The petitioner asking USDA to prohibit the use of “climate friendly” claims on packages of beef said so much about a frontier for processors fraught with marketing challenges, in just one sentence.

“There is no such thing as ‘climate-friendly’ beef,” The Environmental Working Group (EWG) states flat-out in its petition.

This is the reception, in some cases, that the meat industry has gotten in recent years as it seeks a seat at the sustainability table. You’ll recall that Danish Crown, Europe’s largest pork producer, withdrew its “climate-controlled pig” claim after activists and even retail customers raised a similar stink. And that’s for pork, a product far less demonized than beef by the likes of EWG.

The meat industry’s farmers and ranchers, many representing multiple generations before them, often say they’re the ultimate stewards of the land; they were into “sustainability” long before it became cool. But the cool kids in this case see the packing sector as late-to-the-party imposters, “greenwashing” under the heavy weight of investment dollar pressure from the BlackRocks of the world.

To me, it seems the tricky part for companies like Tyson, JBS and Cargill in marketing some of their products as environmentally responsible, even as they work to improve the means by which they measure and verify their claims, is perhaps a divide between what some consumers might consider sincere intent to do right by the planet and what others will always see as a money-grabbing marketing ploy.

The more I visit companies and listen to those leading their ESG efforts, the more convinced I am of their sincere intent to improve in areas like reducing emissions and water use. These are passionate, problem-solving people. At the same time, their employers are in the business of making money too, and must find ways to recoup the expense of such environmental efforts. One new way is to get credit for their efforts in the form of premiums tied to a “climate friendly” product.

It's a tough environment, though, particularly when the skepticism around such efforts can be as thick from industry peers as it is the industry’s biggest adversaries.

I’m not sure if there is a “climate friendly” beef, for example, or how the wording on labels could be phrased to better stand up to scrutiny. But I like how Colin Beal — the cattle rancher and Ph.D who developed Low Carbon Beef, the first USDA-approved cattle GHG reduction certification program — framed it in a past interview.

Even inviting all the criticism of his methods, he said, “I don’t really worry so much about the criticism that [this program’s requirements aren’t] enough, because it’s an improvement and we can make it better from there,” Beal says. “It’s a perfect’s-the-enemy-of-good type of a situation.”

If the global community seeks a reduction in GHG emissions to combat the effects of climate change, it will have to leverage such efforts — and what is possible — rather than vilify them and write them off as impossible.

It’s not easy being green

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