Greenwashing

In our current time of increasing concerns about the environment due to the effects climate change will have on humanity and animals, many companies and models are moving towards producing products that are environmentally sustainable... or, making their products just seem that way.

Greenwashing is the business practice of making products that are known to be bad for the environment, such as meat, to be actually good (or at least, not as bad) for the environment. It's an exploitive business practice that unfortunately is permeating our increasingly environmentally conscious society, and it takes place in all shapes and forms. Most of the time, greenwashing refers to attempts to make their products appear more sustainable and environmentally friendly, but it tends to sometimes also refer to how they treat animals in their production.

Reducing your carbon footprint is easily one of the most important and cost-effective things you can do to reduce your harm, and there are tons of ways of doing so aside from being Vegan, but you need to be careful of less-than-ethical corporations that are trying to exploit the desire of consumers to be more ethical, all so they can maintain their bottom line.

Animal Products

Meat, dairy, and eggs are prime contenders for most greenwashed products in terms of how bad for the environment they actually are. People are beginning to understand that consuming animal products is easily the most harmful thing they do in terms of climate change, and it would be much easier to eliminate or reduce consumption rather than doing other drastic things such as not using their cars, not showering, no AC or heating, or not doing laundry. Recognizing that they're the low hanging-fruit if personal emissions reduction, the animal agriculture marketing lobby is trying its hardest to make their products appear more sustainable and possible even better for the environment.

Aside from regenerative agriculture pseudoscience, people selling meat, dairy, and eggs will engage in a variety of different tactics and gimmicks.

Locally sourced animal products

Likely the most common and widespread example.

Yes, transportation does contribute a little to the total embodied energy of farmed products, but the vast majority of the emissions are from the animals themselves, not from transportation when they pass these gases one way or another. In fact, since local "humane" meat tends to keep animals alive longer, giving them more time to release these emissions, so overall, these animal products are often much worse for the environment than ones sourced from factory farms, as ironic as that is.

Regardless how the animals are treated, whether it's grass-fed, free-range, organic, or raised on a family farm, no matter how it's raised, the animals will be releasing tons of emissions. Unless you genetically engineer animals to not release so many emissions, there is simply no way around this. It's simply far more cost-effective to just give up animal products, which really isn't much of a sacrifice given that we have plenty of delicious mock meats. Mock meats are far better for the environment, and buying them potentially yields a carbon-negative impact by helping redirect market forces towards them away from animal products.

Using Seaweed as Cattle feed

An admirable but severely misguided attempt at making beef and dairy products less environmentally destructive,