The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were just released, along with a new food pyramid that heavily promotes meat and dairy—and reflects the authors’ ties to industrial animal agriculture.
While the new guidelines emphasize fruits and vegetables, as do previous editions, they directly contradict the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommendations by encouraging nearly double the consumption of protein from red meat and full-fat dairy while also touting more extreme—and unscientific—nutrition trends, like cooking with beef tallow.
Most of the meat consumed in the U.S. comes from conventional industrial farms, where it accumulates toxins from pesticide-intensive feed and antibiotics and wreaks environmental havoc. Only a small percentage is raised in more limited, agroecological systems that strive to reduce harm to the environment.
Any uptick in meat and dairy consumption is likely to be conventional, and if consumers increased their intake by 25 percent, the impact on human health and ecosystems would be dramatic.
The meat- and dairy-heavy guidelines will exacerbate a problem that quite literally stinks. Conventional U.S. beef and dairy production annually generate well over 40 million metric tons of manure—a source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The animals’ digestive process (their burps as they chew their cud) release even more methane; a single cow produces up to 264 pounds of methane per year. At the same time, sprawling industrial feedlots and dairies gobble up land, polluting waterways and destroying wildlife habitat.
The animal agriculture industry hopes Americans won’t notice, and so far, that seems to be the case. Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have historically focused on carbon and largely ignored methane.
“Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have historically focused on carbon and largely ignored methane.”
Animal agriculture is by far the single-largest source of agricultural methane emissions. Manure and enteric fermentation (digestion) contributed an estimated 36.7 percent of total U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions in 2023, according to a 2025 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report that the Trump administration tried to bury.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we must cut methane emissions by at least a third by 2030 to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Yet the opposite is happening in our country. U.S.-based methane and nitrous oxide emissions from manure management increased 66 percent and 25 percent, respectively, from 1990 to 2023. These disturbing increases came despite the decrease in greenhouse gases from other sources such as coal mining, landfills, and vehicles.
A new progress report from the U.N. Environment Programme also found that the U.S. is seriously off track to meet its Global Methane Pledge (which the U.S. helped launch in 2021).
To tackle this urgent problem, it’s critical to accurately measure the near-term effects of this short-lived super pollutant. Measured on a 20-year time frame, methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But most estimates, including the EPA’s, use a weaker 100-year time frame to measure global warming potential, which shows methane as 28 times more potent.
The industrial animal agriculture industry is trying to dilute and distort the data even more through heavy greenwashing. For example, it’s aggressively lobbying for a new metric that measures changes in greenhouse gas emissions compared to emissions in any chosen baseline year. That means a livestock operation would be considered “climate neutral” if it continued polluting at the same rate as the baseline year, even if that baseline showed sky-high methane emissions.
“The animal agriculture industry is trying to dilute and distort the data even more through heavy greenwashing.”
Under this ridiculously permissive metric, industrial operations with huge methane footprints would falsely appear to be “carbon neutral” as long as they continue business as usual, but a small farmer in the Global South would look like a big polluter if they increased their herd from 15 to 20 cattle.
Another industry-favorite false solution is biogas conversion, which is the practice of capturing manure methane from dairy cows and turning it into fuel via anaerobic digestion. This has incentivized companies to produce massive quantities of liquid manure to convert to gas.
In addition to prompting the creation of more manure, biogas production endangers frontline workers and neighboring communities. It’s also been shown to increase nitrous oxide pollution and deemed unlikely to ever achieve carbon-neutral energy at scale.
The industry claims that it can handle its manure problem through waste management tactics such as covering the manure to trap emissions and using manure as fertilizer.
But waste management facilities are hazardous and difficult to manage, posing frequent risk of accidental breach and leakage. When manure lagoons flood, they damage surrounding communities, spilling millions of gallons of fecal waste containing contaminants like pathogenic bacteria, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, insecticides, and pharmaceuticals.
And using manure as fertilizer increases the likelihood of runoff and water contamination down the line. Manure is already a primary source of water pollution from nutrient discharge. Animal agriculture manure runoff leaches nitrogen and phosphorous into surface and groundwater, depleting oxygen levels in water bodies and creating “dead zones” that kill aquatic life and can cause toxic algal blooms that are harmful to humans as well.
There is growing support in some quarters for factory farming “efficiency” as a way to reduce emissions, but it’s a false solution. Industrial animal agriculture is responsible for the vast majority of deforestation, air and water pollution, toxic pesticide use, and other threats to our climate, environmental health, and biodiversity. It’s hard to believe that the very thing that caused the problem will be its solution.
