Don’t eat me – it’s bad for the environment (Image: Stephen Saks Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)

Early this year, the top nutrition advisory panel in the US offered some common-sense advice to the federal agencies writing the nation’s dietary guidelines: Americans, the panel said, should be urged to eat less meat for the sake of the environment.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration effectively responded “Thanks, but our hands are tied”.

Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack and health and human services secretary Sylvia Burwell, whose agencies are currently at work writing the final guidelines, buried the news in a joint statement. The statement paid lip service to the idea that “the environment and sustainability are critically important” but ultimately concluded that the nutritional guidelines are not “the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability”.

What the appropriate vehicle is, the two did not say.

The timing of the announcement, though, tells us plenty about why Vilsack and Burwell decided to ignore an expert panel that their agencies have traditionally listened closely to when drafting their pyramid- and plate-themed guidelines.

Washington climate wars

Yesterday, both secretaries were scheduled to testify in front of the Republican-led House Committee on Agriculture. The panel’s chairman, K. Michael Conaway, was among the Republican leaders who had a freak-out, supported by the livestock industry, over the idea that the administration would dare to consider the sustainability of Americans diets – particularly when doing so would mean telling people to cut down on their meat intake.

Representative Robert Aderholt, the Alabama Republican who chairs the subcommittee in control of the Agriculture Department’s purse strings, earlier this year even went as far as to threaten budget cuts if the department decided to follow the nutrition experts’ advice.

Given that, it appears the Obama administration is simply, albeit sadly, unwilling to open up another front in Washington’s climate wars at a time when Republicans are unwilling to accept the scientific consensus about global warming.

The political rationale for avoiding the fight, though, is much easier to justify than the scientific case for doing so. The eat-less-meat proposal had the backing of both public health officials, who argued that it could save the nation billions of dollars in healthcare costs, and climate scientists, who saw it as a way to curb US emissions.

Beefing up emissions

As I explained earlier this year, the climate case for eating less meat is particularly powerful: livestock accounts for 14.5 per cent of the world’s human-caused emissions, nearly half of that coming from the resources needed to grow and ship the corn and soy that most of the animals eat, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

A typical meat-eater’s diet is responsible for almost twice as much global warming as your typical vegetarian’s and almost triple that of a vegan, according to a report published in the journal Climatic Change last year. That Oxford University study suggested that cutting your meat intake in half could cut your carbon footprint by more than 35 per cent.

Beef is particularly damaging to the planet. According to the National Academy of Sciences, it results in five times more greenhouse gas emissions than pork or chicken, while requiring 28 times more land and 11 times more irrigation.

In the end, though, science never seemed to have much of a chance against the meat industry, which has a history of flexing its lobbying muscles until policymakers in Washington submit to its will.

Sadly, the only question left now is whether the same familiar story will play out again in five years’ time, when the next administration gets the chance to draft another set of dietary guidelines.

This article was first published on Slate