Bill Gates’ call for wealthy nations to forgo meat sparks backlash in Nebraska
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is proposing that wealthy nations forgo beef in an effort to slow climate change, but that isn’t sitting well with meat lovers in Nebraska, a state where cattle outnumber people.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., made Gates’ comments the topic of a lengthy response in one of his newsletters, called “Fort Reports.”
Nebraska Cattlemen President William H. Rhea III also posted an article on the association’s website focusing on “the truth about animal ag emissions.”
In an article published last month in the MIT Technology Review, Gates was quoted as saying, “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time.”
Gates was elaborating on his belief that some areas of agriculture will be able to innovate sufficiently to address their climate impacts, but not the cattle industry.
“I’m afraid the synthetic (meat) will be required for at least the beef thing,” Gates said. Companies developing synthetic meat already have demonstrated that they are on a path to compete with meat, he said.
Gates, who is investing in synthetic meat, also is the largest private owner of U.S. farmland, including more than 20,000 acres in Nebraska. That land is used as cropland and rented to local farmers. It’s not rangeland, which is where beef cattle are raised.
In Fortenberry’s response, the Lincoln congressman wrote that he supports transitioning away from a fossil-fuel-based economy. “But making supper from a lab? That’s not a solution, that’s a chemistry experiment,” he wrote.
Bill Gates’ 20,000 acres in Nebraska help make him the top farmland owner in the U.S.
Cattle and climate both are issues that have an outsized effect on Nebraska’s economy.
Agriculture is the state’s No. 1 industry and accounts for about a fourth of gross state product, according to figures from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Within ag, the cattle industry is the largest player, according to the Nebraska Beef Council. Cattle outnumber people in Nebraska by more than 3-to-1, and more than half of the state’s land mass is devoted to cattle, according to the council. Rhea pegged the annual impact of Nebraska’s cattle industry at $12 billion.
Cattle also contribute several billion dollars more to the state’s economy, according to UNL, through such things as creating a market for feed, jobs for meat processing and demand for animal pharmaceuticals.
In total, Nebraska’s “agriculture production complex” has a direct and indirect economic impact of more than $81 billion, based on 2017 data, UNL says.
“What wine is to France, beef is to Nebraska,” Fortenberry wrote.
If the U.S. were to shift to a vegetarian diet, the economic effects on Nebraska would be severe, said Rhea of the Nebraska Cattlemen. It would result in thousands of lost jobs, skyrocketing unemployment and less money for schools, roads and health and human services, he wrote in his blog.
Still, farmers, ranchers and ag-reliant economies won’t be able to escape the consequences of warming, research has shown. Livestock health will be under stress from extreme weather, and crop yields and quality are expected to decline, according to the National Climate Assessment, the so-called bible of U.S. climate change effects. (A few examples: Cattle can die from suffocating heat, as happened in 2013 in Nebraska. Increased rainfall can supercharge the growth of pastures, making the grass less nutritious, as happened in Nebraska in 2019.)
Just as the state’s economy is reliant on agriculture, it’s also vulnerable to increasingly chaotic weather. In the last decade, the state has experienced two disasters with damage in the billions of dollars.
Catastrophic flooding, a blizzard and other storms left Nebraska with $3.4 billion in losses in 2019, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The 2012 flash drought, which occurred in the midst of the state’s hottest, driest year on record, caused $4 billion in losses.
And there have been other weather disasters. Extreme rainfall is on the rise, and with it comes the growing threat of flooding. The 2011 Missouri River flood caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Pockets of flooding across the state are requiring local governments to rebuild washed-out roads and bridges. In 2014, four Nebraskans died in flash floods.
It’s not that climate change causes bad weather, scientists say. Rather, it makes extreme weather more likely and more intense.
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How so? Because of a more than 40% increase in greenhouse gases, the planet’s atmosphere is trapping more heat. A warmer planet can have hotter weather and thus more extreme drought. But a warmer planet also is wetter, so rain and snowstorms can be more intense. Finally, heat is energy, which means storms have more fuel with which to intensify.
As bad as extreme weather has been, it will get worse, climate scientists say. Gates and people like him are calling for aggressive action now to stave off greater global instability, famine and mass migration in the decades ahead. (Global warming has been implicated in the Syrian drought that contributed to instability in the Mideast.)
But sacrificing beef isn’t worth the reduction in emissions, beef proponents say. Besides, the U.S. cattle industry already is highly productive and works continuously to improve. The U.S. produces as much beef now as it did in 1977, but with 33% fewer cattle, Rhea said.
One of the key ways cattle contribute to climate change is through methane produced by the animals’ belching or flatulence. Methane is a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide but with a shorter lifespan.
Fortenberry points to the short-lived nature of methane as a reason it’s not as great a threat. But climate scientists point to its potency as a potential quick win in the fight against warming.
The cattle industry has been working to lessen the amount of methane cattle expel, primarily by changing their feed. Additives that reduce methane range from ordinary oils to something as exotic as seaweed. The industry also is working to sequester carbon in soil by managing grazing. In late February, UNL announced a $3 million grant to quantify carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions related to Midwest corn production.
Rhea and Fortenberry point to federal estimates that U.S. beef cattle account for just 3.3% of total greenhouse emissions. Transportation and electricity generation together make up 56% by comparison, Rhea noted.
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But the World Resources Institute and other groups monitoring climate change say the federal figures understate the impact of cattle. Beef production generates many times more greenhouse gases per gram of protein than other animals, research has demonstrated.
Global population growth and increased wealth are driving up demand for beef, which, in turn, requires converting more land to cattle operations. Agriculture and deforestation already account for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and those emissions are likely to continue growing, said Richard Waite, senior research associate in the food program at WRI, which is based in Washington, D.C.
Waite said the world can’t rely solely on a shift away from fossil fuels if it wants to slow warming.
“Emissions from food systems alone could put our 2050 climate targets out of reach,” he said.
Still, the institute is not a proponent of abandoning beef.
Waite said Americans eat about four times the beef as the global average, despite Americans’ cutting beef consumption by about a third since the 1970s (due to a shift to other meat, primarily chicken).
What’s needed, he said, is for Americans to reduce their beef and lamb consumption by about half, to the equivalent of 1.5 burgers a week, while the industry continues to lessen emissions from beef production.
Do that, Waite said, and there would be room for the rest of the world’s growing population to consume more beef — without having to clear more large swaths of the planet for additional cattle operations.
“It’s easy for conversation around a climate-friendly diet to get really polarized and be all or nothing,” he said. “With food, it’s about what we eat and how we grow it. We don’t have to shift entirely away from eating beef.”
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This article originally ran on omaha.com.
