President Joe Biden’s critics are having a cow over a false narrative that his administration is cooking up plans to limit Americans’ red meat consumption.
The beef over the fabricated meat mandates began last week after The Daily Mail — a British tabloid known for unreliability — published an article that misleadingly linked Biden’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 with a University of Michigan study that examined how reducing red meat consumption could cut diet-related emissions.
Biden’s team plans to work with agencies across the federal government to address emissions, with a climate task force expected to release sector-by-sector recommendations later this year. Taking a page from the Green New Deal, which targets lower emissions and environmental justice, Biden’s recent $2 trillion jobs plan calls for investments of billions of dollars in green infrastructure, renewable energy, sustainability in homes and buildings, and ramped up electrification of municipal fleets just as automakers are increasing production of zero-carbon vehicles.
The Daily Mail article suggested that Biden’s emissions-reduction plan — which has not even been released yet — may dictate what Americans drive or grill, or how they heat their homes. In fact, no one in the Biden administration has called for red meat consumption limits or forcing every American to buy an electric car or electric heat pump.
But in short order, false claims and misleading memes suggesting that Biden wanted to limit Americans to a single Big Mac per month spread like a grease fire among far-right outlets, Biden critics, Fox News pundits and even lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Fox News recently showed a graphic of a double cheeseburger and described, falsely, “Biden’s climate requirements” as a maximum of 4 pounds of beef per year; one burger a month; and cutting 90% of red meat from one’s diet. Fox News improperly cited the Department of Agriculture and the University of Michigan study, but the real source, according to several fact checkers, was the misleading story from The Daily Mail.
Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, posted the Fox News graphic for his millions of followers on social media. “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” he said. “That’s going to be a hard NO from me,” he added, referencing the imaginary requirements.
“Martin Heller, one of the authors of the not-about-Biden study all of this nonsense is misusing, told me today, ‘I, admittedly, have no idea what Biden’s plan has to say about our diets,’” CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote on Sunday.
Dale noted “this stuff is completely imaginary. Biden has not proposed any limit on Americans’ meat consumption.”
While agriculture reforms may be part of some recommendations from the climate team, at no point has the Biden White House called for any consumption limits to red meat — or any meat, or any food, for that matter.
The president’s climate goals, and Sen. Ed Markey’s and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, reintroduced last week, have frequently been lambasted with claims that have no basis in fact.
In February, when frigid weather in Texas froze up equipment and caused failures with a range of power sources, Gov. Greg Abbott and talk show hosts like Tucker Carlson singled out renewable energy and The Green New Deal — which has not been implemented anywhere — as the key culprit for blackouts. But according to the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, failures with natural gas, coal and nuclear generators accounted for almost double the outages sparked by frozen solar panels and wind turbines.
Social media users responded with mockery, blaming the Green New Deal for everything from “gout” to “Jar Jar Binks in the [Star Wars] prequels.”
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Fact check: No, President Joe Biden has not cooked up any mandates on red meat consumption - MassLive.com
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