Is it just me, or does it seem like more and more people have their own version of what’s going on in the world?
Depending on your political views and ethics, there’s a YouTube or TikTok channel, website, Instagram or Facebook group, etc., that will gladly reinforce your worldview, and they’re as ubiquitous as the clouds in the sky. Not all the information out there is bad, but too much of it is.
As I have written numerous times before on this blog, we are living in the land of confusion, the title of an old Phil Collins song that has taken on a whole new meaning today.
One of my favorite movies that sums up this dilemma is Don’t Look Up, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, where there is an imminent threat of an asteroid about to destroy the planet, but a significant percentage of the human population refuses to believe it, in large part because of denialist propaganda spread by certain political groups, an indirect reference to today’s climate change denial machines.
As satirical as the flick was intended to be, its eerie approximation to today’s reality made it feel more like an actual documentary than anything else.
Why is modern society so confused?
Sure, a lot has to do with regular people spreading misinformation because, well, let’s face it, a six minute video where a good-looking, charismatic and persuasive narrator tells viewers that the Earth is actually cooling (or that smoking is actually healthy, or that meat is “manly” and/or necessary for human health, or that vaccines are part of a global plot to control us, or that the Earth is flat or that the rich and powerful, like Bill Gates and George Soros, are actually reptilian creatures from another planet) get way more clicks than a scientific study with numbers, percentages and jargon explaining something much less interesting, which most people probably don’t want to hear anyways.
But there is also a deliberate, well-organized and very powerful effort to mislead the public on everything from tobacco consumption to the dangers of firearms to the belief that milk is necessary for strong bones, and it’s been infiltrated through many media outlets and even scientific studies for years.
Anyone got a lighter?
It’s no secret that for decades, big tobacco has spent millions every year on convincing the public that cigs are not just cool, but that they’re actually really not that bad. This was an immediate defense mechanism after the public release of scientific studies showing how bad tobacco really is.
In 1954 the industry created “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”, which it paid to have circulated in 448 newspapers. As you can imagine, this was the first step in a decades’ long effort to mislead the public, paying scientists to produce “studies” with conclusions that lean in favor of the industry, and getting so called “experts” and celebrities to dismiss and ridicule any notion that tobacco was harmful, dubbing it “junk science”.
Things have changed over the years, but not as much as optimists might want to believe. Today, Big Tobacco is actually funding part of the anti-smoking lobby itself. In the open, their logic sounds noble. Phillip Morris International has claimed it is “helping design a smoke-free future”. Doesn’t that sound lovely, one of the world’s biggest tobacco companies joining forces with the anti-smoking movement to “help design a smoke-free future”?
Sounds like Lex Luther having a change of heart and working with Superman to “help design a kryptonite-free future”.
But leaked documents have shown that Big Tobacco knows very well that “smoke-free” is not the same as “tobacco free”. The industry is actually “working with” the anti-smoking lobby to endorse other tobacco products they promote as “reduced risk products”, such as vapes and e-cigarettes. Here too, the tobacco industry has influenced health organizations and policy makers to convince the public that these alternatives are much safer than cigarettes, when in fact they may be just as harmful.
More animals, anyone?
Now on to the meat. Full disclosure, if this is your first time reading one of my articles, you may be unaware of the fact that yes, I’m vegan. Does that make me biased when talking about the animal agriculture industry? Not any more than me being a non-smoker makes me biased against the tobacco industry, or the fact that I’m not a gun owner makes me biased against the weapons industry.
So here goes.
Believe it or not, when we look at the big picture, the modern meat, egg and dairy industries (I’ll leave the fishing industry for a later article) are not good for us, not good for the planet, and definitely not good for cows, pigs, chickens and other animals people consider food.
But it’s much easier for Big Meat to convince the public that these foods are necessary and harmless than it is for Big Tobacco to convince us about cigarettes (including the electronic kind) being harmless.
Wait a minute, how can something so intrinsically human, that has been a part of our civilization for eons, be bad? Don’t most people around the world eat animals? Indeed, most people around the world do a lot of things.
For some context, most meat today comes from factory farms, where the majority of the 70 billion land animals raised and killed to be eaten (yearly) spend their short and miserable lives.
In the beef industry, cows on factory farms often have barely enough space to move freely, and in order to make veal, calves are prevented from moving at all, the only way of making their meat tender and ensuring a high value before their throats are slit.
In the egg industry, egg-laying hens are genetically modified to lay up to 30 times as many eggs as their wild ancestors. This frequently causes their bones to break, since the calcium in their bodies is diverted for the formation of eggshells.
Today’s livestock systems occupy approximately 45% of the Earth’s ice-free habitable land and are the leading drivers of species extinction, while also contributing between 14.5% to 18% of all human-induced global greenhouse emissions, more than the entire global transportation industry.
