Volume 54, Issue 3

We will be unable to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement without radically reforming our food systems. Despite animal agriculture’s significant responsibility for climate change—emitting the majority of agricultural greenhouse gases (GHGs), likely 15% or more of all human- caused GHGs, around a third of anthropogenic methane and more than half of nitrous oxide (two climate super-pollutants)—policymakers have so far largely failed to rein in its emissions. In recent years, international bodies including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.N. Environment Programme, World Health Organization, and World Bank have begun to explicitly make the connection between animal agriculture’s outsized emissions and the need to reduce consumption of animal products, especially in high-income, high-consuming countries. While national-level policy in the United States has not yet embraced these recommendations, policymakers in other countries—led by Europe—are experimenting with policies that would change diets and ultimately “shrink the herd,” i.e., reduce the number of animals raised for food. Recent farmer protests and weakening of policy proposals in Europe illustrate the political realities of seeking reform in this area. But sooner government action would enable better outcomes, before the climate crisis forces changes to food systems. Developing effective and lasting policy on climate and animal agriculture will require consensus building, incremental approaches, attention to international equity, and a commitment to a just transition.

Industrial animal agriculture pitches biogas and methane digesters as solutions to the outsized methane footprint of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), yet these efforts merely seek to convey to the public that CAFOs’ operations are environmentally responsible. In reality, quite the opposite is true because biogas and methane digesters more deeply entrench these facilities into the status quo of unsustainable production and disposal methods at CAFOs. This article first describes industrial animal agriculture’s impacts on climate change, with a focus on methane emissions. It then addresses biogas and methane digesters as ineffective solutions to the methane emissions from CAFOs. Next, it examines how these misleading and inadequate responses in the industrial animal agriculture context parallel the fossil fuel industry’s greenwashing campaigns with blue hydrogen and carbon capture and storage facilities. The article proposes long-term and short-term accountability mechanisms to promote the phaseout of biogas and methane digesters in CAFOs. Effective long-term measures would involve implementing disclosure and verification standards much like those that are starting to be implemented in the fossil fuel industry context. These legislative efforts take time, however, and have not yet been implemented in the United States. In the meantime, an effective short-term response would be to pursue strategic litigation to raise awareness of and apply pressure to phase out these harmful measures by drawing on best practices from greenwashing lawsuits in the fossil fuel context.

With the publication of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2013 report, Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security, the production of insects for animal feed and human consumption has witnessed a meteoric rise. Today, facilities capable of producing insects in the trillions are being constructed in many parts of the world, with enthusiasts hailing insect-based agriculture as a means to combat climate change, global food shortages, and the proliferation of food waste, among other concerns. As this Article argues, however, the industrial production of insects for food threatens to exacerbate rather than mitigate these crises, as well as contribute to the systemic cruelties inflicted upon traditionally farmed animals. In documenting the harms externalized by industrial animal agriculture and how the mass-scale production of insects would compound them, this Article calls for the rejection of insect-based agriculture.