Is There Really Such a Thing as Low-Carbon Beef? That is the title of a recent article in Wired. The article was referring to a new USDA program that will allow beef to be labeled and marketed as having a lower carbon footprint based on a lifecycle assessment and audit of production practices. To be lower carbon it must be 10% lower. Here is a bit more detail:
"Verification of reduced greenhouse gas emissions in a group of cattle using a comprehensive life-cycle assessment model that incorporates impacts associated with management practices and cattle performance throughout the life of the animals.A qualified group of cattle must have life-cycle greenhouse emissions at least 10% lower than industry baseline based on the Low Carbon Beef Scoring Tables."
Before getting into this further I will first answer the question posed by the title. Yes - on a relative global basis, beef produced and consumed in the U.S. is low carbon. Beef in the U.S. accounts for about 4% of total GHG emissions. But on a global scale, which matters most to climate change, overall, total GHG emissions related to U.S. beef consumption accounts for less than 1/2 of 1% (i.e. .5%) of GHG emissions (EPA GHG Emissions Inventory, Rotz et al, 2018). Additionally when compared to beef produced and consumed in other parts of the world, the carbon footprint of beef produced and consumed in the U.S. is 10 times or more lower (Herrero et al., 2013). There is no arguing against the fact that when we look at the big picture, U.S. beef is low carbon beef. Of course it is fair to ask, within the U.S. can we improve our carbon footprint? Our history tells us yes we can and as I will discuss below, the new USDA labeling program cited in Wired may be one way to incentivize getting there.
Will this new labeling and certification initiative be misleading as the article says? I am one of the first people to speak out against misleading food labels. Just see related posts below. There is currently a lot of confusion about the sustainability of our food choices, and consumers are having to use a lot of proxies that are less than ideal to attempt to understand their carbon footprint. Examples include local, organic, 'hormone free', or non-GMO products (see my post about issue related to free-from food labeling). All of these options can in fact have higher carbon footprints, lead to more intense resource use, and have negative social and environmental consequences despite how popular some fads may be or what food marketers may imply about their product. By having a verified measure of carbon footprint associated with beef, the new USDA initiative should actually provide clarity to a confused and often misled consumer. Precisely the opposite of the concern raised in Wired.
Misleading or Realistic Recommendations?
The article in Wired quotes the following recommendation: "low-carbon certifications won’t fix the problems caused by beef consumption. “We need to substantially readjust our diets'
Another common suggestion to go along with this is to consume more plant based or cultured alternative meat sources. These suggestions suffer from two major drawbacks. From a behavioral science perspective, they are challenging behaviors to target.
In a previous post, I discussed how we need to think about the problem we are trying to solve or outcome we are trying to achieve (climate change mitigation) and consider the behavioral map that relates all of the target actions we could take to achieve this outcome. Which solutions are technically correct but also the most impactful at scale from a behavior change perspective? Is a reduction in modern U.S. beef production or consumption the target behavior we should be trying to change compared to other options?
Paul Ferraro, Brandon McFadden, and Kent Messer take this head on using an auction experiment to measure 'plasticity' or the willingness of non-adopters to change behavior (Ferraro, et al., 2022).They find that targeting beef consumption might not be the most socially cost effective approach to mitigating climate change compared to other strategies for abatement (like carbon offsets or policies that encourage more technical innovations). They state:
"Policy interventions are likely to provide the best return on investment when they target choices and behaviors for which abatement potential and plasticity are high enough to lead to meaningful reductions in GHG emissions....our estimates imply that it would cost at least $642 per tCO2e to reduce GHG emissions by inducing 50% of our study sample to eliminate beef consumption...currently the price to offset a tCO2e (based on existing markets for carbon offsets) is between $10 to $13."
These costs are not only higher than market based estimates of the cost of carbon but also most estimates of the social cost of carbon as well even at the lower plasticity levels. They state: "in the U.S., a median estimate of the SCC is $48 per tCO2e."
