By Stephen Battersby for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Commonwealth News Service, reporting for the Pulitzer Center-Public News Service Collaboration.

As a phrase and as a promise, net zero has been a great success. Hundreds of countries have pledged to reduce their net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by around the middle of this century. So, too, have thousands of regions, cities, and companies. Net zero has become a beacon of hope, guiding us to climate safety.

But look closely, and the beacon becomes a little blurry. Some scientists argue that net zero might lead us to rely too heavily on technologies that capture CO₂ from the air. That could bring dangerous delays and unwelcome side effects, and give fossil fuel producers leeway to keep pumping and polluting. And its allure may be obscuring our need to look beyond net zero to a more ambitious goal-a world of net-negative emissions.

Some climate scientists have ideas about how we could refine net zero to make it a more focused and effective target. Others say it should only be one part of a new climate narrative. "We don't think enough about net zero, what it means, and if it's the right goal," says environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck, of the University at Buffalo in New York.

With the fate of the planet riding on the outcome, it's vital that governments and institutions are not led astray by their climate beacon-so the debate over net zero is more urgent than ever.

The Root of Zero

The idea of net zero is firmly based on climate science. In the 2000s, scientists worked out that if we stop pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere, global average temperatures should roughly stabilize. That is because two effects of Earth's oceans happen to cancel out. Today, the atmosphere is kept relatively cool by the oceans. As seawater slowly warms, we lose that cooling effect, so if emissions fall to zero, we might expect the atmosphere to carry on warming for a few decades-a phenomenon known as thermal inertia. But the oceans also keep absorbing CO₂, which should roughly balance the thermal inertia and keep temperatures steady.

Net zero took off in 2018, driven by the United Nations report "Global Warming of 1.5 °C." Three years earlier, the Paris Agreement had set out a goal to limit warming to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. The new report laid out how the world might try to hit the more ambitious end of that goal, based on models that combine climate and economic activity. It concluded that to avoid warming of more than 1.5 °C, we would not only have to cut emissions deeply, but also remove a lot of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Such removal could balance any stubborn, ongoing sources of greenhouse gases, known as residual emissions. These might include CO₂ from concrete manufacture, for example, or nitrous oxide from fertilizers. So instead of absolute zero emissions, the new goal aimed for net zero, which allows some residuals to be balanced by removal.

This was only possible because technologies that remove CO₂ from the air had become feasible. "Targets through the years have tended to reflect the practicality at the time of reducing emissions," says climate ecologist Stephen Pacala at Princeton University in New Jersey. "When you could envision a practical path to zero net emissions without leaving the world in poverty-all of a sudden, humanity jumped on net zero as a target."

It has undoubtedly had a galvanizing effect. "Before this, few companies had climate targets at all," says Sam Fankhauser, a climate economist at the University of Oxford in the UK. "So this is a step in the right direction."

But that shouldn't be the end of the story. "Net zero comes from the science, so it's subject to change as we learn more," says climate economist Sabine Fuss at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change in Berlin, who was a lead author on the "Global Warming of 1.5 °C" report. Climate scientists agree that the concept holds several crucial ambiguities that need to be resolved.

Zero Sum

For a start, what is the best balance between cutting emissions and removing CO₂? That depends on which emission sources will be too difficult to cut. But when Buck and her colleagues analyzed 50 national long-term climate strategies, they found that countries are inconsistent in how they consider residual emissions. "The risk is that governments put things that are expensive or politically inconvenient to abate into the 'residual box,'" the paper states. That makes it hard to know how much CO₂ removal we need.

According to these strategies, the average residual emissions in developed countries will be 18% of current total emissions at the time of net zero. Extended to the whole world, that would imply annual removals of at least 12 billion tonnes of CO₂.

Natural solutions, such as planting forests, can't come close to reaching this quantity on their own-and in a warming world, they will be increasingly vulnerable to fire, disease, and chain saws. So the assumption is that we will use a range of novel removal methods: using machines to suck CO₂ directly from the atmosphere, for example, or burning biomass to generate energy while capturing and storing the CO₂ emitted.

Most of these technologies operate at small scales today, collectively removing only about two million tonnes of CO₂ per year. For now, most of them are expensive to operate. Some need a lot more research and development and may yet prove difficult to scale up. That's the first problem with asking too much of carbon removal: It might not have the capacity to meet such high demand, and then we would fail to hit net zero.

