By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Prairie News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Our food systems are in serious need of an overhaul. Over the last 60 years, per-capita meat consumption has roughly doubled, and is now at unsustainable levels. During that same period of time, the number of billionaires in the world has increased dramatically as well. This confluence of trends raises an important question: what, if anything, are the world's billionaires doing to fix our food systems, and help us transition into a more climate-friendly way of eating?

Meat production fuels a number of long term environmental impacts, which is one reason why the precipitous rise in meat consumption over the last few decades is such a big problem. The livestock industry is responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, with 80 percent of all agricultural land going to livestock production. Beef production is the top driver of deforestation worldwide, and deforestation is an enormously destructive process that destroys ecosystems, reduces biodiversity, erodes soil and emits massive amounts of greenhouse gasses.

At the same time, the world's population is predicted to swell to 9.7 billion people by the year 2050, which means many more people potentially eating more meat. Researchers warn that the global appetite for meat will eventually exceed our capacity to produce it on this planet.

"I was at a workshop surrounded by pork producers, chicken farmers and dairy farmers, and eight out of 10 of them agreed that they will not be able to meet growing meat [demand] on their own without the other options," says Sheila Voss, vice president of communications at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that advocates for alternatives to meat. "We only have finite land and water."

Despite what some opponents of food systems reform claim, the goal of getting people to eat less meat is not a conspiracy of billionaires trying to replace traditional meat entirely, or aiming to force people to become vegetarians. Efforts to reform the way we produce and consume meat include investments not only in alternative proteins, but also into technologies that aim to make traditional meat production more environmentally friendly, such as feeds that reduce the methane output from cattle. (Though when these turn out to be more marketing gimmick than verifiable solution, the public should be wary.)

While there's no silver bullet for accomplishing all of these changes, the richest people in the world are certainly in a position to help fund initiatives that move us in the right direction. But have they?

To answer this question, we analyzed the investment profiles of several well-known U.S. billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Which of them are actually giving away money to improve food systems - and which ones don't appear to invest in solving this major climate issue at all?

A Breakdown of Billionaire Investments in Food

1. Jeff Bezos

One of the more prolific donors in the field is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos - a little surprising, no doubt, since "Amazon" is hardly synonymous with "sustainable." As a company that sells and ships physical products around the world, Amazon has an enormous carbon footprint, and while it's announced several measures intended to reduce its environmental impact, the efficacy of these measures is still unclear.

Bezos himself, however, has spent quite a bit of money to fund climate initiatives, including measures aimed at researching and promoting alternatives to traditional meat. He's done this primarily through the Bezos Earth Fund, a grant program for funding climate scientists and green initiatives around the world.

"Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," Bezos wrote in an Instagram post announcing the fund. "I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share. This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs - any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

Bezos, one of the richest men on Earth, seeded the fund with $10 billion of his own money at the outset. That money is meant to be distributed gradually by 2030; as of this writing, $2 billion has been doled out to various climate initiatives, according to the fund's website.

The fund has committed to spending $1 billion of its overall endowment on food-related projects, with the goal of "transform[ing] food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet." A lot of that money has gone to grants aimed at reducing methane output from cattle, while the Bezos' fund is also funding research into cultivated and plant-based meat.

In 2024, the fund announced that it would be spending $60 million of its endowment on research centers aimed at improving the technology behind alternative proteins. This allocation was soon increased to $100 million, and in May, the first Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein went live at North Carolina State University. The fund intends to build more of these centers in order to "establish a network of open-access research and development centers focused on sustainable protein alternatives, expanding consumer choices."

In addition to the Bezos Earth Fund, Amazon itself established the Right Now Climate Fund, a $100 million initiative aimed at reforestation and conservation. As cattle farming is the biggest driver of deforestation worldwide, this fund targets efforts, like agroforestry, that are component of food system change.

"We are not turning everybody into vegetarians," said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, in June. "But we are trying to improve the choice and the health and the vitality of the agricultural system."

2. Bill Gates

Next on our list is Bill Gates, one of two founders of Microsoft. A vocal proponent of alternative proteins, Gates has called plant-based meat "the future," and said that wealthy countries "should move to 100 percent synthetic beef" in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with cattle.

More importantly, he's put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. Gates has invested in plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, as well as the cultivated meat company Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats. Upside Foods is one of just two cultivated meat companies that have been given FDA approval to sell its products commercially in the U.S.

Gates has also given money to Neutral Foods, a food company that aims to be carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for the emissions its products cause. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also provided grants to a number of organizations working on alternative proteins, including the Good Food Institute.

