Today I want to talk about how misinformation is infecting our dialogue on climate. There is one recent and kind of fascinating lie that I’d like to use as an example.
It starts with an obscure academic study focused on a hypothetical, then it travels to a British tabloid and finally the American kings of climate misinformation, Fox News.
If you watch late night TV, you may have seen the story circulating that President Biden plans to cut American red meat consumption by 90%. Americans eat on average around 40 pounds of red meat a year, so a 90% reduction would limit that to 4 pounds annually, or approximately 1 hamburger a month. This claim has a number of conservative commentators clutching their pearls, defending red meat, and comically boasting about who eats more beef. Seriously, Don Jr. tweeted out that he probably eats said 4 pounds of red meat a day. I know he’s exaggerating for effect, but still.
However, as you’ve probably guessed, this “story” is completely made up. There is no section of Biden’s climate plan that calls for a reduction in red meat, let alone some stringent requirement that limits Americans to 4 pounds of it. Right wing media have spent hours and hours now circulating this lie and more credible news outlets have been forced to waste time refuting it. So, the question is: how did we get here?
Let’s start at the beginning. In January of 2020, researchers from Tulane and the University of Michigan published a study that examined various hypothetical scenarios that would impact our efforts to cut carbon emissions. One of those hypotheticals asked, what would happen if Americans cut their beef consumption by 90%. The answer is that cutting this much beef out of our diets would have substantial benefits and would lead to appreciable decreases in carbon emissions.
This study has nothing to do with the Biden Administration and was in fact published before he even took office. However, earlier this week the Daily Mail, which is a British tabloid on par with the National Enquirer and barely more serious that the Onion, published an editorial linking the study with Biden’s plan. I read the article and it’s filled with nonsense and outright lies, including this one. It’s written in such a way as to get around libel laws, but just barely.
That being said, this article was picked up immediately by Fox News and Fox Business. Both networks started repeating the claims ad nauseum for days afterward and this idea has been circulating among other right wing media outlets.
If they haven’t already, I guarantee that Republican politicians will repeat this claim on the floors of Congress.
This is how misinformation spreads.
We really don’t have time to be dealing with this nonsense. Fox is extraordinarily influential and what they do impacts our dialogue. It should come as no surprise then that public discussions of climate change seem to be going nowhere. When the most influential cable news network is willfully spreading lies about the topic, we can’t expect their viewers to take the issue seriously.
The Mangrove 