Elon Musk Says Beef Has No Impact on Climate Change, Fuelling Pro-Meat Rhetoric Under Trump

The world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s “first friend” has disregarded the impact of beef on climate change, hinting at a red meat renaissance in the US.

What do you get if you elect a McDonald’s fanatic who also happens to be a climate denier for president?

The US will see that scenario play out over the next four years as Donald Trump returns to the White House. The president-elect is moving much more rapidly than he did the first time around in 2016, already making a number of appointments to drive his agenda in a Congress controlled by the Republicans.

One of the 78-year-old’s most shocking but unsurprising moves was to appoint campaign surrogate Elon Musk as the co-head of a new Department of Government Efficiency. The world’s richest man will be leading the agency alongside hard-right Republican (and climate denier) Vivek Ramaswamy – nothing says efficient like two men doing one job.

But even as a non-governmental position, the involvement of Musk, whose big bets on Trump paid off in the election, is alarming not just due to conflicts of interest (he has billions’ worth of government contracts), but also for its implications for the fight against climate change – especially through the food system.

Speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience – America’s most popular podcast – before the election, Musk called the idea that livestock agriculture contributes to climate change “hot bullshit”, promoting the carnivore diet and acting as a precursor to how the second Trump administration will approach meat and climate change.

Musk makes bogus claims about measuring emissions

Musk and Rogan were talking about the carnivore diet and how eating steak and eggs for breakfast is a “power-up” when the podcast host brought up what he called a “lot of propaganda” around claims that “animal agriculture is the number-one contributor to global warming”.

“The real problem is factory farming. Regenerative farming is carbon-neutral if it doesn’t sequester carbon,” Rogan said.

“The animals are not going to make any difference to global warming,” replied Musk. “Like none.” He agreed with Rogan that people pushing to avoid meat often have “a vested interest” or “ideological reasons” (like being vegan or vegetarian).

“It’s not going to make any difference to global warming or the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere if people eat pure steaks. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant,” he said. “You can totally eat as much meat as you want. It’s not going to make a difference… if somebody says it does make a difference, I’m like: ‘How will you measure it?’ And if you can’t even measure it, then it’s bullshit.”

A lot to unpack here. First, no one is saying livestock farming is the biggest contributor to climate change – that distinction lies with the fossil fuel industry. But animal agriculture does make up 11-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

And while Rogan was correct in calling out factory farming, his claim about regenerative farming being carbon neutral if it doesn’t sequester carbon is contradictory – and even if you allow for a slip of the tongue, regenerative agriculture is not the climate solution it’s touted to be, and makes for a great corporate greenwashing tool. For example, switching to grass-fed beef (a core principle of the philosophy) could actually increase methane emissions by 43%.

But more outlandish was Musk’s claim that we can’t measure livestock emissions. Scientists have been doing it for decades, and there are a bunch of ways to do so. Respiratory chambers can measure an animal’s emissions through its inlets and outlets, the SF6 tracer technique involves attaching canisters to capture respiration and belches in grazing animals, and GreenFeed Systems can calculate methane production in pastures and feedlots when the ruminants are eating.

Other processes involve micrometeorological measurements, where tall tubed towers draw air into methane sensors and capture emissions from the animal as well as the farm; and open-path spectrometers, which measure methane concentrations on the upwind and downwind sides of a site, among others. Experts have even created a 103-page protocol that describes how agricultural emissions are calculated.

Stance on livestock farming a marker of things to come?

Musk may be seen by some as a climate warrior for his work on electric vehicles through Tesla – although the company itself has its own sustainability problems – but his assertion that you can eat “as much meat as you want” is inaccurate and dangerous.

Meat and dairy production alone makes up 57% of the food system’s climate footprint, occupies 78% of farmland, and uses a third of our freshwater resources – but these products only provide 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein.

Climate scientists have urged that livestock emissions need to be halved by 2030 to meet global environmental goals, since the sector is set to take up almost 50% of our GHG budget under the 1.5°C target. In a poll of over 200 leading experts this year, 85% felt it’s important for human diets to shift from “livestock-derived foods to livestock replacement foods”.

Most also agreed that where plant-based alternatives to animal foods provide comparable or better health outcomes and lower GHGs, they should be considered a ‘best available food’ and given preference in climate (83%), agriculture (78%) and food purchasing policies (82%).

Policy is where things are on shaky ground, and Trump’s reelection promises to destabilise climate policy even further. He has connected wind energy to a decrease in bacon consumption, one of many instances where he has floated bogus claims about the environment. His vice-president-to-be, JD Vance, went on a tirade about “disgusting fake meat”, calling it “highly processed garbage” and somehow turning it into an ode to Indian food.

And now, Trump is leaving all things health to Robert F Kennedy Jr, a known vaccine conspiracy theorist who wants to Make America Healthy Again. RFK Jr is crowdsourcing names for potential roles in the government, and some Americans are nominating ‘Carnivore MD’ Paul Saladino for a position in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Saladino has long been a proponent of the carnivore diet, but recently suggested that he had given it up because of negative health effects. If he were to be appointed, it would be a hallmark of the contradictory chaos that is set to define Trump’s second term.

Look no further than Musk. He has promoted renewable energy but emits more CO2e from his private jet in a month than an American family does in a year. He has also poured millions into helping elect a man who ran on a platform of “drill, baby, drill”. Now, Musk has the reigns to government efficiency (whatever that means), in an administration famous for firing people left and right.

Trump’s election is terrible news for the food sector’s fight against climate change. Will Musk, with his hundreds of billions, make things worse?