3. Elon Musk

Musk's record on the environment is mixed. There was a time when he had a reputation as an environmentalist, as the success of his electric car company Tesla was seen as a positive step in reducing transportation-related greenhouse emissions.

Over the last few years, however, Musk's politics have drifted steadily to the right, and that includes his stance on global warming and sustainability. In a recent conversation with Donald Trump, Musk downplayed climate change's urgency, claiming that "it's not like the house is on fire immediately" and that "people can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it's okay." Musk's statements are often contradictory, however. He went on to characterize climate action as "something we need to move towards," albeit "without causing hardship in the short term." Musk has also praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made headlines recently for banning the sale of cultivated meat in his state.

And yet despite all of this, Musk's company SpaceX has collaborated with Aleph Farms, an Israeli company that makes alternative meat, to investigate the viability of growing cultivated meat in space. In 2022, a four-man team flew to the International Space Station on a SpaceX capsule with cultivated beef cells in tow, and studied the viability of growing those cells into edible meat in zero gravity conditions.

It seems contradictory: Musk's company participates in an experiment that promotes meat alternatives (in space, at least), yet he's also vocally downplayed beef's role in driving climate pollution (back on Earth). While only Musk knows what's going on in his head, the fact remains that his company has at least played a small role in research to advance cultivated meat technology.

Outside of that, Musk's company Tesla stopped using animal products in its cars in 2019, replacing the traditional leather seats with vinyl.

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Finally, we took a look at investments made by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no problem with traditional meat, and he doesn't appear to have invested in the alternative meat or meat reduction strategies in any significant way (a Zuckerberg-backed fund did apparently invest in biotech company Modern Meadow, maker of leather alternatives, in 2019). He has made headlines, however, with two of his meat-related projects.

In 2011, Zuckerberg announced that for the next year he would only be eating meat from animals that he personally killed. He later explained that this meant he'd "basically become a vegetarian," since he was killing relatively few animals. He ended the experiment after a year.

More recently, Zuckerberg revealed that he's been raising cattle on his ranch in Hawaii, with the goal of creating "some of the highest quality beef in the world." He said that the cows are wagyu and angus breeds, and that he's feeding them macadamia meal and beer that they produce on the ranch. Zuckerberg was widely criticized for this, in part because it's unclear whether macadamia meal and beer is a suitable diet for cows.

The Bottom Line

The billionaires we've looked at here are all over the map in terms of their stances on meat. Both Bezos and Gates support efforts to address how much meat the world consumes, while Zuckerberg mostly has other ideas. As for Musk, only he can know what's going on in his head.

"[Bezos and Gates] are leaning into food systems transformation, and that's fairly new," Voss says. "Our food system needs massive help, given the realities and challenges, as well as growing meat demand, and in both of these cases, the Bezos Earth fund and Gates both are supporting multiple interventions. They're not just putting their eggs in one basket."

But money talks, and what matters much more than what these people say about meat is how they've spent their money. Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy have the resources to significantly improve food systems around the world. A few have made the financial commitment, and hopefully, more of their peers will soon follow suit.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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The Town of Carrboro is leveraging state law to combat climate change, announcing a lawsuit aimed at Duke Energy.

Barbara Foushee, mayor of Carrboro, revealed the case Wednesday, filed in Orange County Superior Court, alleging the company misled the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and delayed its transition to renewable-energy sources. Foushee said the town wants accountability for the damage caused by the delays and the harmful effects of the company's continued reliance on coal and gas.

"For years, Duke Energy Corp. has been working against our public safety," Foushee alleged. "As our town has been working hard to use every tool at our disposal to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change."

Foushee argued the climate crisis has taken a toll on Carrboro's public health and well-being and cost the town millions of dollars. She added while fossil fuels have caused measurable harm, Duke Energy has doubled down on coal and gas use, even constructing new coal plants in North Carolina.

Danny Nowell, mayor pro tem of Carrboro, underscored what he called the depth of Duke Energy's climate deception and the effects it has had on communities.

"Because of their monopoly, North Carolinians had no choice but to trust their deceptions," Nowell contended. "Our trust has been violated, and we have paid for it. We have paid for excess road repairs. We have faced the effects of stormwater, and we will continue to pay for even further expenses as we uncover them."

The Center for Biological Diversity and the nonprofit climate justice group NC WARN are assisting Carrboro with its case.

Jim Warren, executive director of NC WARN, said Duke Energy's leadership needs to be held accountable for what he called its long history of misleading the public and the widespread harm caused by its practices, comparing them to the tobacco industry. He is optimistic the lawsuit could provide relief and accountability for others who have suffered from the harmful effects allegedly caused by the company.

