Demise of Livestock Farming, Fraudulent Science, and BlackRock

Part 3 of 3 in Fraudulent Climate Science and Global Corporations

In the first article of this three-part series, we looked at how flagrant manipulation of science was being used to blame cattle for man-made climate change (anthropogenic global warming). The second article delved into the 2025 Aude Fire of Southern France, its relation to the Sustainable Development Goals, what decisions have made it far worse, and who profits from it. In Part 3, we look at why scientists risk ridicule and professional humiliation by committing to such transparent flaunting of scientific principles and who benefits from this scientific fraud.

Putting to one side for a moment the case of cattle emissions, let’s take a wider look at the underlying problem. 

Springer Nature is the second-largest publisher of scientific journals in the world. It was created by the 2015 merger of Springer Science + Business Media, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group’s Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education. 

And according to a December 2020 press release, Springer Nature is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact, a United Nations initiative that prioritises the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) when publishing. The press release says that the Compact’s “Signatories aspire to develop sustainable practices and act as champions of the SDGs during the Decade of Action (2020-2030), publishing books and journals that will help inform, develop, and inspire action in that direction”. 

The UN requires publishers signing the Compact to take the following actions:

1. Committing to the SDGs: Stating sustainability policies and targets on our website, including adherence to this Compact; incorporating SDGs and their targets as appropriate.
2. Actively promoting and acquiring content that advocates for themes represented by the SDGs, such as equality, sustainability, justice and safeguarding and strengthening the environment.
3. Annually reporting on progress towards achieving SDGs, sharing data and contribute to benchmarking activities, helping to share best practices and identify gaps that still need to be addressed.
4. Nominating a person who will promote SDG progress, acting as a point of contact and coordinating the SDG themes throughout the organization.
5. Raising awareness and promoting the SDGs among staff to increase awareness of SDG-related policies and goals and encouraging projects that will help achieve the SDGs by 2030.
6. Raising awareness and promoting the SDGs among suppliers, to advocate for SDGs and to collaborate on areas that need innovative actions and solutions.
7. Becoming an advocate to customers and stakeholders by promoting and actively communicating about the SDG agenda through marketing, websites, promotions and projects.
8. Collaborating across cities, countries, and continents with other signatories and organizations to develop, localize and scale projects that will advance progress on the SDGs individually or through their Publishing Association.
9. Dedicating budget and other resources towards accelerating progress for SDG-dedicated projects and promoting SDG principles.
10. Taking action on at least one SDG goal, either as an individual publisher or through your national publishing association and sharing progress annually.

Springer Nature has organised its publications into 17 SDG-related content hubs, and it has started new journals themed around the SDGs, such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, Nature Food, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Water, and Nature Cities. Since 2015, Springer Nature has published between 400,000 and 1,000,000 publications in support of the SDGs.

Springer Nature, the world’s largest scientific publisher, does not prioritise science and truth; instead, it prioritises a narrow set of ideological agendas known as the SDGs, which were published and ratified in 2015. This harks back to the conclusion of Part 1 in this series: 

We must reclaim science from ideology, and climate from centralisation. That does not mean ignoring environmental threats. It means responding to them with integrity, grounded in full-spectrum thinking that honours history, complexity, and the freedom of all people to shape.

Noticing this dominant trend of manipulating science in favour of ideology to further political ideology, has reached as far as the US Government, which has labelled Springer Nature as promoting “junk science” and has retracted all government subsidies to the publishing giant, amounting to $20 million per annum.

So bad is the controversial and unreliable nature of Springer Nature that, according to Retraction Watch, it has been forced to make an astonishing 2,923 scientific retractions in 2024 alone. Yet, ‘scientific papers’ published by Springer create the backbone for justifying the SDGs in the first place.

But why has science been subverted in this way? Who stands to gain from the false conclusions produced by scientists working within this SDG ideological mind space?

Well, it might come as some surprise that there is a vast amount of money involved in SDGs. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published the need for an annual budget of $5.4-6.4 trillion to achieve them. Although this may be the funding goal, the current donations directed towards the UN Joint SDG Fund is $212 billion.

This is an immense amount of money. This money is in turn diverted into industries that align themselves with the SDGs, which include publishing scientific literature. (Springer treats its revenue sources as strictly confidential).

Not only is there a huge carrot available to industry in order to enforce SDGs, but there are sticks too from governments. As Mark Carney said in 2019, “Companies that don’t go green will go bankrupt without question”. In concrete terms, to cite just one example, the ACEA (European Automaker Association) estimates that in 2025 alone, car manufacturers in the EU will pay €12-16 billion in fines for not manufacturing electric vehicles. So, if corrupt science can’t persuade industry to comply, fines based on corrupted science will do the enforcement. Kicking or screaming, industry will be forced to comply with the SDGs. To help car manufacturers avoid these massive fines, marketing pressure is applied to the public in the form of relentless TV ads, promoting the pleasures of electric vehicles.