The meat industry consumes approximately 33% of the Earth’s freshwater reserves. In fact, the average meat burger requires 460 gallons of freshwater. That’s simply because all those crops to feed all those animals need to be irrigated on a regular basis.
With regards to health, meat consumption has been causally linked to colorectal cancer by the WHO, and nearly all legitimate health organizations agree that healthy vegan diets are not only sustainable for human wellbeing but can offer numerous benefits, like significantly reducing a person’s chances of suffering from diabetes, heart attacks, hypertension and obesity.
And yet, we seem to hear so much contradicting information from all sides, especially with regards to health, the environment, and whether farmed animals are treated “humanely” or not. We see articles in well-known media outlets about the detrimental effects of animal ag, but then a week later the same medium will publish an article about the importance of meat for a “well-balanced diet” and how vegans are dropping like flies from protein deficiency.
Some people claim that much of what we hear about the problems associated with meat are “vegan propaganda” spread by vegan lobby groups. Indeed, there are vegan lobby groups. In fact, there are 5 well-organized and well-known vegan lobby groups in the world. The oldest one is the Vegan Society, founded in 1944, followed by the Humane Society which came into existence a decade later. The other three are much more recent, not making a sound until the average millennial was at least a teenager.
Meanwhile, the number of lobby groups for beef, pork, dairy, eggs and other animal products is so big that even ChatGPT admits it cannot provide me with an accurate number because there are too many. However, the oldest well-established animal agriculture lobby group is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, founded in 1898. Countless others around the globe sprouted throughout the early and mid-20th century, before Leonardo DiCaprio was even a thought and a time when Jennifer Lawrence’s parents probably thought cooties was a real disease.
Phil Collins might remember, though.
Anyways, the fact that there are lobby groups on behalf of a certain industry does not automatically make that industry evil. The problem is when we have enough evidence -that is not influenced by lobby groups in one direction or the other- to prove the industry that they promote is detrimental in numerous ways, and animal ag is definitely one of those industries.
The animal ag lobby has gone above and beyond simply shaping public opinion about the “need” for animal protein for over a century. In 1977, for example, US dietary advice changed from “decrease consumption of meat” to “have two or three daily servings” after being pressured by the meat lobby.
In 1991, the US Department of Agriculture was forced to withdraw its Eating Right Pyramid, which advocated for a diet that includes more plant foods, under pressure from the meat and dairy lobby, and similar occurrences have been taking place since.
They have produced so called “ag gag laws” which go as far as suing individuals for anything from publicly exposing the cruelty that takes place on factory farms to simply talking bad about meat to an audience.
In 1997, Oprah Winfrey “got sued for dissing a burger,” according to Britannica. At the time, both Winfrey and Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher turned animal activist, were sued in a federal district court in the US state of Texas for allegedly “disparaging beef”.
While the five largest meat and dairy producers have emitted more greenhouse gases than ExxonMobile, the industry has spent millions of dollars against climate action that hinders their businesses. The livestock industry has gone as far as pressuring the United Nations to promote more global meat and dairy production, not to mention influencing entire health organizations and the media.
A recent article in The Guardian exposes Big Beef’s ambitious measures to keep meat on the menu, from creating its very own “Masters of Beef Advocacy program” to training advocates to spread pro-meat misinformation through “blog posts, videos, educational assets, op-eds, TV ads, social media campaigns, trained influencers and other channels.”
This is part of the reason so many people are convinced animal-derived foods are such a “necessary” part of our everyday diets, when the reality is quite the opposite, and much worse than most meat, milk and egg lovers would like to accept.
The industry is determined to keep it that way.
Getting high on greenhouse gas emissions
Since the onset of the industrial revolution, our species has destabilized the atmospheric equilibrium by unleashing an unnatural amount of additional C02 into the air.
By 1950, human industrial activities added 6 billion additional tons of C02 into the atmosphere. But why stop there? Of course, we didn’t, and today we pump an average of over 35 billion tons of C02 into the air we breathe each year, and that number keeps going up.
The funny thing is, we’ve known for decades that our activities produce heat trapping gases that can eventually lead to the extinction of a significant percentage of life on Earth, including ourselves. The first scientist to publicly acknowledge this effect was the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the late 1800’s.
Oddly enough, the issue didn’t get much attention until over 100 years later, in the 1980's, when former NASA climate scientist James Hansen vehemently urged the US congress to act on human induced global warming.
Hansen now says the rate of global warming during the next 25 years could be double what it was in the previous 50.
But global warming isn’t the only problem caused by our C02 emissions. Exposure to air pollution causes cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases and numerous cancers. On average, 6.7 million people a year die from pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not to mention how factories that produce coal, plastics, textiles, etc., pollute rivers, lakes and reservoirs, making drinking water unsafe.
And yet, the oil and gas industry has its own monstruous lobby groups that invest well over USD $100 million each year to convince leaders to make decisions that favor their industries, while convincing the general public that climate change is fake or that human activities have nothing to do with it.