"We all hope this lawsuit can help the many communities down east North Carolina, in the mountains, around the world that have been hurt already by climate disasters," Warren emphasized.

Duke Energy responded to the lawsuit by stating it is reviewing the complaint and remains committed to its customers and communities. The company added it plans to continue collaborating with policymakers and regulators to provide reliable, increasingly clean energy while keeping rates affordable.

Oil and Water Don't Mix, a nonprofit group opposing Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline, is leading student efforts across the Upper Great Lakes to advocate for its shutdown.

The campaign includes eight Michigan universities, with schools in Wisconsin, Illinois and Canada. Opponents argued the aging pipeline, running through the Straits of Mackinac, poses a catastrophic environmental risk if a spill occurs.

Calvin Floyd, a graduate student at the University of Michigan and volunteer student organizer, joined the Line 5 student campaign after first learning about the issue in high school.

"I remember the Kalamazoo oil spill," Floyd noted. "I became aware of the same company is operating a ticking time bomb underneath the Straits of Mackinac and that it had to be stopped."

Enbridge defends Line 5 by citing its economic importance and safety measures, including a proposed tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac and continuous monitoring.

Last month, Oakland University hosted "Bad River," a documentary about the Bad River Band's fight against the Line 5 pipeline, while the University of Michigan screened "Troubled Water," focusing on environmental and social justice.

Floyd pointed out student support for shutting down Line 5 is strong, with a diverse group leading the effort at the University of Michigan.

"It's both in-state students who have a connection to the Great Lakes and to the region and they know the weight of this issue, and it's also folks who come from all over the world who realize both the importance of this resource and how it's under threat," Floyd outlined.

In November, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved permits for Enbridge's 41-mile reroute of the Line 5 pipeline, bypassing the Bad River Band's reservation. The project faces opposition from the tribe and environmentalists.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Alabama News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Over the last couple of years, the US Department of Agriculture has been funding various agricultural initiatives that it calls “climate-smart.” These are farming practices that, in the USDA’s estimation, provide some kind of benefit to the environment. But where is this climate-smart money actually going, and is it really doing anything to stop or slow climate change?

The impetus behind climate-smart farming policies is rather straightforward. Food production is currently responsible for almost one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the majority of those emissions coming from animal agriculture. Over three-quarters of all freshwater and ocean eutrophication are the result of agricultural production, as is almost all habitat loss on the planet.

It’s clear that our farming practices need to change, and climate-smart policies are the U.S. government’s attempt to bring about this change. At least, that’s what the government says.

What Are Climate-Smart Policies?

While the concept of agricultural practices that are good for the environment is nothing new, only recently did the U.S. government start using the phrase “climate-smart” to refer to such policies. Unfortunately, the term doesn’t have any official or legal definition, and as we’ll see, that’s resulted in a number of dubiously beneficial practices being dubbed “climate-smart.”

Broadly speaking, though, climate-smart policies are those that provide some sort of environmental benefit, or otherwise help slow climate change and global warming. Usually, this means that they either reduce carbon emissions or increase carbon capture by soil, trees and other sequesterers.

Climate-smart policies are funded by the USDA, which is in turn funded by Congress, and the USDA has many different programs through which it distributes climate-smart funds.

However, tracking the funding, progress and implementation of these climate-smart practices is quite difficult, in large part because the USDA has made it that way.

The USDA’s Climate-Smart Initiatives Aren’t Transparent

In 2022, the USDA announced the formation of Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a billion-dollar pilot program aimed at researching and testing the environmental benefits of various farming and forestry practices. Farmers and other agricultural producers could apply to receive grants from the USDA to spend on potentially climate-smart policies, and over the years, the USDA would measure how beneficial to the environment these practices actually were.

The USDA initially dedicated $1 billion to this program, and has added several billion more since then. But Jason Davidson, Senior Food and Agriculture Campaigner for the nonprofit Friends of the Earth, tells Sentient that the inner workings of this pilot program have been anything but transparent, with almost all of the process taking place behind closed doors.

“The USDA has been very opaque in describing not just the projects themselves, but even what sort of data they plan to collect [to evaluate them],” Davidson says. “All we can really say is that they have planned to give money to these organizations. On what schedule, or whether that’s a lump sum over the years, etc, is unclear.”

The Problematic Investment in Supposedly ‘Climate-Smart Beef’

This lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine why, to take just one example, some of the largest meat companies on the planet, including Tyson, JBS and Perdue, received “climate-smart” funds through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program.

