A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

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Another week, another cryptocurrency-enabled ransomware attack on a wildly unsustainable industry. Last time, the target was Colonial Pipeline, a company with notoriously bad computer systems, which, as The New Republic’s Nick Martin pointed out, didn’t even realize it had a million-gallon-plus gas leak on its hands last year until two teens on bikes reported it. This time, it’s Brazilian multinational JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world.

When hackers targeted Colonial in mid-May, the pipeline briefly shut down (allegedly because the company was worried it couldn’t bill customers effectively), triggering an unnecessary gas panic up and down the East Coast. Similarly, the attack on JBS this week led the company to pause cattle slaughter in Australia on Monday, and in its U.S. plants on Tuesday.

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This is a big deal for the American meat supply chain. As Reuters reported Tuesday afternoon, JBS accounts for roughly 20 percent of the “slaughtering capacity for U.S. cattle and hogs.” So while the company quickly assured consumers that many plants were expected to come back online Wednesday, the news did trigger a fair amount of price anxiety.

There’s a lot to say about this from the climate perspective. First, it’s clear that Americans in particular need to eat less meat, period. (Regenerative grazing, feeding cattle seaweed, and other proposed “solutions” to meat’s methane problem probably aren’t scalable.)

Second, the very fact that it’s possible to cause this much supply chain disruption with a single hack points to the huge levels of consolidation in the meat industry. A handful of big companies are producing most of the emissions and holding most of the lobbying power.

And third, while it’s hard to make companies completely immune to hackers, both of these hacks targeted industries with a long history of lax standards and under-regulation of different varieties. The industry is rife with worker exploitation and endangerment. When industrial meatpackers lobbied the Trump administration for help staying open during the pandemic, TNR’s Kate Aronoff wrote about the absurdity of keeping open the very facilities that were rapidly turning into Covid-19 hot spots:

A Tyson facility in Waterloo, Iowa, had to be shut down last weekend after being linked to 200 cases of Covid-19.… At least 4,400 meatpacking workers across 80 plants in 26 states had tested positive as of Wednesday.… These facilities were already a danger to public health. The increasingly consolidated industrial meat-raising and meatpacking operations run by Tyson, Smithfield, and the other companies now begging for federal assistance have long been veritable petri dishes for zoonotic pathogens. Their business models rely on what author Mike Davis has called “vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.” As it infects workers with the coronavirus, industrial animal agriculture may well be brewing the next deadly, world-stopping pandemic. Meanwhile, the factories’ rampant air and water pollution, and the health conditions they provoke, make the inordinately poor, Black, and brown communities surrounding them more vulnerable to Covid-19 and other diseases. That’s not even to mention factory farming’s gargantuan contributions to global warming, which itself increases the likelihood of future zoonotic epidemics

Meat is an incredibly sensitive topic. But you don’t need to be a budding vegan to recognize that the meat industry, regardless of your personal attachment to burgers, needs radical reform. Think hard about the fact that hackers can shut down 20 percent of U.S. meatpacking capacity with an attack on a single company. That’s a bad system, leading both to food insecurity and way too much political influence for meat giants. Maybe if the meat lobby were a little less powerful, we’d have a chance of having an honest political discussion about its emissions.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

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Stat of the Week

That’s how many heat-related deaths worldwide can be attributed to global warming between 1991 and 2018, according to a new study.

Good News

Turns out it’s relatively easy to get more people to ride-share (rather than drive alone or take single-passenger cabs/Lyfts) by using financial incentives, according to a paper published in Nature Communications this week.

Bad News

A new study suggests a lot of flies become infertile when exposed to heat stress. This is worrisome (rather than just good news for your kitchen fruit fly infestation) because of its implications for ecosystems in general as the planet heats. There’s reason to believe heat stress will have a similar effect on other animals, too.

Elsewhere in the Ecosystem

Wall Street’s Favorite Climate Solution Is Mired in Disagreements

Carbon offsets are wildly popular, and, as TNR’s writers have repeatedly noted, problematic: frequently unrigorous, easy to game, a vehicle for corporate greenwashing, with a potential to increase inequality. Bloomberg published an interesting piece Wednesday looking at the negotiations involved in setting up carbon markets. It’s unusually detailed in its acknowledgment of the potential pitfalls:

Customers in the U.K. filling up their tanks with Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s gasoline today will see advertisements about the beneficial role of carbon offsets. Pay a small fee at the pump, drivers are told, and their emissions are neutralized by funding a forest program in Peru. There’s more than marketing happening here: Shell is one of a growing group of companies with commitments to zero out emissions by mid-century, and purchasing offsets is a significant part of the solution.

The danger is that cheap offsets can be used to avoid the hard work of actually cutting emissions. The practice is so common that the certificates are often described by critics as “papal indulgences,” reminiscent of the way Catholics in the Middle Ages made payments to the Church to eliminate the stain of sinful deeds.

Jess Shankleman and Akshat Rathi | Bloomberg