About us

Livestockclimatefacts.com is a production dissertation by Dave Kendall for his Master’s degree in international journalism at Edinburgh Napier University. Kendall is a veteran media producer and journalist currently working at the Bangkok Post.

The subject of the overall dissertation is that while there is a broad scientific consensus that animal agriculture is a major driver of climate change, the media coverage and general public awareness of this fact is amazingly low. There are numerous possible reasons for this, including psychological denial and a desire to avoid uncomfortable truths, resistance to knowledge that would precipitate personal lifestyle changes, lobbying efforts and disinformation from the animal agriculture industry, and ignorance – along with all the aforementioned other factors – among journalists.

The hypothesis of this production dissertation, however, is that there is one further cause: the lack of objective, science-based information explained in laymen’s language and accessible by the general public. While animal agriculture’s contribution to the climate crisis does feature on the internet, much of the coverage is by animal rights and environmental activists who take a strident and moralising tone. Most people do not take kindly to being told their basic lifestyle choices are evil and must be completely changed – by going vegan, for instance. This kind of advocacy might have its place, but this website has a different focus: to present the facts about animal agriculture’s effect on the climate and explain them as simply and soberly as possible.

For this reason, there are many aspects of the subject and debate that are not covered on this website. To the extent that industrial animal agriculture is shown in a negative light, this is due to its effect on climate and not on ethical concerns about the suffering of the 70 billion farm animals currently on the planet. Likewise, there is no discussion of meat’s influence on human health, whether as a primary driver of heart disease, lung disease and cancer through its physical ingestion and creation of air pollution, or its risk factors in creating pandemics.  

As the name suggests, this website seeks only to portray the facts about the connection between raising livestock and climate change.