Moreover, the efficiency theory fails to take into account the reality of corporate control of the food system and its sway over policy, which results in lack of regulation and increasing expansion and consolidation.
The Trump administration, for instance, has worked hard to end pollution research and oversight. Last April, it blocked the release of the EPA’s annual report estimating the sources of U.S. greenhouse gas pollution across every sector. It put “under review” Agriculture Department web pages that had collected and reported critical data about agricultural sources of carbon emissions.
In September, the EPA proposed a rule to remove manure management from the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, authorized by Congress under the Clean Air Act to require big polluters to report their annual emissions.
Furthermore, Congress—since 2009—has consistently prevented the EPA from monitoring greenhouse gas emissions data from animal agriculture operations.
And the problem will only get worse with the administration’s “Plan to Fortify the American Beef Industry,” which reads like a wish list for meat lobbyists. It outlines how to increase demand for beef through federal food programs like school meals and SNAP while decreasing environmental and wildlife protections around cattle grazing, safety inspections of meat processing plants, and protections under the Clean Water Act.
But the framework is there to change course, if Congress stands up to the livestock industry and stops blocking the implementation of data collection. Congress should also thwart September’s proposed EPA rule, which would create more barriers to data collection and erase animal agriculture as a source of emissions.
“The framework is there to change course, if Congress stands up to the livestock industry and stops blocking the implementation of data collection.”
Erasing, hiding, and manipulating manure emissions data doesn’t make the resulting climate and public health problems go away. And the Trump administration’s boosting of the American livestock industry via the Dietary Guidelines will only exacerbate those very problems.
To truly address manure pollution and ensure accountability, we need to move away from the system that’s causing it in the first place. The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended prioritizing plant proteins over animal proteins to achieve the healthiest diet, which also has immense climate benefits: Compared to tofu, beef produces more than 31 times as many greenhouse gases per kilogram.
It also suggests making plain drinking water the primary beverage, while the new guidelines push whole milk. Dairy milk produces about 315 times as many greenhouse gases as tap water.
We can consider supporting a just food transition that puts the planet and human rights first. That means ending our heavy reliance on industrial animal agriculture and embracing more plant-rich diets—a solution that must involve policy for meaningful systemic change, and one that can be supported by individual consumer choices as well.
Along with continuing its killing of Palestinians in Gaza and its destruction of civilian infrastructure more than three months after a "ceasefire" deal was reached, the Israeli government is violating the agreement by continuing to block humanitarian aid from entering the exclave—making it impossible for aid groups to ensure people there have adequate water as extreme weather makes the problem even worse.
As 100 days since the ceasefire agreement were marked Wednesday, international aid group Oxfam described the work it's been doing to try to restore water wells and other crucial infrastructure, but warned that Israel's decision to block 37 humanitarian organizations—including two Oxfam chapters—has made it difficult to provide Palestinians with a sustainable water supply.
As aid flows have continued to be restricted by Israel, Oxfam workers have been working "around the clock with experts from local partner organizations, to restore vital water wells—even sifting through rubble to salvage and repurpose damaged materials, including sheet metal," the group said.
They've managed to restore wells in Gaza City and Khan Younis and are now providing at least 156,000 residents with water, but parts of Gaza "remain inaccessible and construction costs have also doubled, due to the lack of materials being allowed in," said Oxfam.
“We did not just re-open these wells," said Wassem Mushtaha, Gaza response lead for Oxfam. "We have been solving a moving puzzle under the siege and restrictions to make the wells operational—salvaging parts, repurposing equipment, and paying inflated prices to get critical components, all while trying to keep our teams safe."
Mushtaha emphasized that Oxfam has over $2 million worth of "aid and water and sanitation equipment ready to enter Gaza," but Israeli authorities have repeatedly refused to allow the materials to enter since March 2025.
Oxfam has managed to reach more than 1.3 million people in Gaza with assistance since October 2023, when Israel began bombarding the exclave and blocking humanitarian relief in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, but 1.1 million people are still in "urgent need of assistance in the harsh winter conditions," which have included freezing temperatures and intense polar winds in recent days.
That storm killed at least seven children, and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesperson James Elder emphasized Wednesday that they died because the "man-made shortage" of food and medicine had left them defenseless against the conditions.
“We are talking about layers upon layers of rejection [of aid],” Elder told Al Jazeera.
A recent survey by Oxfam found that despite the ceasefire agreement, 87% of people in Khan Younis and Gaza City still had no access to basic essentials and 89% were depending on unsustainable water trucking "to get just the bare minimum level of water needed to survive."