The second problem is unwanted side effects. Deployed at large scale, biomass-based CO₂ removal could compete for land with agriculture or with rich ecosystems, which could push up global food prices or harm biodiversity. Other approaches are also likely to have snags, especially if stretched too far. Direct air capture requires a lot of energy, which must come from a very-low-carbon source not to be counterproductive. Enhanced weathering, which involves grinding certain types of rock to speed natural CO₂-absorbing chemical reactions, could create air pollution.

Without defining the levels of reductions and removals that lead to net zero, there's no clear imperative for each country or company to cut its emissions to the bone. Instead, they might hope to pay others to remove lots of CO₂ on their behalf. "Everyone thinks they will buy negative emissions from someone else," says climate scientist Bas van Ruijven at the International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.

Worse, it seems increasingly likely that CO₂ removal will have to go beyond merely balancing residuals. "Now it looks like we will need net negative to meet the Paris goal," says Fuss. That means removing more CO₂ from the atmosphere than we put in. Researchers in the international ENGAGE project have developed models that include a range of sociopolitical constraints, such as the ability of governments to enforce climate legislation. These models project that climate warming will overshoot the 1.5 °C target by 2050. Reversing that overshoot would require several hundred gigatonnes of CO₂ removal during this century. "So you cannot have an enormous amount of residual emission, as then you need an even more enormous amount of carbon removal," says van Ruijven, who is a member of the ENGAGE project.

It may be wise to go further and try to repair some of the damage we have done, dialing down global temperatures closer to pre-industrial levels and curbing the ocean acidification caused by absorbed CO₂. That would, of course, require even more removals. Despite this, companies and countries are not yet planning to reach net negative.

In some quarters, net zero is seen as a final goal. This could leave the door open for fossil-fuel production to continue at high levels and for new infrastructure that could commit us to burning those fuels for decades to come. "We haven't focused enough on the phaseout of fossil fuels," says Buck. "If we only focus on emission at the point of combustion, then we are missing half the picture." The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (known as COP28) alluded to this problem, calling for "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems." But, this falls far short of a phaseout. "It is promising that they said something, but it could have been stronger," says Buck. "What you need is a plan and a lot of resources committed to phaseout."

Zero Clarity

Net zero holds a host of other ambiguities. "Today, everybody has their own idea of what net zero means," says Fuss. "So we should take a step back and refine the concept. It is really important to get all these things straight, so we are not fooling ourselves."

For example, it's unclear whether net zero should include climate feedback effects, such as CO₂ emitted by thawing permafrost. These could require vastly more removals to prevent temperatures from rising.


Nor does the target emphasize urgency. If governments are aiming for net zero in 2050, they might feel free to kick their heels for a while. But many mitigation measures will need decades to scale up, so "it's vital to reduce emission as much as possible in the short-term," says Fuss. "You don't break something just to then repair it."


Net zero doesn't yet specify the durability of removals, either. Today's emissions will linger for centuries, so they can't simply be balanced by a form of removal that is likely to last only years or even decades. As Fankhauser et al. write: "Achieving net zero through an unsustainable combination of fossil-fuel emissions and short-term removals is ultimately pointless."


The sum should also explicitly include any knock-on effects. For example, planting forests at high latitudes can be counterproductive because they create a darker landscape that absorbs more solar heat, melting local ice and snow.


Then there is the question of whether to include other greenhouse gases, such as methane, in the net-zero sum. Methane has a much shorter lifetime in the atmosphere, so attempting to cancel out methane emissions with CO₂ removal would tend to mean more warming in the short term, and less in the long run. That could be good or bad, depending on whether it takes us past climate tipping points.


Zooming in on Zero


How can we do better? The first thing is to decide what should be classed as a residual. "We should make sure that residual emissions are truly hard to abate," says Buck. Voluntary codes are starting to address that, including the net-zero corporate standard launched by the Science Based Targets initiative, which calls for residuals to be only 5-10% of a company's current emissions.


To get removals moving, Fuss thinks that we need higher prices on carbon emissions. "If we are asking people to remove, we are asking them to perform a public service," she says, "so we should be compensating them for extracting each tonne of CO₂."


