Planet's Biggest Meat & Dairy Companies Produce More Methane Than EU Plus UK: Tonnage Equals Saudi GHG Output

[hatrack]

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The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for emitting more climate-warming methane than all of the countries in the European Union and United Kingdom combined, according to a new assessment published Monday. Livestock, mostly beef and dairy cattle, account for roughly one-third of global emissions of methane, a short-lived but especially potent greenhouse gas. Yet, unlike energy companies, beef and dairy companies are not required to report their greenhouse gas emissions.

So, in an effort to understand the climate impacts of these livestock companies, the nonprofit research firm Profundo and four environmental advocacy groups calculated emissions by cobbling together available production and slaughter data and plugging the numbers into an updated modeling framework used by the United Nations.

They looked at 45 major livestock and dairy companies, finding that they generated about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023—roughly the same amount as reported for Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest oil producer. “These emissions are huge and are not really mentioned or confronted in government policy right now,” said Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, one of the advocacy groups that published the report.

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The top five greenhouse gas emitters were the Brazilian meat giants—JBS, Marfrig and Minerva—and American companies Tyson and Cargill. Together these five accounted for nearly half of the emissions of the 45 companies analyzed in the report. JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, accounted for nearly one-quarter—more than the methane emissions reported by fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil and Shell combined, the advocacy group found. The report comes three weeks before the annual United Nations climate summit, or Conference of the Parties (COP), being held this year in Belém, Brazil, the first time the conference has come to the Amazon region. The Brazilian beef industry has long been blamed for the destruction of the world’s largest rainforest as ranchers cut and burn huge swaths of trees to clear pasture. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation in the region, accounting for nearly 80 percent, and despite public commitments to stop buying cattle from illegally deforested land, the practice continues.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21102025/livestock-industry-methane-emissions/

[flvegan]

1. It's almost like we should stop consuming it, or something. n/t