A Palestinian refugee named Nahla told the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East that "water decides everything. How much we drink, how we cook, how we clean our children."
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More than 80% of water networks, pumping stations, main lines, tanks, and wells have been destroyed, and of Gaza's three water desalination plants, just one is operational.
Damage to sewer systems has caused overflow which is compounded by flooding, raising the risk of the spread of diseases. Eighty-four percent of households reported members of their families had suffered from outbreaks of disease in recent weeks.
"Yet basic equipment like water pumps, sandbags, and construction materials such as timber and plywood needed to reinforce shelters and drainage are delayed or rejected under 'dual-use' restrictions and bureaucratic clearance processes," Oxfam said, with Israeli authorities claiming the materials can't enter Gaza because they could feasibly be used as weapons.
Monther Shoblaq, director general of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, one of Oxfam's partners, commended the group's staff for "going to such lengths to bring water access to those who need it so desperately," and noted that "the equipment needed is just across the border, blocked from entry."
"Agencies are having to resort to salvaging materials from the rubble of bombed water infrastructure and the remains of people’s homes, repurposing parts, and paying inflated prices," said Shoblaq. "This is the direct result of Israeli restrictions, last-resort measures forced by siege conditions."
"Needs in Gaza exceed far beyond the aid and reconstruction materials Israel is allowing in and the situation will worsen if Israel’s collective punishment and illegal blockade continues," Shoblaq added. "Water deprivation is just one of the many human rights violations Israel has undertaken with impunity. Oxfam and other organizations who have operated in Gaza for decades must be allowed to respond at the scale."
More than 440 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since the so-called "ceasefire" began, and more than 2,500 residential buildings have been destroyed.
The New York Times (11/4/25) explains that Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race by “delicately disarming” New York City’s “all-powerful establishment.”
Much as they did back in 2018, when New Yorkers stunned the political establishment by electing a little-known former bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress, the corporate political press covered the most thrilling Democratic victories of 2025 as if they were largely inexplicable, semi-miraculous flukes. While breathlessly covering the tweets, styles, preferred lipstick brands and personal qualities of individual politicians, establishment media outlets mostly ignored the organizing efforts led by ordinary people that put representatives like Ocasio-Cortez in positions of power.
In the view of these publications, recently sworn-in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t a movement candidate who emerged after years of working on other insurgent campaigns and organizing with groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which I am a member, but a slick young upstart whose campaign was “built from nothing in a matter of months” (New York Times, 6/29/25).
After the general election, the New York Times (11/4/25) wrote that while Mamdani had won the primary by uniting “a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies,” he triumphed in the general by running an “improbable backroom campaign” that “wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.” This framing, by New York politics reporter Nicholas Fandos, suggested that Mamdani—undeniably a “megawatt talent”—had blandished his way into the mayoralty virtually singlehandedly.
NBC News (11/4/25) wrote of his “meteoric rise” from a “virtually unknown state assemblyman who barely registered in polling” to the mayor of America’s largest city without substantially analyzing how that came about.
‘Building civic architecture’
Dissent (11/25/25) traced DSA’s electoral strategy to former FAIR analyst Seth Ackerman‘s call for a “party surrogate” (Jacobin, 11/8/16).
This framing obscures both the crucial role that ordinary people played in these campaigns, and the potential they have to organize and win even political changes the rich and powerful bitterly oppose. And it misses the real story of Mamdani’s win: the unprecedented army of volunteers, young people and first-time voters who propelled him to victory. That story was mostly covered by left-wing outlets like Dissent (11/25/25) and Jacobin (7/15/25), which put out sharp analyses of how campaigns like Mamdani’s were structured and organized, and how they were able to succeed against such long odds.
Grassroots formations that provided crucial support to Mamdani’s campaign, such as DSA and DRUM Beats, which organizes working-class Indo-Caribbean and South Asian communities, are membership-based organizations. They differ in structure and strengths from the top-down, consultant-driven campaign model corporate political outlets see as the norm.
These groups also spent years planting the seeds of victory by organizing people who had long been overlooked, ignored or shut out of conventional politics to participate in local elections. In other words, Mamdani’s campaign was the opposite of the Times‘ characterization as being “built from nothing in a matter of months.”
As Chris Maisano explained in Dissent, “people on the ground have been quietly building civic infrastructure” in neighborhoods Mamdani won. The mobilization of these communities “transformed the electorate and helped Mamdani offset Cuomo’s strength in neighborhoods that shifted sharply to the former governor in the general election.”