The Fallacy of Disruption
The recommendations from Wired (and similar recommendations promoting cultured or alternative meats) may also suffer from what I am calling the fallacy of disruption. In his book Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, Steffan Thomke discusses what drives many important innovations as high velocity incrementalism. Not huge disruptive leaps:
"Even though the business world glorifies disruptive ideas, most progress is achieved by implementing hundreds of thousands of minor improvements that can have a big cumulative effect."
When looking at total economic growth, economists have estimated that 77% of economic growth is driven by existing products not via creative destruction associated with new products (Garcia‐Macia et al., 2019). While creative destruction is a well recognized and essential process in our economy, it is important to recognize there is a lot of progress to be made through high velocity incrementalism.
The suggestion from the article that alludes to making huge technological disruptive leaps (like cell cultured meat alternatives) or behavior changes (making significant dietary changes) just isn't consistent with what we know about behavioral economics and the economics of innovation. As the work from Ferraro et al. has recently shown, even small changes in beef reduction aren't as practical as we might think.
Internalizing Climate Externalities via Technological Change and Innovation
Climate change problems are what economists refer to as externalities, which at a high level are unpriced negative consequences of our behavior that fall on third parties or future generations. One way externalities are internalized are through technological innovations, which as discussed above, can result from incremental changes to the way we produce and consume goods and services. We have witnessed this in the beef industry over the last few decades. Thanks to advances in economic development, technological change, innovations in management, marketing, and pricing value in the beef industry (for just a few examples see
here, here, here, here, and
here), we've seen gains in beef production and quality. Additionally, in 2007 compared to 1977 we were able to produce the same amount of beef using roughly 30% fewer cattle and 30% less land. This represents a huge impact on global warming potential when we consider the implications of this in the context of methane emissions and the biogenic carbon cycle. As
previously discussed, :
"when you get in your car to go to your favorite restaurant, the associated methane and CO2 emissions that result represents new and long lasting emissions. For the most part the steak or burger on your plate doesn't directly add any new warming potential to the atmosphere that didn't already exist, nor has any steak or burger you may have eaten in the last 30 years based on this data."
Feed and and water usage were also down between 15-20% with a 16% lower carbon footprint (Capper, 2007). All of these factors have culminated in a healthier, more nutritious, higher quality product with a lower carbon footprint. As noted above, compared to other places in the world, the impact of technological innovation is many fold.
It is important to note that these innovations were market driven. They entailed voluntary behavior changes by both producers and consumers that led to higher quality, more nutritious, and more environmentally friendly beef. In addition to helping provide more clarity to consumers compared to existing labeling schemes, the new USDA labels will only help incentivize this innovative process by effectively putting a price on carbon, in absence of any new regulatory frameworks, subsidies, permits, or carbon taxes.
The history of food innovation in the beef industry tells us this trend of voluntary and market driven advancement will continue. While in the life sciences, the 'high velocity' part of high velocity incrementalism is more challenging than designing a search engine or smartphone app, with the convergence of big data, AI, and genomics, innovations are happening faster. Current trends in ESG reporting and concerns about scope 3 emissions, along with advances in block chain and other source verification technologies will only further catalyze future advances. We just don't have this kind of momentum behind drastic dietary fads related to huge reductions in beef consumption, going vegan, or alternative proteins.
Related Reading
The 'free-from' Nash equilibrium
GMOs and QR Codes: Consumers need more than a label they need a learning path.
References
HJ. L. Capper, The environmental impact of beef production in the United States: 1977 compared with 2007, Journal of Animal Science, Volume 89, Issue 12, December 2011, Pages 4249–4261, https://doi.org/10.2527/jas.2010-3784
Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. McFadden BR, Ferraro PJ, Messer KD (2022) Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. PLOS ONE 17(1): e0261372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261372
Daniel Garcia‐Macia & Chang‐Tai Hsieh & Peter J. Klenow, 2019. "How Destructive Is Innovation?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 87(5), pages 1507-1541, September.
Herrero, M., P. Havlík, H. Valin, A. Notenbaert, M.C. Rufino, P. K. Thornton, M. Blümmel, F. Weiss, D. Grace, and M. Obersteiner. 2013. Biomass use, production, feed efficiencies, and greenhouse gas emissions from global livestock systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 110: 20888-20893
