How America’s Cattlemen Fought the Science of Cow Methane for a Decade

In the mid-1980s, atmospheric science quietly expanded the map of climate responsibility. Researchers had long focused on carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, but new studies revealed that methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 per unit of mass, was rising steadily in the atmosphere, and that a surprising share came from the digestive systems of cattle. In 1986, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and colleagues published a global analysis estimating that cattle accounted for roughly three-quarters of methane produced by animals. That same year, James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee and noted that non-CO2 greenhouse gases were adding to the greenhouse effect at a rate comparable to carbon dioxide itself. For the first time, the beef industry, not just the oil industry, appeared on the ledger of global warming.

A new study by Jennifer Jacquet and Loredana Loy of the University of Miami, published in PLOS Climate, examines how the National Cattlemen’s Association, the oldest and largest trade association for U.S. cattlemen, responded to this emerging science between 1986 and 1996. Drawing on 154 internal organizational documents from the association’s archives at the American Heritage Center in Wyoming, along with media coverage and government reports, the researchers reconstructed a decade-long campaign in which the industry treated global warming not as an environmental problem to be mitigated, but as a public relations threat to consumer demand. Strikingly, the authors found no evidence that the association ever researched or promoted any of the emissions-reduction options that federal scientists had laid out.

The stakes were scientifically significant. Methane absorbs thermal infrared radiation far more efficiently than carbon dioxide, making it roughly 80 times stronger per unit mass over a 20-year timescale. In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency convened a workshop on methane emissions from livestock and published a report concluding that managed livestock, particularly ruminants, accounted for some 15 to 20 percent of annual methane emissions. Crucially, a representative of the cattlemen’s association, Richard Neal, attended that workshop, and the report stated that its findings reflected consensus among all attendees. The EPA report also catalogued practical opportunities to reduce emissions: alternative feeding practices, feed additives, nutrient supplements, manure management, and even revisions to the U.S. meat grading system so that leaner, lower-emission meat would not be penalized.

Yet the real threat to the industry, as the association saw it, came not from regulation, which never materialized, but from voluntary dietary change. Civil society campaigns were urging Americans to eat less beef, partly on climate grounds. John Robbins’s bestselling 1987 book Diet for a New America linked meat consumption to global warming, and Jeremy Rifkin launched the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation in 1989 and the Beyond Beef campaign in 1992, which called on consumers in 16 countries to cut their beef consumption in half. Internal association documents show the organization understood exactly what was at stake. Its 1989 Strategic Plan on the Environment, a 17-page document listing 22 environmental issues relevant to the cattle industry, including atmospheric emissions, laid out a plan to counter the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation by circulating what it called factual information, working with legislative influencers, and commissioning position papers from scientific experts.

The centerpiece of the industry’s response was what public relations scholars call third-party validation. At a 1991 convention in Dallas, an executive from Edelman Public Relations advised the association to disseminate technical information to academics and policymakers who would become third-party spokespersons, repeating industry messages with a credibility the industry itself could not achieve. But the association was already ahead of that advice. By the end of 1989 it had contracted Floyd M. Byers, an animal scientist at Texas A&M University, who produced reports, op-eds, and media statements that reframed the science of cattle methane. His reports contained no methods section, were not reproducible, and do not appear to have been peer-reviewed, yet they generated a statistic that would echo through mainstream media for years.

That statistic was the claim that methane from all U.S. beef cattle amounted to less than 0.5 percent of global methane emissions. The figure appeared in a 1990 New York Times article that opened with the line, In America, the cow is on trial, and in a USA Today op-ed titled Eating meat won’t harm the environment. The mechanics of the number reveal its fragility. Byers appears to have used as his denominator the total of all methane sources, both anthropogenic ones like rice paddies and natural ones like tundra and wetlands, whereas the EPA had focused only on the anthropogenic emissions humans could actually control. His numerator counted only U.S. beef cattle, excluding dairy cows, and multiplied by an undisclosed emissions factor that appears to have been lower than reliable estimates of the time. Michael Gibbs, lead author of the EPA report, told the Times that the figure was rather low and emphasized the importance of global emissions. Notably, the association’s own representative had sat in the workshop where the EPA’s much larger consensus estimate was produced, and there is no record of anyone contesting it there.

