How Meat and Fossil Fuel Producers Watered Down the Latest IPCC Report | Hacker News Reader

How Meat and Fossil Fuel Producers Watered Down the Latest IPCC Report

distilled.earth

44 pointsmyshpa6 comments

This is getting picked up on blogs and so on now because of the recent report release, but the underlying facts about delegate lobbying were known back in 2021, thanks to reporting from Unearthed at Greenpeace: https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/10/21/leaked-climate-l...

On fossil fuels:

> Chief among those pushing back against the recommendation that fossil fuels be urgently phased out of the energy sector are Saudi Arabia and OPEC, which together produce around 40% of the world’s oil.

> Saudi Arabia repeatedly seeks to have the report’s authors delete references to the need to phase out fossil fuels, as well as an IPCC conclusion that there is an “need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales”

On the role of diets in climate change:

> Government officials from Brazil and Argentina – both countries with influential agribusiness lobbies that are among the world’s biggest producers of beef and animal feed crops like soyabeans – push repeatedly for the IPCC to remove or water-down messages in the report about the need to curb meat and dairy consumption to tackle global warming.

> In comments on the draft seen by Unearthed, both countries call on the authors to delete passages in the text which suggest a shift to plant-based diets would cut greenhouse gas emissions, or which describe beef as a “high carbon” food.

Is it fair to assume that it is just big oil and big agg that are lobbying for what is included in these climate change reports?

No - but what we can report on is basically where there's a discrepancy between what the scientists who wrote the report wanted to put in the report and what delegates from individual countries with special interests pushed to have it modified to read.

In this particular case, the discrepancies that were discovered by Unearthed included oil (Saudi Arabia), meat (Brazil and Argentina), and coal (Australia and Japan). There might be other discrepancies, but I think it would be a mistake to speculate about them without concrete evidence.

This is based on documents that were leaked to Unearthed and their report is here [1].

Unfortunately, I don't think they have released the documents publicly. Given that there were "tens of thousands of comments by governments, corporations, academics and others", there is significant editorialization to produce these journalistic reports.

These reports identify "Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and OPEC" as the ones watering down the report, and linking this with their economic interests. However, plenty of other countries have economic interests as well, that are contrary to efforts to slow down climate change. Was the US beef industry not putting pressure as well? The Chinese coal industry? The German automobile industry?

I would really like to see the leaked documents to get the complete picture.

[1] https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2021/10/21/leaked-climate-l...

Upton Sinclair also might've wanted to say:

It is difficult to get a man to change his omnicidal and suicidal [these aren't exaggerations of existential threats] lifestyle habits, when his indulgence and privilege depends upon his not understanding them.

Still not eating the bugs, fake meat, living in the pod, or in the walkable city.

IPCC has serious problems with integrity, one look at the now ancient Climategate mails proves this.

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