“Tens of millions of dollars were given to projects where either a primary or secondary applicant was a major international meat company,” Davidson explains. “But the actual specifics of all of these programs are hard to decipher. The only sort of information that USDA released was who applied, how much money they were given and a brief description of the project.”

Take the “Climate-Smart Grasslands” grant. The goal of this initiative, according to the USDA, is to “market climate-smart beef with the ultimate goal of launching a cooperative to sell climate-smart beef products.” A partnership of 28 different entities, including JBS USA and Tyson, received $30 million to implement this project.

But what exactly is “climate-smart beef?” Sure, different methods of cattle farming vary in their environmental impacts, but none of those methods are beneficial to the climate. Beef production emits over twice the greenhouse gasses as any other protein on a per-gram basis, according to Our World In Data, and is the leading driver of deforestation worldwide.

Nevertheless, the USDA soon authorized Tyson to market their Brazen Beef subbrand as “climate-friendly,” and to claim on the packaging that it achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Even if Brazen Beef’s production techniques really do produce 10 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than traditional beef production, though, they’re still emitting more than twice the greenhouse gasses than any other protein source.

But it’s not even clear that this 10 percent reduction is actually happening, as Tyson and the USDA have offered vanishingly few details as to how they’re achieving this supposed reduction. (Tyson is also being sued for these claims.) The USDA doesn’t directly monitor their implementation of these practices, and EWG says that when it asked the USDA for substantiation of this claim, the documents it received were heavily redacted in order to protect Tyson’s “trade secrets.”

This kind of opacity is indicative of the USDA’s general approach when pressed for details on its climate-smart policies, Davidson tells Sentient. Other environmental organizations, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, have also expressed frustration at the USDA’s lack of transparency regarding climate-smart policies, as have some members of Congress.

“Friends of the Earth and other organizations have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to USDA over the last two years to try and get more information about these projects, and we have been largely unsuccessful, receiving heavily redacted documents in return,” Davidson says. “It is extremely unclear how the USDA evaluates these programs.”

The Inflation Reduction Act Funded Climate-Smart Projects — Or Did It?

 When the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was announced, information on it included $19.5 billion in funding for climate-smart policies. While it’s true that it contains $19.5 billion in funding for the USDA, the phrase “climate-smart” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the law’s text.

In truth, the the IRA allocated this money to a selection of USDA conservation programs, and mandated that these programs use the money only on practices that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

Since then, the USDA has curated and maintained a list of programs that it considers to be “climate-smart,” which it updates annually. This list determines which specific practices are eligible to receive climate-smart funds provided by the IRA. In October 2023, the USDA added 14 new practices to its list of “climate-smart” policies.

A February investigation by the Environmental Working Group, however, found that one of the USDA’s newly designated “climate-smart” programs — waste storage facilities for animal farms — actually increases greenhouse emissions, according to the USDA’s own analysis from 2024. Note: though the 2024 data is no longer available on the USDA website, this author did review data provided by EWG.

The Farm Bill Could Scale Back Climate-Smart Funding

Every five years, Congress has to renew the Farm Bill, an enormous package of legislation that undergirds American farming and agriculture. The last version of the bill has expired, and as usual, Republican and Democratic lawmakers are bickering over what the next bill should include. One of these arguments concerns the IRA’s funding for climate-smart policies.

In May, Republicans released a Farm Bill proposal that retained the $19.5 billion in funding that the IRA approved, but removed the requirement that this money go to initiatives that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

If this version of the Farm Bill passes, which looks increasingly probable given Republicans will control both the House and Senate, the $19.5 billion in “climate-smart” funding provided by the IRA would become $19.5 billion in general funding for the USDA’s conservation projects, regardless of their impact on the climate.

A 2022 analysis by EWG found that the overwhelming majority of funds from the USDA’s conservation programs don’t go to climate-smart projects, and the group estimates that if these “guardrails” from the IRA are removed, only one-fifth of the USDA’s conservation budget will go to programs that reduce greenhouse emissions.

It’s not a sure thing that this provision will be included in the final Farm Bill, which isn’t expected to pass until next year. Nevertheless, the fact that these guardrails are on the chopping block shows just how precarious funding for climate-smart projects is, regardless of their efficacy.

The Bottom Line

From a bird’s-eye perspective, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that the federal government has, at least in theory, recognized the importance of making America’s farming practices more sustainable.

But the extent to which these efforts have actually benefited the environment is entirely unclear. Some of the ostensibly “climate-smart” initiatives are anything but, and the USDA’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to measure the effectiveness of those that are.

Bringing about a more environmentally friendly farming system is a laudable goal, but the American government’s efforts to do so have been disappointing and lackluster at best.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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