Carbon pricing could also curb fossil fuel production. Pacala led a 2023 National Academies report on accelerating decarbonization, which, among other things, recommended an economy-wide carbon tax in the United States. He says that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (the nation's main policy tool for moving toward net zero) omitted any such tax in order to gain political traction.


Assuming that carbon removals can scale up fast enough, it will be vital to prove how much CO₂ they are removing, through monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems. That could be challenging. "MRV is hard enough with forests, where we already have decades of experience," says Buck. "With novel techniques, it's a big challenge, and I'm not sure it's solvable on a timescale of 20 years or so." But there are some promising signs. In November 2023, the European Parliament voted to adopt a new certification scheme for removals, aiming to boost their credibility and scale. Meanwhile, advances in remote sensing and machine learning could make MRV more achievable.


As well as trying to redefine net zero, perhaps nations and societies also need to take a step back and think more broadly about what to strive for. Buck thinks that net zero should become just one among a set of targets, including reductions in fossil-fuel production and enhancing the capacity of countries to implement the clean-energy transition. She also considers the term to be fundamentally unsatisfying, a piece of accountancy that is not compelling to most people. Perhaps the world needs a more inspiring climate narrative that comes not just from scientists, but also other groups. "We need to evolve broader languages," Buck says, "and make more effort to understand what would encourage people to change their lifestyles and consumption."


Fankhauser, meanwhile, cautions against focusing on climate impacts alone. "The risk is that we maximize natural systems for carbon uptake but compromise biodiversity and other ecosystem services," he says. "We need a holistic point of view."


Climate solutions should also avoid dumping pollution or costs disproportionately on disadvantaged communities. This isn't just a moral matter. "People are not going to go along with these changes unless they see benefits in their own lives," says Pacala, who points to the plight of coal miners in the United States and other workers whose jobs may be threatened by the energy transformation. "We have to manage the jobs of legacy workers, who were previously thrown under the bus," he says.


At the moment, there is no pithy phrase to sum up these diverse aims. "Net zero is powerful because it is two words," says Fankhauser. Adding more detail could spoil that rhetorical impact. Low-residual, urgent, all-greenhouse-gas net zero, aligned with biodiversity and poverty reduction-it hardly trips off the tongue. For now, at least, researchers and policymakers may have to stick with those two words, while carefully contemplating all the things that add up to zero.




Stephen Battersby wrote this article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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By Julia Tilton for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Oregon News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When Oregon’s 2024 fire season ended in late October, over 1.9 million acres had burned across the state – an area larger than Delaware. For Tyler McCarty, district manager at the Coos Forest Protective Association (CFPA), in the coastal southwest part of the state, fires today are a “night and day difference” from what they were twenty years ago. 

McCarty spent more than two decades with the Oregon Department of Forestry before starting his current position in rural Coos County, where he also commands one of the state’s incident management teams that responds to large fires and other natural disasters. He started his career right out of high school as an entry level firefighter, and has been fighting fires since 2000.

“When I first started, a two or three thousand acre fire was a big fire,” McCarty told the Daily Yonder. “One of the fires that my incident management team was on this year was 180,000 acres.”

As the Oregon fire season trends longer and fires burn larger, McCarty and others who work with Oregon’s remaining few forest protective associations are grappling with questions about how they will retain personnel and secure enough funding to fight the fires of the future.

“You need more people to manage a 180,000 acre fire versus a 6,000 acre fire, which our system is kind of built on,” McCarty said. “Right now we’re operating in a system with a funding model that doesn’t support the fires that we’re seeing today.”

A Century of Community-Based Forest Protection

The first iteration of the forest protective association in Coos County was organized in 1910. Two years later, in 1912, the Douglas Forest Protective Association (DFPA) formed in the next county over. In those days, the goal was fewer fires and a sense of shared responsibility among those who owned and logged land in Oregon’s forests. 

Nowadays, the state of Oregon mandates that private forest landowners – many of whom are in the timber industry – have fire protection. Membership in a forest protective association like the one McCarty leads is one way to meet that requirement. 

The state of Oregon provides about 50% of the funding for these associations, according to Patrick Skrip, the district manager at DFPA. The other 50% comes from private and public landowners, such as the Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Currently, Oregon has three forest protective associations that operate with this or a similar funding model. 

