to get the emissions reductions that we need,” she said. “There are so many policies, from dietary guidelines to what school meals are reimbursed, to agricultural loans and government purchases, that are currently promoting overproduction of meat — and all of that needs to change.”

It’s not just Biden’s farm chief who is treading carefully on livestock emissions: John Kerry, the president’s special climate envoy, rejected the idea that the government will eventually have to tell Americans to eat less meat. …

On the other side, more progressive lawmakers are pushing for USDA to take a tougher stance on large-scale livestock production.

“For too long we’ve relied on an extractive, exploitative form of corporate agriculture, with lots of negative consequences,” House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro said at a recent hearing on USDA research programs.

The Connecticut Democrat cited a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found that nearly 16,000 Americans die each year from air pollution caused by food production — primarily meat, dairy and crops used for animal feed. The findings, which industry groups dispute, suggest that shifting America’s diet more toward plant-based foods could reduce such deaths by as much as 83 percent. …

A policy paper from the nonprofit Climate Advisers and the Good Food Institute, which advocates for alternative meats, says a “global protein transition” is needed to reach the goals in the Paris climate agreement. Speeding up the adoption of alternative meats while making the existing system more efficient could make a bigger dent in cutting global emissions than switching to electric vehicles, according to the report. …”

It is going to be different this time.

There isn’t going to be a slippery slope in your grocery store.

They are drawing the line at minding your business at your refrigerator and your grill. You don’t have to worry about the proposed “global protein transition” to alternative meats.

Currently, the Biden administration is using the carrot, not the stick, to reduce carbon emissions from industrial animal agriculture. They are relying on “voluntary conservation programs that provide financial incentives to land owners to retire environmentally sensitive land from farm or livestock production or to adopt practices on land still in production to help sequester carbon or to reduce other greenhouse gas emissions.” This is not going to cut it though.

Washington Post:

“It didn’t take long for fact-checkers to expose that right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, were wrong to claim that President Biden is plotting to ban or cut back on beef consumption to address climate change. The administration was just as quick to distance itself from the idea that it had any plans to even suggest people eat less meat.

That’s a shame. Lowering meat consumption should be in the president’s climate agenda. In return, Americans would get more delicious plant-based foods and a more sustainable future. …

Panic over the idea that Biden might storm into people’s kitchens and confiscate their steaks is laughable. Aside from insufficient tweaks such as feed additives to reduce methane produced by livestock and voluntary incentives for adopting practices to sequester carbon in the soil, Biden’s climate plans so far ignore agriculture, even though it accounts for 10 percent of U.S. emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Beef production is responsible for one-third of those emissions. Worldwide, food accounts for as much as 37 percent of emissions, with more than 40 percent coming from beef.

Americans eat four times the global average of beef. This is particularly troubling since domestic livestock animals and their manure are responsible for more U.S. methane emissions than any other industry. Those emissions, which have much higher warming potential than carbone dioxide, have been increasing, even as the importance of reducing methane gained recognition. Since 1990, methane emissions from manure alone have risen 68 percent. We can’t meet climate goals without reducing meat and dairy consumption. …”

The same people who recklessly dissolved the border, who imposed draconian lockdowns which destroyed countless small businesses, who insist on wearing masks after they have been vaccinated to signal other people in their social class, who have glorified criminals and undermined the police, who only wanted to “punch Nazis” and not anyone else on the Right, who have Amazon ban the Confederate flag and books which they find offensive, who form social media mobs to destroy people for saying the wrong words on the internet, who educate your kids to hate themselves for being born White in the public schools, who banned menthols, who pushed “trans” and gender fluidity into our culture, who moved with lightning speed to raise gas prices, who have sent inflation soaring, who celebrate lawless mobs who topple monuments and vandalize small businesses, who censored Donald Trump and hundreds of thousands of his followers off the internet, who have weaponized the intelligence agencies and the national security state to trample on your civil liberties, who want to go after your guns and the gas guzzling truck in your front yard ARE NOT going to intervene in the food supply chain to decide what you can eat.

Note: Joe has already caved on refugee resettlement.