The Crown, the Clown, and the Whopper

George Monbiot has done what industry-funded spin merchants hope no one will: actually read the reports. His latest piece in The Guardian takes aim at two new attempts to dress up cattle and sheep farming as climate solutions. One is funded by McDonald’s. The other is backed by King Charles’s dairy advisor. Both are padded with vague language, dodgy numbers, and a generous helping of rural romanticism.

Monbiot dismantles them both, line by line. And he’s right to. Because when “net zero” claims rely on three poorly sampled fields and a bunch of missing data, they’re not environmental reports, they’re marketing campaigns.

The first study, from FAI Farms, makes the grand claim that the operation is “beyond net zero”, that it absorbs more carbon than it emits. But scratch the surface and there’s nothing underneath. Just three fields were sampled out of 105, and one had its sample locations changed partway through. One brought in hay from elsewhere, carbon imported. One was ploughed and reseeded, introducing unaccounted-for variables. And one didn’t even bother measuring soil bulk density the first time round, so you can’t compare results. By the time you remove all the statistical noise, there’s nothing left. No usable data. Just headlines.

Even the authors admit, buried in the full report, that the tests aren’t representative. But of course that bit doesn’t make it into the glossy executive summary or the PR push. Because this was never about accuracy, it was about optics. McDonald’s needed something to point to when people asked uncomfortable questions about climate destruction. FAI Farms obliged.

The second report comes from the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT), run by Patrick Holden, King Charles’s farming advisor and a long-time promoter of “regenerative” livestock systems. Their pitch? A nationwide transition to grazing cattle and sheep on “temporary meadows” (leys), rotated with crop production. Eat less pork and chicken, they say, and more beef and lamb. The most climate-damaging flesh available, in other words.

This model, they claim, will help fight climate change, restore biodiversity, and deliver social benefits. It just happens to require permanently higher food prices, a prescriptive national diet, and a fantasy 50% reduction in food waste. But don’t worry, they’ve “assumed” that all of this will work out just fine. No need to think too hard about it.

Holden himself admits food prices would soar under this model. The report’s solution? Everyone in the UK should simply eat less, waste nothing, and embrace a whole new set of dietary rules. Grain output would drop dramatically, yet they claim no extra imports would be needed. Meanwhile, cows and sheep, some of the least efficient converters of plant calories into food, would somehow need only “a small amount” of supplementary feed. No numbers. Just vibes.

It’s the same tactic we’ve seen time and time again: present a fantasy, bury the problems in footnotes, and hope people are too tired, too confused, or too nostalgic to notice the sleight of hand.

Monbiot calls it what it is: lobbying. Dressed up in green. Promoted by billion-dollar fast-food chains and members of the royal family. All pushing the idea that animal farming isn’t just harmless, it’s helpful.

The reality is the opposite. Cattle and sheep are two of the most environmentally destructive animals humans farm. They require vast amounts of land, emit methane, degrade ecosystems, and block rewilding. Their grazing prevents the return of native forests and wetlands, critical carbon sinks that could actually help slow climate collapse. Dartmoor, recently set ablaze in a fire that never should’ve been possible, is just one example of a landscape degraded by centuries of grazing. Without the animals, it might be temperate rainforest. Instead, it’s kindling.

But this isn’t about science. It’s about storytelling. “Regenerative” is the new buzzword, the latest rebranding of the same old violence and destruction. It appeals to a public desperate for good news, especially if that good news tells them they don’t have to change.

The meat and dairy industries know exactly what they’re doing. Monbiot references Brandolini’s law, the idea that it takes ten times the effort to debunk lies as it does to spread them. These industries exploit that. They flood the media with soft-focus images of cows in green fields and reports filled with technical-sounding nonsense, knowing it’ll be shared long before anyone reads the methodology.

This is greenwashing, plain and simple. Just like the fossil fuel industry that told us climate change could be solved with better lightbulbs and clean coal, the animal agriculture lobby wants us to believe that the solution is more of the same, with slightly different branding.

Monbiot has flaws, and we’ve called him out before. But credit where it’s due: this article cuts through the nonsense. It names the industries, names the tactics, and names the damage.

And it reminds us of the truth that needs repeating: you don’t graze your way out of ecological collapse. You don’t solve a crisis by clinging to the very thing that caused it. And you don’t “regenerate” a planet by breeding animals into existence, feeding them crops, slaughtering them, and pretending the grass grew back fast enough to make it all okay.

This isn’t sustainability. It’s delay. It’s distraction. It’s derailment.

The climate can’t afford more “solutions” that rely on nostalgia, denial, and wishful thinking. It’s time to stop pretending that the answer lies in better animal use. The answer is obvious. We just need the will, and the honesty, to say it: End animal farming.