To the east, Idaho has its own version of community-based forest protection. Called timber protective associations, the state’s two organizations have operated in some form since the early 1900s. At the edge of the Payette National Forest in McCall, Idaho, the Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association protects over half a million acres including private land, state-owned land, and portions of federally-owned land and national forests. In northern Idaho, the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association protects nearly one million acres owned by private landowners and state and federal agencies. 

As in Idaho, Oregon’s forest protective associations provide fire suppression and prevention services rooted in community partnership. There are no similar protective associations anywhere else in the country. 

“It’s a system that’s been in place for over a hundred years, and we believe that the best answers come locally,” Skrip told the Daily Yonder.

This local approach is exemplified by the resources shared between private landowners and their forest protective associations. Ken Canon, the president of the board of DFPA, said it is common practice for landowners to lend firefighting teams their timber equipment like excavators and dozers during a fire.

“The nature of DFPA and the way it’s set up is that they not only value the resource that the landowners own, but they also value the very, very close relationships they have with the landowners,” Canon said.

Canon is a retired attorney who has lived in rural Oregon for most of his life, and in Douglas County for over two decades. The 282 acre parcel of land he owns is part of the 1.6 million acres DFPA manages. Mostly forested, the area makes up some of the most productive timberlands in the lower forty-eight, Skrip told the Daily Yonder. It is also a vital part of the local economy. 

In the summer, this same land can pose a significant fire risk. But shutting down timber production, even temporarily, also means shutting down an income stream for local landowners. As a district fire warden, Skrip is one of the people with authority to close the woods for logging activity. It is not a responsibility he takes lightly.

“Those are tough decisions, and I’m very mindful,” Skrip said. “They impact our operator community and our mills, and those are mortgages that people have to pay.”

When Skrip has had to make those tough calls, the larger private landowners have generally supported the decision, Canon said. Many landowners – Canon included – take their own measures when it comes to fire prevention. In Coos County, McCarty said private landowners do the same, from making evacuation plans to ensuring their homes are as defensible for firefighters as possible. 

Even with the close cooperation between landowners and their forest protective associations, the increase in bigger fires burning at the same time means resources are stretched thin.

Firefighting Challenges

Ken Canon has a 120º vista from his property, which sits atop a small mountain surrounded on two sides by forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management. That land has not been managed in any way for years, Canon said, partly because of efforts to protect the spotted owl that date back to the 1990s. Today, the land is heavily forested as a result.

“It’s pretty dense, and the denser the fire, the more intense they are,” Canon said.

To mitigate against a future fire on the federal lands jumping to his property, Canon has taken to creating a boundary between his property and the federally-owned neighboring land. He said he has taken out the undergrowth on his side of the property line and left the old-growth trees with space between them.

Forest management is just one part of the story when it comes to the kinds of fire blazing in Oregon today. Dense forests like the one bordering Canon’s property are filled with fuels that sustain fires. On the landscape’s other extreme, burn scars from previous fires that have experienced some regrowth also provide what Skrip calls “light and flashy fuel” for fires to consume quickly as they advance. 

Climate change is also upsetting conventional methods for fire management. Warmer-than-average temperatures and heat waves during the summer season dry out fuels. Combine this with the state’s current megadrought conditions, which are drier than any other period in the past thousand years, and there is a new host of challenges for fire prevention and suppression efforts. 

“In this era of fire, we’ve seen more acres burned in our district in the last 10 years than in the last hundred years combined,” Skrip said. The fire regime is also marching to new lengths, Skrip said, with burning happening more frequently north of Roseburg and in the foothills of the Cascades. 

Adam Sinkey, the North Unit Forester for DFPA, started firefighting at seventeen, and has worked his way up the ranks since the early 2000s. During the first half of his career at DFPA, Sinkey said there was one big fire beyond what the district could handle. That was in 2004, and Sinkey said the district’s next big fire after that was in 2013. Now, Sinkey said, those big fires have become commonplace.

“We’ve had one in the district or multiple in the district it seems like every year, or every other year, ever since 2013,” Sinkey said. 

Larger and more severe fires strain a system where there are only so many resources to go around. Fires also carry a significant financial burden and put a heavy physical and mental demand on firefighters. McCarty said his team spent 50 days out in the field this past summer. Other teams were out for as long as 60 days.

