Ever the optimist, President Joe Biden has issued a decree that electric vehicles (EV) must comprise at least 30% of all vehicle sales by 2032 (as reported in Politico, April 12, 2023). Similarly, Biden had offered independent US farmers $1 billion in aid announced in his 2022 State of the Union address as part of a battle against meatpacking giants he accuses of building monopolies to squeeze out smaller competitors. Later that year, such a $1 billion tranche from American Rescue Plan funds started flowing to smaller, independent beef processors to help them “expand capacity and increase their competitiveness.”

With his EV edict, President Biden is attempting to lower greenhouse gases (GHG) with restrictions on the gas guzzling and resultant carbon dioxide emissions of the internal combustion engines of our country’s transportation fleets. In my view, the crux of his edicts favoring EVs is a necessary if not mandatory method to chill the effects of carbon dioxide emitting fossil fuel burning vehicles. The auto industry’s response has been relatively proactive, with some major car manufacturers initiating their own programs of converting the majority of the vehicles they produce and sell to EVs. Being proactive is something we in the meat industry should replicate.

My concern is that we will witness a similar presidential restrictive edict to reduce beef industry GHG methane emissions. I view Biden’s EV mandate as part and parcel of a greater effort needed to curb the growing carbon dioxide-induced warming of the atmosphere and subsequent destruction of our environment. And we in the meat industry may be the next target for Biden’s emission edicts.

Climate change is real, as evidenced in part by the past few years’ increasingly destructive weather phenomena. We have seen the warming effect of GHG on glacial melting beyond what was predicted just a few years ago. The whiplashing storms traversing the US and alternating droughts and floods also seem to have increased the last few years. The combustion of fossil fuels such as gasoline and diesel to transport people and goods was the largest source of CO2 emissions in 2020, accounting for about 33% of total U.S. CO2 emissions and 26% of total U.S. GHG emissions. (Source: www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases)

What can the meat industry do about its own atmospheric warming GHG emissions? It is estimated and certainly debated that the ruminant animals of our beef industry, with their cud-chewing and subsequent belching, contribute nearly 14% of the total methane emissions into the atmosphere. Methane is at least twice as bad for the environment as the much more prevalent carbon dioxide. The only saving grace is that when compared to the internal combustion engine’s CO2 emissions releasing nearly 26% of total carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the fact that methane lasts half as long as carbon dioxide, our industry may have less overall effect but a greater immediate one.

Instead of a full-throated total meat industry effort to curb methane emissions, we have seen only intermittent attempts at developing alternative feeds and feeding regimens. This must change or we may become vulnerable to a presidential edict. Because of the beef industry methane emissions coupled with Biden’s consolidation argument, I worry we are positioned to have imposed upon us a decree for action.

To avoid such a presidential-imposed limit, we must prove to those final arbiters of our success, meat consumers, that we have and are taking the “bull by the horns” by addressing our “contributions” to climate change with efforts to reduce if not eliminate methane emissions from the cud-chewing, four-stomached ruminants that are our industry’s raison d'être.

Simply put, we need science-based results to develop and implement an industry-wide effort curbing methane emissions not just to avoid being told to do so, but because it is the right thing to do. And, just as importantly, if not more so, to prove to the consuming public that we are not just the competition-stifling, consolidated industry of big beef behemoths, but that we, too, can be caring environmentalists.

We are not only “talking the talk but walking the walk” of developing total industry curbs to atmospheric-warming and climate-changing ruminant animal “tail pipe” emissions.

Could the meat industry be the subject of the next presidential edict?

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