But why? Why is the Western world being forced in this way to comply with the SDGs? Who really gains from all these changes based on corrupted science? This article doesn’t have the space available to properly address the full scope of this question, so let’s focus in again on the issue that was analysed in the previous article; that of falsely attributing cattle emissions to man-made climate change.

A wide raft of policies have been enacted in various western countries aimed at destroying livestock farmers’ livelihoods. The most recent attack on farmers comes in the form of the suppression of Agricultural Property Relief (APR), which will be effective from 6 April 2026.

Prior to this reform, a 100% relief from IHT was granted on qualifying agricultural land and business assets, meaning farms could generally be inherited tax-free, even if asset-rich but income-poor. The new law caps full APR and BPR relief at £1 million per individual per estate. Any qualifying assets above that threshold receive just 50% relief, creating an effective 20% IHT rate on the excess above £1 million.

Between 2010 and 2020, the EU lost over 3 million farms smaller than 50 ha. This isn’t just about making smaller farms unviable and the larger agro-industries swallowing their land; it is also about halting cattle production altogether. In 1993, the UK had a total of 15.8 million head of cattle; this had plummeted to 9.3 million in 2024, while over the same period the UK’s human population has risen from 57 million to 69 million. But worse, by 2030, when the SDGs will seriously be taking effect, the AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) expects the breeding herd to drop from 3.1 million to 2.5 million, a fall of 20%. This drop of 600,000 head of livestock, taking into account an average of land needed per head of around 1.7 hectares (ha) — taking into account the varied usage of both lowland and upland sucklers and dairy cows — makes for just over 1 million ha of land no longer used by cattle breeders in the UK.

Today, the UK is consuming an ever greater amount of synthetic protein, which is promoted as a preferable choice to meat. Last year, the UK consumed an approximate 35.8 million kg of synthetic and alternate protein; this compares to a figure of near zero in 1993. A whole new industry has emerged to fill a gap in the production of traditional meat. In 2014, the synthetic protein industry in the UK was worth $582 million, and now it is worth over $1 billion.

While the cattle industry will be reduced to a shadow of its former self by 2030, with beef consumption expected to drop off by 35%, the alternate protein industry is expected to explode from its current figure of $1 billion to around $2 billion in 2030. This figure is likely to be a serious underestimate as the predicted reduction in beef consumption will be around 247,000 tons of beef, being replaced by synthetic and other manufactured proteins at a conservative £10/kg = £2.4 billion of extra turnover to the alternate protein industry. And that in turn is based on a stable population, whereas the UK population is growing rapidly, due mostly to migration.

It’s more than clear that livestock farmers are going to be huge losers as a result of cattle being falsely blamed for man-made climate change, but who are the other winners?

Let’s have a quick look at the new arrivals on the UK synthetic protein market that are expected to benefit hugely from the SDG boom in synthetic proteins. Enough, a Scottish synthetic protein company spun off from the University of Strathclyde, managed to obtain $91 million in start-up funding. Uncommon, a spin-off from Cambridge University, uses cell-based protein, and managed to acquire $38 million in funding. Oxford, not to be outdone, has created its own synthetic protein company called Ivy Farm, which gathered $31 million in funding. And, this is not for the squeamish, but the company that transforms black soldier flies into synthetic protein called Entocycle raised $12.5 million in funding. The synthetic protein gold rush has begun, and there’s no shortage of funding to fuel it. 

For much of this synthetic meat production, stem cells provide a crucial source for generating the synthetic meat. Terms and marketing come into play here in order to make synthetic meat seem more palatable. Legally, synthetic meat manufactured from stem cells can only be referred to as ‘cultured’ meat. Currently, it is illegal to use human stem cells in the production of synthetic protein in the UK, although it is of course legal to use human stem cells, especially from aborted foetuses, for ‘scientific research’.

Now let’s look at the land that the cattle farmers will necessarily relinquish as the cattle industry shrinks because of government policy. The Committee for Climate Change (CCC) has issued very clear instructions on the change of land use.

Currently, around 160,000 ha of land is given over to producing crops that are transformed into energy for domestic and industrial purposes. The CCC wants an annual increase of that figure by 23,000 ha/year to reach around 300,000 ha dedicated to growing crops for energy use in order to meet net zero targets. The climate change scientists consider that bioenergy crops contribute little to carbon emissions, because they view it as a closed loop. The closed loop is the absorption  of the CO₂ planting om the atmosphere, which is then released when the plant is combusted.

Rather than using land which could be used to feed the country, the UK Government allocates massive subsidies to companies involved in bioenergy. Already in 2021, nearly £2 billion of taxpayers’ money was given as subsidies to companies involved in bioenergy, more than any other EU nation. Between 2015 and 2026, Drax power station alone will have received over $6 billion in subsidies.

For 2025, the UK Government allocated around £14 billion to net zero-related projects, roughly a third of which is hoovered up by the bioenergy sector. In addition, they sent a further $3 billion abroad to help with ‘international climate change’.