“That’s a lot of days sleeping in a tent during the summertime, sleeping in the dirt,” McCarty said. Asking firefighters to be away from their families for months on end while working some of the toughest seasons the state has seen risks high rates of burnout. And while both CFPA and DFPA offer wintertime work in the form of co-ops to retain summer employees, the associations still face year-over-year retention challenges.

Sinkey is one firefighter who built his career in part thanks to DFPA’s winter co-op programs. When, after college, he realized he wanted to make firefighting his full-time job, he stayed on throughout the year. Sinkey’s co-op work ranged from supporting fuel reduction in Douglas County – much like what Canon does each year on his own property – to short stints with the Oregon Department of Transportation operating snowplows on state highway mountain passes. Today, Sinkey said around 40 of DFPA’s 100 summertime employees stick around for the winter co-op program. 

“Not only are we reducing heavy fuel loads around people’s homes, but it also allows us to retain good folks and good firefighters throughout the years,” Sinkey said. 

Still, Skrip and McCarty agreed they could do with even more full-time employees as today’s fires demand additional resources. Year-round employees allow forest protective associations to retain their leadership on the ground. Ultimately, Sinkey said, it’s “boots on the ground” that put out fires. 

But shifting the hiring model to have the majority of employees be permanent would require increased funding at the state level. 

Finding a New Funding Model

After the catastrophic 2020 Labor Day Fires destroyed more than 1 million acres over the course of a few days in Southern Oregon, 2021 ushered in a series of conversations among the public and the state government about how to better fund firefighting efforts across the state. 

In 2024, a large portion of the 1.9 million acres burned were in Eastern Oregon, a predominantly rural region. Canon said he expects there will be talk about the cost of those fires – a staggering $317.5 million across the state – in the 2025 legislative session.

For private landowners and the forest protective associations that provide for them, the price tag is a reminder of the burden that falls on rural communities.

Private landowners who are members of their local forest protective associations pay for their coverage by the acre. Prices have gone up across the board, McCarty said, to the point where fire protection is no longer affordable, particularly for ranchers and grazers whose land generates less profit than timber.

A more holistic approach to funding would include more investment from urban folks, Canon and McCarty said. Already, every Oregonian pays into a general fund that accounts for 50% of the funding that is dispersed to forest protective associations like in Coos and Douglas counties. But a new era of fire demands more financial resources. Canon and McCarty said those cannot come from rural landowners alone, especially when the fires affect everyone.

One idea is to impose a tax on camping equipment or cars, since both are connected to fires and their common causes: fires set from recreation and malfunctions with catalytic converters. Another idea is to raise the state’s income tax to cover the growing costs of fire protection in the state. A task force was organized by Oregon’s governor earlier this year to look at future possibilities for fire funding. Their findings are due before the legislative session begins in February 2025. 

Canon said he wants to see more participation from urban areas, where he said the effects of fire are only growing more apparent.

“What we’ve seen in the last 10 years is it’s not fun going to the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland in choking smoke,” he said. “It’s not just a discomfort, but it’s a health risk.”


Julia Tilton wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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Mainers are encouraged to take advantage of clean energy rebates and tax credits before they are gone.

The Inflation Reduction Act offers incentives to buy electric vehicles, upgrade appliances or install heat pumps. President-elect Trump has called the landmark climate law a "green new scam" and vowed to repeal any unspent funds.

Emily Walker, researcher for the energy consulting group and online marketplace EnergySage, urged homeowners to act quickly.

"There's going to be either a faster phaseout of some of these incentives, or the value will become lower," Walker outlined. "Or they'll become more difficult to obtain because there's more restrictions around who can actually get them."

Walker pointed out interest in benefits has surged since the election, including queries about the 30% tax credit for installation of full solar and battery systems.

Mainers can save up to $7,500 on a new electric vehicle or $4,000 on a used one and plug into the state's growing number of high-speed EV charging stations. Eligible households can also receive up to $2,000 for installing heat pumps and credits for weatherproofing windows and attics.

Walker noted EnergySage can help people find the best options for their home.

"We are experts so we can quickly walk you through the process and get you multiple quotes all at once so that it can expedite that time," Walker explained. "And provide you with the resources to still feel confident in your decision."

