While billed as a landmark win for the environmental cause, the Biden administration’s climate bill signed late last summer wasn’t nearly what many Democrats first hoped it would be. In fact, its passage hinged on major concessions to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), a coal company owner whose pivotal vote required language that boosts the fossil fuel industry.

By some reads of headlines pairing Biden’s name with climate change, the bill’s passage still reflected a government run amok in the liberal pursuit of unrealistic, aggressive green goals. But those reads neglected the fact that the package deal gave the oil and gas industries a windfall of new drilling leases.

The contradiction of the goals and actual outcome of the bill speaks to the give-and-take nature not only of politics, but also of the wide world of “sustainability.” It’s a place in which stakeholders, including meat processors, see-saw between consumer and industry expectations. We see in these developments, as well as in a big chunk of the pages in the most recent issue of our magazine, that the fights are worth fighting — and, sometimes, both sides are winning.

Among the reasons we chose Jensen Meat Co. and its CEO, Abel Olivera, as the 2023 honorees for our annual Richard L. Knowlton Award was their ability to lead and succeed in meat and plant-based protein processing. While they’re two industries often in conflict, the culture Olivera has established at Jensen rises above it, leveraging and uniting them in a core purpose: feeding people.

Sustainability has many definitions, facets and dynamics. But all of it means little without addressing the alarming challenge of sustaining food. Jason Weller, JBS’ chief sustainability officer, summed it up at the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef’s global conference in Denver: In order to feed an estimated global population of 10 billion people by 2050, the world’s food production system will have to produce as many calories in the next 30 years as it did in the preceding 10,000 years.

No doubt the conventional animal protein industry has some heavy lifting to do, but there’s also no question that it can’t go it alone. There’s little time for political divides. The time is now for solutions that leverage the strengths of and lift all boats, rather than traditional, political thinking that moors them to a dock alone on an island.

Jensen is an example of the critical role that its native industry can play in using its indisputable strengths — scale, operational prowess, data use, and R&D — to boost the production and appeal of alternative meats.

For Congress to help in cutting GHG emissions, it cut a deal with a prime GHG emitter. Perhaps it makes sense there’s been scant progress in those efforts, which was the main, anticlimactic takeway of COP 27.

But then progress requires trade-offs. New landscapes aren’t formed without friction.

Editor's note: This article ran as the Editorial in the January issue of Meatingplace.

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