Why New York is suing the world’s biggest meat company

Cattle at a JBS facility in Brazil. | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Meat giant JBS said it’ll reach net zero emissions by 2040. LOL.

As public concern about climate change grows, so does demand for lower-emissions consumer goods. And as major meat producers face the fact that their climate impacts may turn away conscientious consumers, they are increasingly claiming to offer low-carbon meat.

That includes the Brazilian multinational JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, which in 2021 began claiming that it will achieve net zero emissions by 2040, promising in a full-page New York Times ad that it could serve up “bacon, chicken wings and steak with net-zero emissions.”

This claim is, on its face, dubious. Meat, especially beef, is by far the food sector’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, and no solution to these emissions exists that would offer significant reductions — except scaling down meat production.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has deemed JBS’s misleading promises serious enough to take the company to court. A lawsuit filed by her office last week alleges that JBS’s claim about emissions reductions is both unsubstantiated and unachievable — and that it may not only mislead consumers into buying its highly polluting products but could also “in effect, provide environmentally conscious consumers with a ‘license’ to eat beef.”

While some critics may read the suit as an anti-free market move, it is, in reality, the opposite. Functioning markets depend on giving consumers accurate information to be able to make free choices; corporate duplicity undermines the market’s capacity to provide goods they see as preferable.

If successful, the lawsuit would come with financial penalties for JBS and would send a message to other food companies that greenwashing comes with monetary and political costs. In a context where the link between livestock production and climate change is often ignored or underreported, it could also send an important message to the public and policymakers about the prevalence of deception in the stories they are told by the livestock industry.

Why JBS’s net zero promises make no sense

JBS, which was founded in 1953 and is based in São Paulo, Brazil, today sells products in about 180 countries and runs plants and sales offices on nearly every continent through subsidiaries like JBS USA. In 2022, its net income was close to $3 billion. It is one of the biggest beef processors in the US, and a major processor of pork and chicken.

JBS didn’t respond to Vox’s request for comment in time for publication, but told the Wall Street Journal that it disagreed with James’s lawsuit and that it “will continue to partner with farmers, ranchers and our food system partners around the world to help feed a growing population while using fewer resources and reducing agriculture’s environmental impact.”

But being in the meat business situates JBS in the most environmentally harmful part of the food system. Livestock is responsible for 57 percent of food systems emissions, or about 14.5 percent of all global emissions. Much of this comes from cows, which produce methane when they digest food, but it also comes from factory farms where pigs and chickens are raised and from open air manure lagoons where waste from farmed animals is stored.

Grazing cattle and growing feed crops for animals, like soy, are also major drivers of deforestation, most notably in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Among its many harms, deforestation removes a major carbon sink — meaning that not only does livestock production emit greenhouse gases, but the lands cleared for that production also can no longer capture and store planet-warming emissions anywhere near as efficiently as forests.

Leo Freitas/Getty Images

An area of the Amazon rainforest deforested for cattle ranching.

Andre Penner/AP

A forest is illegally burnt in the Amazon to clear land for industry.

Unsurprisingly, JBS’s emissions are gargantuan. In 2021 it reported more than 71 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions — making JBS, as New York’s lawsuit mentions, a larger emitter than the entire country of Ireland. Outside audits have suggested that its emissions are growing at an unchecked pace, increasing by 51 percent between 2016 and 2021.

With global demand for meat rising, the meat industry is a major impediment to meeting climate targets. Without shifting diets in wealthy countries away from meat and dairy, it would be impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C, a target set by the Paris climate agreement.

JBS’s business model conflicts with that reality, and with any possibility of bringing emissions in line with planetary limits. As New York’s lawsuit bluntly states: “scientists point to the need to reduce production of and demand for ruminant meat, including beef … The JBS Group plans to do the opposite.”

The case alleges that JBS’s claims — which have appeared on its website and have been repeated in forums including a New York Times event last year — have no basis in fact, and that the company has neither the information nor the means to deliver on its promises because it lacks a complete picture of its own emissions.

Corporate emissions reporting is usually split into three tranches: Scope 1, which includes direct emissions from company-owned facilities; scope 2, which includes emissions from electricity purchased by the company; and scope 3, which are all other emissions throughout the value chain of the product the company is selling. For meat processors like JBS, scope 3 is highly complex, including things like crops grown to feed animals, deforestation, and methane — and it can make up upward of 90 percent of their emissions.

JBS has admitted, as noted in the lawsuit, that it lacks the capacity to accurately calculate its scope 3 emissions due to the complexity of its supply chain (which would also suggest its 2021 reported emissions mentioned above are at best an estimate). In short: the company doesn’t have a reliable baseline emissions number from which it could plan to achieve net zero.