Walker stressed working with an EnergySage adviser is free. She added the federal benefits are not only saving households money on energy costs but helping states meet their own clean energy goals. Maine has set a target of reaching net-zero emissions by 2045.


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By Gabriella Sotelo for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathleen Shannon for Wyoming News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Elon Musk recently appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he discussed everything from the benefits of sleep to gaming. But the conversation quickly shifted to meat, and led to a brief exchange - based on misinformation, rather than facts - that beef does not have a climate impact. Given the show's huge reach and Musk's newfound political influence, the exchange is worth unpacking and fact-checking.

Musk, who was once considered environmentally forward due to his work with electric vehicles, has a notably different stance when it comes to the climate implications of beef. In fact, Musk has tweeted that farming has no impact on climate change, and that killing "some cows" won't make a difference for the environment.

In reality, meat production and consumption are responsible for between 12 and just under 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a constant drain on our planet's water and land reserves.

Musk's suggestion otherwise reflects his ongoing dismissal of the environmental concerns surrounding animal agriculture. This is particularly concerning given his close relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, who recently appointed Musk to co-lead the new Department of Government Efficiency. Musk and Trump have had public discussions about climate change, with Musk once again downplaying the urgency of global warming by stating, "we don't need to rush" when it comes to addressing the climate crisis.

"The constant barrage of misinformation - spread through ads, inaccurate alternative news programming, and uninformed podcasters and social media influencers - can create an illusory truth effect where repetition makes false claims seem credible," Michelle Amazeen, a professor of mass communication at Boston University, and part of the university's Climate Disinformation Initiative, told Sentient in an email.

Musk's comments on the podcast, though brief, sidestep the growing body of evidence of the significant role the livestock industry plays when it comes to climate change. Let's dissect their exchange, and take a closer look at how two extremely influential men are representing this issue.

What Rogan Got (Almost) Right

Setting the scene, the conversation on animal agriculture started off with a one-off comment from Rogan about the carnivore diet, and how people dismiss it because of "propaganda" against animal agriculture.

Rogan: There is a lot of propaganda that put this thing out there that animal agriculture is the number one contributor to global warming.

Musk: It's rubbish, it's bullshit, it doesn't matter.

Rogan: Not only is it hot bullshit, but the real problem is factory farming. Regenerative farming is carbon neutral.

Rogan is technically correct that animal agriculture is not the number one contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, the EPA puts the transportation sector as the higher contributor, responsible for 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Factory farming is also an important facet of the issue, as Rogan points out. Since 99 percent of the meat we eat comes from factory farms, impacts from animal agriculture are, by default, attributable to factory farming.

Here's where things go awry: despite Rogan's claim, research shows regenerative farming does not make meat carbon neutral. While it does appear to have some soil health benefits, according to the research, getting carbon to stay put in agricultural soils has not panned out (again, by the research). Factory farming, which operates on a more efficient scale, actually tends to result in lower emissions per unit of meat produced, though the tradeoff is living conditions tend to be worse for animal welfare.

Beyond direct climate pollution, factory farming is responsible for a range of other environmental problems and public health risks. Industrial animal agriculture is a leading cause of water contamination, as runoff from animal waste often ends up in rivers and groundwater, polluting drinking water supplies.

Factory farming is also a key driver of antibiotic resistance, which contributes to the rise of drug-resistant pathogens that threaten human health. These farms are often linked to disease outbreaks, including avian flu, as overcrowded conditions make it easier for diseases to spread from animal to animal and, in some cases, to humans.

All that said, research has shown that changing the way we produce meat to a more land-intensive approach like organic or regenerative (what some call "better meat") would be worse for climate change, not better, even if it might result in some important improvements, to soil health and animal welfare, for example. No matter the method, there is no getting around the urgent need for people in the Global North to reduce their meat consumption in order to stave off the worst global warming scenarios.

What Both Elon Musk and Rogan Got Very Wrong

The exchange went on:

Musk: The animals aren't going to make any difference to global warming. Zero percent, nothing...

It's not gonna make any difference to global warming or the CO2 concentration atmosphere, really, if people eat pure steaks, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. Irrelevant. I wanted to be super clear about that. Yeah, it will not matter. You will not even be able to measure it. Okay, that's how irrelevant it is.

