Professor takes to Twitter to challenge false data’s long shadow
10/09/2018
An inaccurate report from 2009 by two World Bank environmental advisers, Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, claimed falsely that more than 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions are “driven by livestock rearing and processing”. They quoted ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, another famously inaccurate report published by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation in 2006.
In 2009, a team led by Professor Mitloehner from the University of California, Davis, reacted to ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ and showed that the figures in the report were flawed. Not only did the FAO accept that its report was inaccurate, in 2012 it asked Professor Mitloehner to become the chair of a committee to assess the environmental impact of the livestock industry.
Nevertheless, the flawed figures continue to appear in reports and campaign literature aimed at putting people off meat. In September 2018, Beyond Meat, a California-based company that makes synthetic meat substitutes from plant material, quoted the Goodland and Anhang figures on the homepage of its website.
In tweets addressed to Beyond Meat, Professor Mitloehner said the company appeared to be “the last major outlet” using the false data and invited it to revisit the figures. He said that livestock contributes 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and that the figure accepted by the Environmenal Protection Agency for the US is 3.9%.
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