Even as the need for renewable energy goes from being a business opportunity to a survival imperative, fossil fuels have grossly outspent renewables in federal lobbying in the US and much of the world.
And here we are, boiling the planet with our own industrial waste, and spending billions of dollars to convince the rest of the world to keep up the good work.
Has anyone seen my AR-15?
As our species has become more sophisticated over the years, so have our weapons. Just like meat, weaponry has been a part of human cultures for millennia, ever since we evolved opposable thumbs, the ability to put things together with our hands, and the desire to wage war on other members of our own species.
The sophistication of our weapons over the years has only gotten scarier and scarier with the ability to kill more and more people with the pull of a trigger or the push of a button.
There are two categories of weapons: First we have the kind that individuals can carry with one or two hands, often used by everyday citizens (especially in the US), police officers and members of the Armed Forces. Then we have the big boys, missiles, conventional bombs, and nuclear bombs.
Although we like to believe we have grown more civilized over the years, the seemingly never-ending proliferation of both categories may be an indicator that our perceived evolution into a more peaceful species may very well be a myth.
Time will tell.
On the topic of household firearms, the evidence that more guns leads to more homicides is irrefutable. It’s no coincidence that the US is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world, and among the countries with the highest total gun deaths on the planet (in 2019 the US ranked 2nd after Brazil and surpassed Venezuela, Mexico, India and Colombia in total gun deaths, and was the only “developed” country on the list).
It’s no secret that common sense seems to be nonexistent in the US of A when it comes to remedying the problem. Instead, many citizens and politicians religiously recite the 2nd Amendment, the “right to bear Arms”, whenever someone suggests the sale of everything from pistols to semi-automatic assault rifles should be restricted, even after another mass shooting in Texas, among the states with the most lax gun laws.
Then we have our beloved National Rifle Association (NRA), which spends an average of anywhere between 3 and 5 million dollars every year to pressure politicians to keep some of the deadliest weapons on the menu for everyone, including those who are mentally unstable and anxious to end (or ruin) the lives of as many people as possible after a bad day at the office.
Let’s move on to bigger and better things, like the global weapons industry, also led by the US, with Russia and China not far behind.
In 2021, the United Nations reported that “more than a decade ago, developed countries committed to jointly mobilize $100 billion per year by 2020 in support of climate action in developing countries, ” a target that was never met.
Meanwhile, joint world military expenditure in 2020 alone was estimated at almost $2 trillion. This means that, for some reason, most countries around the world struggle to come up with $100 billion dollars over several years, collectively, to try and save us from climate catastrophe, while they have no problem coming up with $2 trillion dollars in a single year in preparation for World War III.
That number has increased significantly since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, a long-lasting Christmas present for the trigger-happy global weapons industry.
Lobby influence, or human nature?
For years we’ve been getting duped by lobby groups that protect unhealthy, cruel and destructive industries. But can we really place all the blame on them? Afterall, don’t a lot of people just love the taste of a steak, or a cigarette, or that amazing feeling when driving a gas guzzling SUV down the highway, or that enthralling sensation of power and control when they have a murderous weapon in their possession?
Personally, I believe the destructive actions of the lobby groups mentioned in this article are merely another symptom of our short-minded, hedonist human nature on a collective scale. Sure, many people know about the cruelty and harmful planetary effects of modern-day meat production, but does big beef really have to work that hard to convince the public to keep eating their bloody hamburgers?
Is the Big Tobacco lobby the only reason 1.1 billion people on Earth still smoke on a regular basis, despite the nearly ubiquitous knowledge of its horrific effects on human health (and some of those lovely pictures of charred lungs on cigarette packs)?
Is the general public really smart enough to understand the complexities of how human activities are warming the planet? Wouldn’t they rather vote for a leader who explains the world in simpler terms, like blaming the influx of climate refugees on George Soros and the Jews, or the drought or heatwave on God’s angry wrath because of gay marriage and abortion?
Is it that difficult to convince Americans that the 2nd Amendment is sacred and that everyone should have an assault rifle, no matter how many mass shootings there are, because good guys with guns somehow always stop bad guys with guns?
Unfortunately, not really.
Our innate gullibility, laziness, and wilful ignorance toward inconvenient and complex truths is the fuel that enables destructive industries to keep the status quo, which is basically a continued race to the bottom.
Anyways, why worry when you can drive to the beach on this unseasonably hot afternoon in your SUV, enjoying the taste of a cigarette in your mouth, the smell of the gasoline on the highway, the aroma of your bloody beef burger, and the feeling of empowerment that semi-automatic rifle in the trunk provides you with?
Instead of resisting, perhaps we should thank the world’s lobbyists for letting us be who we really are.
Let’s just hope more of us can resist the urge to reach for that rifle after a bad day at the office.
