Politico: The Red Meat Issue Biden Won’t Touch

Joe Biden isn’t going there.

You have his word as a Biden that he will not cave to the progressive activists who are itching 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.

The same people who recklessly dissolved the border, who have glorified criminals and undermined the police, who educate your kids to hate themselves in the public schools, who pushed “trans” and gender fluidity into our culture, who moved with lightning speed to raise gas prices, 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.