Worse, James’s lawsuit alleges that JBS had no plan for achieving net zero when it announced its commitment. In 2023, two years into making the net zero promise, it was still claiming to be “working to develop a robust net zero roadmap.”

At a New York Times event last fall, JBS CEO Gilberto Tomazoni said, “The main strategy that we have [to reduce emissions] is to regenerate agriculture.” The company’s website has claimed that JBS will invest $100 million by 2030 in research into “regenerative farming practices.” But while “regenerative” has become something of a catch-all buzzword in agriculture sustainability discourse, the term is infamously slippery, with no clear definition, and therefore no clear ability to quantify its capacity to reduce emissions.

Given the scale of emissions from animal agriculture, especially beef, it is not clear the means exist to significantly reduce, much less completely offset, emissions using regenerative or any other techniques.

Can litigation hold Big Meat accountable for greenwashing?

The New York lawsuit reflects the emergence of agricultural greenwashing as not just corporate fluff — but as a key area where the law can be used to hold food businesses accountable and protect consumers from having their good intentions exploited.

Across industries more traditionally associated with pollution, like plastics and fossil fuels, greenwashing is so widely recognized as a problem that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) publishes so-called “Green Guides” to inform companies about how to avoid running afoul of consumer protection laws in their marketing claims. These guides are not legally binding, but they can and have been the basis for class-action lawsuits. While they’ve traditionally focused on issues like recyclability, the environmental law firm Earthjustice has submitted a comment to the FTC calling for the inclusion of agriculture sustainability claims, citing JBS’s net zero promise as an example.

In the meat industry, there’s a parallel history of so-called “humanewashing” — misrepresenting products as coming from happy, free-roaming animals when they actually come from factory farms. Companies are, in effect, shaping their advertising to meet consumer affect: When they see consumer concern about the treatment of animals, they will claim that their animals are raised humanely. As public attention shifts to the carbon emissions of animal agriculture, livestock producers are pivoting to climate-friendly messaging.

Agribusiness already benefits from a lax regulatory environment that may make it especially disposed to this type of greenwashing. Last year, for example, the USDA signed off on a “climate-friendly” beef product marketed by Tyson Foods that claimed to emit 10 percent less than other types of beef even though Tyson did not reveal from what baseline it was reducing emissions, making the reduction claim meaningless.

In that otherwise inadequate regulatory context, the New York case is serving notice to the livestock industry that government officials are “paying attention to the next and most concerning advertising trend on the part of animal agribusiness,” Amanda Howell, managing attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which has litigated humanewashing claims against companies like Hormel and Trader Joe’s, told me.

This case is much bigger than just JBS

The lawsuit’s outcome will hinge on whether the attorney general can prove that reasonable consumers could have been misled by JBS’s claims. This is not necessarily a given, as companies sued for greenwashing or humanewashing can argue that they were merely engaging in “puffery,” or slight exaggeration that is accepted in advertising.

JBS, however, will have to show that it can substantiate its very definite claims about achieving “net zero.” That seems unlikely. This was already the conclusion that the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Better Business Bureau made in March 2023, when, based on a complaint filed by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, it called on JBS to stop making such claims because it could not show they were verifiable. But since the NAD’s decision is not legally binding, JBS ignored it.

This case is only the latest in a series of lawsuits that have challenged JBS’s almost comical predilection for fraud. In 2017, JBS S.A., JBS USA’s parent company, was fined $3.2 billion for its role in running a massive bribery operation in Brazil. In 2020, J&F Investimentos, the parent company of JBS S.A., pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the US and was fined $128 million. That same year, Pilgrim’s Pride, a US company owned by JBS, was fined $110 million by the Justice Department for price-fixing in the chicken business. JBS was also sued last year for issuing over $3 billion in “green” bonds linked to its sustainability goals to investors.

The company’s “extensive international corruption record” and environmental impact led Sen. Cory Booker and a bipartisan group of 14 other senators to write to the Securities Exchange Commission earlier this year to ask that JBS not be allowed to issue stock on the New York Stock Exchange. For now, the company’s US stock issue has been delayed.

The lawsuit against JBS is ultimately about much more than JBS alone. Given the lack of clear regulatory commitment on the part of entities like the USDA, litigation may be a valuable tool to signal to Big Meat that they are being watched and that there are consequences for lying about their climate commitments.

Meanwhile, the publicity from the case can also send a message to two distinct audiences. First, the general public, informing them to be wary of sustainability pleas from the livestock industry. And second, policymakers themselves.

“I think a big potential indirect impact is a bit of education of policymakers. Congress gives special exemptions to animal ag in part because they don’t know, or don’t want to believe, the real climate and pollution impact,” Peter Lehner, managing attorney at Earthjustice, told me. “So I hope this will get a few more policymakers to understand that industrial ag is just that — another highly polluting industry.”