Trump Jr, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene ridiculed for peddling false claim Biden plans to ban hamburgers

President has pledged to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030

Joe Biden’s ambitious plan to slash greenhouse emissions was subject to a controversy surrounding the right to eat red meat after the Daily Mail ran a story on theoretical ways the policy “could” slash meat consumption among Americans.

Donald Trump Jr, Republican Lauren Boebert and many other MAGA supporters defended their right to eat red meat as they shared the speculation by the paper as a fact.

The controversy erupted when Daily Mail reported that the US president’s climate plan “could limit” the consumption of burgers to just one a month.

It ran an infographic to support the claim that in order to meet Mr Biden’s target of slashing greenhouse emission to half by 2030, Americans might have to “cut 90 per cent of red meat out of diet” and “eat only 4lbs a year”.

“Americans may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 per cent and cut their consumption of other animal-based foods in half,” the piece said.

It also reported associated an unrelated January 2020 study by the University of Michigan study to Mr Biden’s climate plan, saying that making these change by 2030 “could see diet-related greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 50 per cent”.

However, at no point in his speech on 22 April during the “Virtual Leaders Summit on Climate” did the president announce any attempt to impose a curb on red meat consumption.

Tweeting the speculative argument as a proposal by the president, Ms Boebert said, “Joe Biden’s climate plan includes cutting 90 per cent of red meat from our diets by 2030. They want to limit us to about four pounds a year. Why doesn’t Joe stay out of my kitchen?”

She was not the only one. Mr Trump Jr also took to Twitter to claim his right to eat red meat. “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday. That’s going to be a hard NO from me,” he wrote.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also took to Twitter to lambast the hypothetical proposal. “The Hamburglar. ‘No burgers for thee, but just for me’,” she wrote.

Using the imaginative premise, Fox Business host Larry Kudlow painted a picture saying that Mr Biden’s Green New Deal means no burger for 4 July and people should have grilled Brussels sprouts instead.

“Now, I’m making fun of this because I intend to make fun of it. This kind of thing is stupid. It comes from a bunch of ideological zealots who don’t care one whit about America’s well-being. Not one whit,” he said.

Texas governor Greg Abbott also pushed back on the potential proposal. “Not gonna happen in Texas,” he tweeted – never mind that Biden has no plans to ban burgers.

Several social media users took to Twitter to slam the conclusions drawn both by the Republicans and the paper.

“In children’s terms, the study found that if people reduce meat eating by a lot, emissions would fall a lot. Daily Mail was like...Biden wants to cut emissions by a lot. Therefore, he’ll force people to reduce meat eating by the same amount this random study looked at,” wrote CNN journalist Daniel Dale as he shared the screengrabs of the January 2020 study by the University of Michigan.

“This is a complete lie and I’ve seen it no less than five times this morning already. The Biden plan includes no such thing,” said another user. “If you care to have a taxonomy of what happened, Biden announced a goal to cut emissions by 2030. It didn’t include anything about how Americans’ consumption would change, so the Daily Mail more or less made some things up and threw them in an infographic.”