The New Merchants of Doubt: The Corporate Playbook of Big Meat and Dairy to Distract, Delay, and Derail Climate Action - Hardcover

"Because ruminants produce more greenhouse gases than any other food source, the meat and dairy industries have a huge accountability problem. Urbancic's investigations thoroughly expose how these industries use the tobacco industry's global strategies to head off attention to their effects on global warming and to actions to reduce those effects."

-Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at NYU and Author of What to Eat Now

Fifty years ago, the tobacco industry wrote the playbook for manufacturing doubt. Today, the world's biggest meat and dairy companies are using it against climate action.

Drawing on years of investigation by the Changing Markets Foundation, investigating journalists, and other NGOs, Nusa Urbancic exposes how Big Meat and Dairy distract the public with greenwashing, delay regulation with hollow voluntary pledges, and derail the policies that threaten their business model. From boardrooms in Brussels and Washington to the capture of the UN's own food agency, the evidence spans five continents and dissects how 22 of the world's largest meat and dairy companies and their trade groups use a range of tactics to undermine climate action. The book features case studies from the European Union, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Brazil, Australia, and the United Kingdom showing how these tactics are put into play. The book reveals how the same playbook invented by Big Tobacco and previously used by Big Oil is now applied by Big Meat and Dairy to muddy the science, sidestep regulation, and continue reaping the rewards of a damaging status quo.

Rigorous, revealing, and unflinching, The New Merchants of Doubt shows exactly how corporate power keeps climate solutions off the table, and what it will take to put them back.

"The future of our planet, and the wellbeing of today's populations, depend on shifting our diets in a healthy plant-centric direction. In this deeply-researched book, Nusa Urbancic describes the coordinated efforts of the meat and dairy industries to sow misinformation using the playbooks of the oil and tobacco industries. Understanding this attack and the science-based evidence is important; every reader will benefit from this book, personally and by being a more effective change-maker."

-Walter Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard University

"This is a forensic and deeply troubling investigation into the food industry's deceptions. It reveals how the industry seeks to define reality and capture regulators, corrupting government and sacrificing future generations to protect today's profits."

-Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System