Establishment media’s obsession with portraying democratic socialism as divisive and/or fatally alienating to voters blinded it to what was truly radical about Mamdani’s campaign: It empowered ordinary people to lead, changing individual lives and history. What most scares the establishment isn’t socialism; it’s people-powered democracy.
Discouraging mass political participation is not new—in a 2019 Politico article (4/25/19) headlined “Politics Is Not the Answer,” Matthew Continetti suggested that “we might begin to see ourselves, and all of our virtues and our vices, more clearly” if we would only lower our expectations “of what politics can achieve”—but it’s newly salient in the run-up to the 2026 midterms.
‘Too much emphasis’ on ‘far-left positions’
“The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” billionaire-backed Adam Jentleson told the New York Times (9/17/25).
One function of the corporate political press is to funnel popular energy and outrage into what its backers see as the proper channels: lawsuits, think tanks and voting for establishment-backed candidates. This is reflected in how these outlets are covering contemporary opposition to Donald Trump.
The New York Times (9/17/25) wrote about a new Democratic think tank, the Searchlight Institute, that attributes the party’s recent losses to “too much emphasis on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights…at the expense, some argue, of appealing to voters in battleground states.”
Paraphrasing the think tank’s founder, Adam Jentleson, the paper’s Reid J. Epstein noted that
organizations focused on climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights have all managed to get Democratic presidential hopefuls on the record taking far-left positions to the detriment of their general election performance.
The Times quoted operatives who disagreed with Jentleson, but didn’t bother to analyze his essential claims: Were those positions really “far left” and alienating to the party’s base? What evidence is there that candidates who took certain positions on climate change and/or LGBTQ rights underperformed in general elections as a result of those positions?
To the Times, the needs and preferences of the party’s “liberal base” are inscrutable and beside the point; what matters is the guidance of self-appointed experts like Jentleson, whose think tank is “subsidized by a roster of billionaire donors,” including prominent hedge fund managers and real estate investors.
‘A lot of compromise’
David Brooks’ advice (New York Times, 4/17/25) for defeating Trump is all too normal: Universities have to stop being “shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: Your voices don’t matter.”
In a New York Times column (4/17/25) calling for a “national civic uprising” against Trump, David Brooks argued that the mass rallies Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders led in 2025 were “ineffective” because they were “partisan,” and made opposition to Trump “seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.”
Yet one day earlier, the Times (4/16/25) reported that the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies had “drawn enormous crowds” and were “energizing a beaten-down Democratic Party.” And according to a Sanders adviser, the paper noted, “21% of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’ events reported that they were independents, and 8% said they were Republicans.”
Organizing mass rallies that expose thousands of listeners in conservative areas to critiques, not just of Trump, but of oligarchy in general, seems like an effective means of diluting right-wing power and demonstrating that leading Democrats and their allies care about Americans throughout the country, not just in blue states. But to those in corporate media, the point of politics is not to inspire regular people to organize and win broadly popular demands, but to “build power” and “do good things” by, as the New York Times’ Ezra Klein suggested in a recent interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick (9/29/25), engaging in “a lot of compromise and a lot of working with people who we have very, very deep disagreements with.”
Klein is far from the only Democrat who believes we should take “an approach to politics that we think will expand our coalition such that we are not always within two points of losing to Donald Trump or the people around him.” But to Klein, that means penning paeans to hatemongers like the late Charlie Kirk (New York Times, 9/11/25), not standing up to plutocrats.
‘A better story’
Despite evidence that mass issue-based organizing campaigns can and do politicize people, bring them into effective coalitions and achieve significant victories, corporate media outlets and establishment leaders remain laser-focused on encouraging the rank and file to elect centrists rather than build mass movements.
As CBS News (12/16/25) recently reported, former President Barack Obama—still one of the Democratic Party’s most popular figures—is urging Democrats to “focus on winning the midterms and developing ‘a better story’ to tell voters, rather than on ‘nerdy’ internal disagreements.” The man once touted as the nation’s “organizer in chief” has long since abandoned encouraging Americans to organize, fight for and win life-changing policies; he is advising them to focus on winning the midterms by burnishing their brand.
The endurance of Trump, who won more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 but has never won the consistent support of a majority of Americans, revealed to many that they cannot trust US political leaders to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people. Campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, and recently elected Mayor Katie Wilson’s in Seattle, have shown people around the world that they have the power to win the policies and elect the leaders they want, without top-down instruction or management from—and despite interference by—elites.
To pundits and corporate media outlets, this is a dangerous lesson: If everyday people realize they don’t need overpaid consultants or self-declared experts to win real change, how long can the status quo be maintained by its beneficiaries?
