On campuses across the nation, students and faculty have passionately debated whether their universities should stop accepting fossil fuel money for research. But until recently, funding from the meat and dairy industries, which also contribute to climate change, had scarcely received any attention.
In 2019, when Mitloehner launched his UC Davis academic group, the CLEAR Center, he did so with a $2.9 million donation from the nonprofit arm of the American Feed Industry Association and the help of a PR firm hired by the trade group to come up with the center’s name. Other funders have included the National Pork Board, the California Cattle Council, and Burger King.
A year after the CLEAR Center launched, Colorado State University started an academic center called AgNext and hired Stackhouse-Lawson, one of Mitloehner’s former graduate students, to lead it. She was then the chief sustainability officer of JBS USA, the American subsidiary of the giant meat producer. The company is currently being sued by New York’s attorney general for allegedly making misleading claims about its greenhouse gas emission goals to boost sales, accusations that it denies.
The paper “reads as if working with industry were a bad thing. And it’s not a bad thing,” Mitloehner said, adding that he plans to write a reply disputing its findings. He said that the paper’s authors got it backward: He’s not being influenced by big beef and dairy companies; he’s trying to change them.“We are doing research that generates findings in and around emissions mitigation and we seek to influence the industry to adopt those technologies so that we can reduce emissions,” he said.
According to their paper, Mitloehner has given more than 800 presentations since he joined UC Davis in 2002 and frequently talks to the media and travels internationally. Stackhouse-Lawson has given at least 90 presentations, and both have emphasized in their appearances that the meat and dairy industries in the U.S. are on track to significantly cut their emissions through voluntary action.