June 2, 2021
Make Nexus Hot News part of your morning: click here to subscribe.
Hackers Hit Big Meat- Expect Climate Disinfo About It, Because 🦖😈 Deniers Lie For A Living
When the Green New Deal was first introduced, deniers falsely accused climate activists of wanting to take away Americans’ god-given right to enjoy as many cheeseburgers as we can. When natural gas and coal froze up in February, deniers blamed climate activists for pushing the state to adopt renewables by posting old pictures of frozen turbines. When hackers attacked the Colonial pipeline, the company’s decision to protect its billing capability by shutting down gas deliveries to a wide swath of the southeast,
😈🦕 deniers blamed climate activists for convincing President Biden to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico for export.
Now that hackers have hit JBS SA, the world’s biggest meat producer, no doubt deniers will use it as an excuse to blame climate activists for ever having dared to suggest maybe Americans tone down our per capita 2.4 burger-a-day habit. (It's worth noting this number includes poultry, as well as waste, so the "average American's" actual consumption isn't quite this high. But still...)
Over Memorial Day weekend, five of JBS’s biggest U.S. beef plants were shut down, as were slaughterhouses in Australia (where it’s the county’s biggest meat processor) and Canada. Overall, JBS produces about a quarter of U.S. beef, and a fifth of our pork. The White House has offered JBS assistance and is dealing directly with the Russian government since the company suspects the cyberattack is coming from a Russian criminal organization. One commodity market expert, Matt Dalgleish, told Bloomberg that it’ll just be “a minimal hiccup” if it only lasts a week, but any longer and “we’re going to see disruption to supply chains.”
Since that sounds all-too-familiar, no doubt deniers will be ready to blame environmentalists. Actually, it’d be a surprise if they even waited for real impacts to be felt before they start casting stones, since that’s their whole deal.
For example, Steve Milloy, having defended tobacco, fossil fuels, and an unhinged Q-anongresswoman, and fresh off being humiliated by ExxonMobil’s shareholders, is apparently turning his attention to the agricultural industry. He recently took to the notorious bastion-of-intellectual-honesty that is the Washington Times to warn of “Biden’s coming war on farmers.”
The Biden administration isn’t going to encourage alternatives to meat because it's so expensive, or because eating the apparent American average of 2.4 burgers a day would be terrible for your health, or because the large-scale deforestation of the Amazon into grazing land for JBS cattle (and soy) is not just illegal (and yet also encouraged) and causes terrible biodiversity loss, or because the forest and adjacent land is a natural carbon sink, it’s terrible for the climate. Those issues are all unmentioned by Milloy.
Instead, he claims that the Biden Administration is targeting farmers simply because they “tend to be strong Trump supporters” who “project disproportionate political power in Congress.”
That sure sounds like a pretty weakly justified and highly partisan motivation for a famously moderate President, even by right-wing news standards. So what’s the real reason Milloy’s imagining a war? Because this is really just all about PM2.5 pollution, a staple issue of Milloy’s tobacco-to-fossil-fuels-to-farms career. Milloy just really loves these tiny soot particles, which are found in smoke from cigarettes, smog from fossil fuels, and dust and other airborne particles from farm machinery, tilling, fertilizers, burning fields, waste management, etc.
Biden’s not planning any War on Meat, and in fact, his proposed budget would increase the Department of Agriculture’s budget by 17%, with a particular emphasis on helping farmers and ranchers understand, adapt to, and even profit off a changing climate.
But the fact that
Biden’s trying to
help agriculture isn’t not stopping
😈 Milloy from doing a little war(on meat)mongering as his latest excuse to claim that the science of epidemiology is fake, and the EPA’s work on air pollution is a big hoax. He’s been saying
that for decades on
behalf of Big Tobacco and Big Oil as part of his unfortunately
very real and well-documented war on
air pollution science, so it’s safe to assume he’ll continue doing it until no one listens anymore.