John Robbins’ Diet for a New America (1987), Jeremy Rifkin’s Beyond Beef (1992), and the EPA’s livestock methane findings (1989) helped create an early-1990s PR crisis for the beef industry, fueling a disinfo response that has continued for decades.

NCA rep at the 1989 EPA workshop on livestock’s CH4 was one of 30 who agreed to “increase levels of research to find solutions to limiting CH4 emissions from livestock” Instead NCA chose to: “control the agenda and prevent environmental issues from eroding consumer confidence.”

The NCA commissioned academic experts, monitored eco groups, attacked advocates for eating less beef & promoted cattlemen as eco stewards. Edelman PR called for recruiting “third-party spokespersons, repeating our messages with a credibility we [the industry] cannot achieve.”

Its “Every Day is Earth Day for American Cattlemen” ad reached ~20 million people. Industry-sponsored reports – mostly with a single Texas A&M animal scientist – minimized cattle methane, both denying climate change but also falsifying %s & pushing it out to the public.

I find this part hilarious. They even pressured Random House to stop reprinting a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles book that explained cattle methane and encouraged eating less meat. By coincidence, I randomly found this book for my kids a year or so ago in a thrift shop:

NCA treated global warming as “a public relations concern that could affect consumer demand.” U.S. methane fell 19% from 1990–2022, driven by reductions from landfills & fossil fuels. Ag methane increased & livestock (mostly cattle) are now the leading anthropogenic CH4 source:

“If the US had reduced beef and veal consumption by 50% starting in 1992 and replaced that consumption with other products…it is possible that somewhere between 4 and 13 Gt CO2eq could have been avoided between 1992 and 2023.” (Jacquet et al., 2025) Not incl foregone land C seq