The association amplified the 0.5 percent figure through newsletters, press releases, and paid media analysts. It hired the firm CARMA, computer-aided research and media analysis, to track how its talking points were landing. A 1991 CARMA report found that among 196 news articles referencing methane emissions, 25 had adopted the claim that U.S. beef accounted for only 0.5 percent of global methane. The association even commissioned a report from Harvard economist Robert Stavins and colleague David Reishus, The Real Economics of Beef Production, which opened with the statement that calls for curtailing domestic beef production were unwarranted, and repeated the 0.5 percent figure while citing Byers. The association also spent $100,000 of Beef Board funds on a full-page advertisement, Every Day is Earth Day for American Cattlemen, which ran in USA Today and the New York Times and reached an estimated 20 million readers around Earth Day 1990.

Beyond minimizing its own emissions, the association deployed a four-pronged discursive strategy that researchers classify as challenging the problem, the causation, the policy, and the messengers. Its newsletters ran articles titled No Global Warming and No Global Warming Threat, and spokespeople told reporters that scientists continued to debate whether warming was occurring. When causation could not be denied outright, the scale of analysis was shifted: termites, rice paddies, and wetlands were invoked to make U.S. cattle look trivial, and the efficiency of intensive American production systems was contrasted with emissions in developing countries said to be five to seven times greater. The association also went after its critics directly, calling Robbins’s book laced with conjecture and hearsay, describing Rifkin as an anti-science activist, and founding the Food Facts Coalition, which asserted that Beyond Beef showed a total disregard for science. In one remarkable episode, the association persuaded publisher Random House not to reprint a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles children’s book whose entry for the letter M explained that cattle expel methane and encouraged readers to eat less meat.

What the archive does not contain is perhaps the most damning finding. The researchers searched every document for the emissions-mitigation strategies the EPA had identified: feed, feeding, supplements, hormones, manure, animal waste, and grading. Three of the industry-commissioned reports acknowledged in passing that nutritional management could reduce methane, but there is no mention anywhere in the association’s own materials of researching, encouraging, or implementing any of these changes. The one mention of grading-standard revisions made no connection to emissions. Instead, the association’s strategic plans focused on awards for environmental stewardship, media training for spokespersons, monitoring environmental groups, and distributing pro-industry materials to Congress, where a 1993 media analysis found more than a dozen members among the top 25 favorable sources for the industry.

The consequences of that choice are visible in the emissions record. According to the EPA, U.S. methane emissions fell by 19 percent between 1990 and 2022, driven by mitigation in landfills and the fossil fuel sector, while emissions from agricultural activities increased over the same period. Methane from enteric fermentation in U.S. beef cattle rose from 4,742 kilotonnes in 1990 to 5,018 kilotonnes in 2020, and emissions from manure management more than doubled. Jacquet and Loy argue that the association’s campaign, amplified by news media norms of balance and by headlines that made cow methane a punchline, helped make dietary change seem laughable as climate policy. The study is a case study, the authors suggest, in how public relations can reframe a substantive environmental problem into a mere image problem, and in how an industry facing inconvenient science can choose messaging over mitigation, a strategy whose success is measured in the methane still rising from American pastures four decades after the science first made it visible.

Subject of Research: The U.S. beef industry trade association's strategic communications response to scientific evidence linking cattle methane to global warming from 1986 to 1996

Article Title: Global warming and the National Cattlemen’s Association 1986–1996

Article References: Global warming and the National Cattlemen’s Association 1986–1996. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001061

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001061

Keywords: methane, global warming, beef industry, National Cattlemen's Association, public relations, climate disinformation, EPA, dietary change, trade associations, Texas A&M, climate science, livestock emissions