This statement is patently incorrect.

As already stated, livestock farming contributes between 12 and 19.6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a range of studies. These figures come from peer-reviewed research conducted by experts in the field, such as the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which uses comprehensive methods to estimate emissions from different sources in the agriculture sector, including enteric fermentation (methane from digestion) and manure management. The lower estimate - 12 percent - comes from an FAO report, but more recent studies by the FAO and its partners suggest livestock emissions could be higher, depending on research methods.

Musk's claim that the impact of meat consumption is "irrelevant" fails to account for these significant potential reductions in emissions. Even reducing global meat consumption a few days a week would result in substantial environmental benefits.

While plant-based meat can help facilitate this transition, the plant-based protein industry is another point of contention for figures like Musk and Rogan - which leads to another part of their exchange that was also incorrect.

Rogan: Do you think that is just propaganda because of people that have a vested interest in things like plant-based meat products and things along those lines? Green energy.

Musk: I think that's part of it. You know that you're only going to get people pushing to avoid meat, like some people, just maybe they go natural, just maybe they just like vegetarians or vegans or whatever ideological, ideological reasons.

In reality, the meat industry remains much bigger, and far more influential than any so-called plant-based propaganda. Plant-based meat sales have gone down in recent years, in part thanks to the meat industry campaigning against plant-based alternatives, labeling them as "ultra-processed." These efforts are designed to steer consumers back to traditional meat.

The meat industry has actively worked to shape public policy and perception through government programs, such as the beef and pork "checkoff" programs. These are initiatives funded by the meat industry to promote the consumption of beef and pork. One of the most famous examples is the "Beef. It's What's for Dinner." campaign, which has been running since 1992. These programs have been highly effective in bolstering the demand for meat, creating an environment where meat consumption is not just normal, but celebrated.

While the plant-based industry is still growing, it simply does not have the same resources to flood the media with messages aimed at shaping consumer behavior and policy in the same way the meat industry has and currently does.

Here is how the conversation on this topic ended between Musk and Rogan:

Rogan: Isn't it funny that is heretic speaking now. That's crazy talk now, nowadays it's like you have to say that we have to eat less meat. That meat is bad.

Musk: Totally eat as much meat as you want, it is not going to make a difference. And 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.

In fact, there are many ways to measure emissions from meat production. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has outlined several methods, including the use of respiration chambers, which capture the gasses animals release during breathing, and the SF6 technique, a more advanced method where a tracer gas is used to measure methane emissions directly from livestock.

Another key tool in the field is the Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM). GLEAM is designed to analyze environmental factors like feed use, land use, greenhouse gas emissions and more. GLEAM's goal is to measure resources used during livestock production and then identify the environmental impacts of farming livestock, arriving at the 12 percent figure cited above.

Scientists Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemeck also took a deep dive into global food systems by analyzing 570 studies across 38,700 farms in 119 countries in 2018. They focused on five key environmental factors: land use, water use (factoring in local water scarcity), greenhouse gas emissions, acidification and eutrophication emissions. Their findings showed that food systems are responsible for about 26 percent of global emissions (a more recent study put the number at around a third), with meat production as the largest driver of food-related emissions, responsible for 57 percent of that sector's pollution.

These models are key to understanding the full scope of livestock's impact on the planet, something Musk and Rogan's dismissal of the issue fails to acknowledge.

The Bottom Line

The impact of the views expressed by Musk and Rogan are not insignificant - The Joe Rogan Experience attracts millions of listeners, and the episode in question alone has been watched over 16 million times on YouTube and viewed by over 51 million on X. It also represents the way misinformation can easily spread on the internet.

"Podcasts are also becoming an increasingly popular medium for news, with nearly half of U.S. adults having listened to at least one in the past month, according to Statista. Both presidential candidates tapped into this trend, appearing on influential podcasts such as Joe Rogan's and Howard Stern's," Amazeen writes to Sentient. "These alternative news sources often lack the commitment to journalistic principles like verification and accuracy."

Musk has also centered himself in the public discourse, now tapped for Trump's incoming administration. Given Trump's previous track record of downplaying climate issues, there is a strong possibility that Musk's views will reinforce the President-elect's views, and his continued support of the meat industry.


Gabriella Sotelo wrote this article for Sentient.


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