Let’s now look at solar farms, which currently occupy 21,200 ha of land in the UK. The Government is planning on increasing that by 200% by 2030, making a total of around 63,000 ha. Between biofuels land use and solar farms, that makes around 363,000 ha dedicated to SDG land use. As wind farms are, in theory, dual land use, I’ve excluded them from this analysis.

We have seen how livestock farms will ‘liberate’ around 1 million ha (1 ha = 100m x 100m). Of these 1 million ha, the UK Government plans to use to meet its own net zero targets by 2030: 210,000 ha to be converted into forestry, 115,000 ha into bioenergy crops, and around 200,000 ha into peatland projects. The remaining nearly half a million ha fits into an ‘other’ category, which will include ‘rewilding’, ‘set-aside’, and other ‘others’.

Amongst other new land uses planned by the UK Government, it plans to build between 200,000 and 250,000 new homes in the UK every year, which would occupy around 8,000 ha of new land every year.

As each livestock farm stops functioning, and it sells off its land, this land sells for an average of £20-30,000/ha. However, if the council then decides that it needs that land for building some of those 200,000 new homes and allows it to become constructible, then that land will sell for an average of between £2 million and £6 million per ha, sometimes much more depending on the area. In other words, on average, the land liberated by the livestock farmers can, according to the whim of the council, become 100 to 300 times more valuable, just on the basis of a planning permission decision.

The land itself doesn’t alter in any way to achieve that astronomic mark up, its use is simply modified by the stroke of a pen, and by that same stroke of the pen, it becomes between 100 and 300 times more valuable.

The two largest buyers of agricultural land in the UK are first BlackRock, then Legal and General. BlackRock, given its reputation, is naturally secretive about its acquisition of land in the UK, but we do know that this year it has launched a $100 million fund with the specific purpose of buying up farmland in the UK. Given the minimum markup price of this land, this $100 million investment would be expected to produce at the very least a $10 billion return. Freedom of Information requests submitted to the land registry have not returned with any details on the total agricultural land purchases of BlackRock. It is believed that Legal and General has obtained 1,435a of agricultural land to be used for ‘strategic speculation’. This would be expected to generate between upwards of £3 billion in sales for them.

In order to realise these eye-watering profits, however, both BlackRock and Legal and General need to be sure that the planning authorities will decide in their favour. This process is undoubtedly a very costly one. A Guardian article revealed that 10% of UK councils faced corruption charges related to fraud and misuse of public funds. A planning officer of Reading Borough Council, Peter Owusu-Ansah, was jailed for two years under charges related to Section 106, also known as developer contributions.

As of mid‑2024, BlackRock was recognized as the dominant player in climate transition investment strategies, managing some $210 billion in transition funds globally. BlackRock led investor inflows totalling $13.9 billion in Europe during 2023 alone. Furthermore, BlackRock initially joined the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative (NZAM) in March 2021. At that time, approximately 77% of its AUM — around $7.3 trillion — was committed to net zero alignment.

BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink said: “This partnership is proof that governments, philanthropic organisations, and institutional investors can come together to mobilise capital at scale into emerging markets, which are most exposed to the impact of climate change”.

BlackRock has a huge amount of money invested in profiting from climate change, a figure in the trillions of dollars. We have seen in these two articles just how this sophisticated money-making machine works. BlackRock works with governments who have promoted ‘junk science’, which, inter alia, defines cattle emissions as anthropogenic contributors to global warming. This provides governments protected by the ‘science’ and by BlackRock climate transition vehicles to pressure cattle owners to close down, and to encourage people to eat alternatives to beef. The liberation of agricultural land used by farmers is then swallowed up at a cut-price by BlackRock and other investors, and sold on for eye-watering gains.

It should come as no surprise to readers that BlackRock’s Sustainable Investment Objective emphasises resource-efficient farming, healthier eating patterns, and less resource-intensive food production — areas that include plant-based and alternative protein businesses. So, another spin-off of this huge scam is the money made from coercing people to change their traditional diets.

BlackRock is currently worth somewhere between $11 and $12 trillion, over three times greater than the GDP of the UK or France, and still greater than the combined GDP of the two. Indeed, only the USA and China have a higher GDP than BlackRock’s worth. 

Unsurprisingly, and taking the crucial year of 2030, BlackRock aims to double its market capitalisation between now and then. When you have that amount of financial power, the world is your oyster. It is only to be expected that at some point BlackRock be found out in its shady dealings, particularly related to ‘Environmental and Social Governance’, to cite just one of many such incidents.

Texas, along with ten other Republican-led states, sued BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, accusing them of conspiring to reduce coal production through their ESG policies, thereby violating antitrust laws. The lawsuit alleges that these asset managers used their shareholder influence to manipulate the coal market, leading to higher energy prices.

Is this all just simply a case of huge global companies worth more than the GDP of most countries on the planet being able to manipulate science, politics, markets, the media, the way of life of people around the world, just in order to make more profit? Or is there more than all this at stake? Are we now glimpsing the reality of a world which already exists, where our futures are decided by a few globalists, who are more powerful than most heads of state and can buy almost anything they want, to get what they want, while everyone else has to suffer the consequences?