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The Ultimate Dairy Greenwashing Guide

Welcome to the Dairy Industry’s go-to guide for looking green without actually being green. This manual will help you navigate the climate era and maintain public trust, political influence, and profit margins — all while your emissions stay sky-high, biodiversity crashes, and rural communities disappear.

Remember: It’s not about changing the system. It’s about changing the story.

Chapter 1
Green by Association
Chapter 2
Creative accounting
Chapter 3
Social Responsibility Theater
Chapter 4
Lobby Like a Legend
Chapter 5
Magical solutions…that change nothing
Conclusion
Campaign media

Key message: “See, we are reporting our emissions and reducing them! We care for the climate!

  • Measure and report emissions in clever, misleading ways that make a company look like it’s making more climate progress than it really is. 
  • Report and set targets to reduce your emissions “per liter of milk” instead of total emissions (which are rising like crazy by the way! ). Trust that your customers won’t bother doing the sums and your regulators won’t bother regulating you anyway! Intensity targets are your best friend.  
  • Simply adopt methane targets that keep your big dairy herds large while claiming to cause “no additional warming”. All you need is a nice fancy metric with stars and everything to show for it. It’s called GWP*! As a bonus, you don’t have to tell the world that, actually, you kinda need to really cut methane to keep the world from frying even faster than it already is!) Isn’t that just stellar?!  
  • Cook the books by using the most convenient year (ideally with really high emissions) as the baseline for reporting your emissions cuts. And heck, while you are at it, why don’t you just change the emissions dataset from one year to the next to make it seem like your emissions have come down when actually you just changed the source of the data (very creative indeed!). 
  • Pay for the right to pollute! Many fossil fuel companies and even governments have come up with a get out of jail free card by buying credits to pollute. All you have to do is pay and voila! You can keep on polluting! This free pass can be obtained just by buying all kinds of cheeky carbon credits (a.k.a. “Carbon Offsets”) :) Haven’t figured out how to do it, watch this great video to learn how! You’re welcome!
    • Psssst - you can also do it in your own supply chain and report that your emissions are decreasing (just call it “insetting” and keep quiet about the fact that they won’t be able to measure these so-called “removals” accurately or even guarantee that they will last for any length of time - you’ll be fine, don’t worry!).