This just in: if you want to save the world, you may just want to stay on your couch. And if you must get up, throw a steak on the grill.
According to a mounting arsenal of evidence, efforts to fight global warming could bring devastating consequences to the environment.
Take American dairy cows, for instance. These anti-environmentalist livestock are threatening our very human existence because of their emissions. In response, a proposal is floating around the nation’s capital seeking to tax these pests for their intentional release of methane into the atmosphere.
As Congressman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., recently warned agribusiness leaders, we should brace ourselves for a showdown over “cow farts.” The idea — a brainchild of vegan Europeans — is to cut down on human dairy consumption as a way to reduce the number of cows needed to meet demand.
While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has distanced itself from such a proposal, Sensenbrenner and others aren’t convinced. Under a 2007 Supreme Court decision, the EPA is afforded broad discretion in its regulation of greenhouse gasses. The American Farm Bureau calculates the total cost a methane tax to the average American farmer as between $80 and $175 per animal.
According to a British Parliament study, such a tax could rid grocery store shelves of dairy and beef entirely. Bad for business and consumer choice, the move could also be bad for the environment. Farmers would be forced to raise the price of milk. Consumers would seek out alternatives — including soy and organic choices.
While the soy industry has worked diligently to avoid its “gassy” reputation, endless websites proclaim soy’s “flatulence factor,” an embarrassing reality resulting in greater methane production. Organic options present their own problem, with organic cattle emitting more methane and producing less milk than their hormone-injected peers.
Getting cars off the streets may also harm the cause. According to another British study, people opting to walk to the store instead of driving may cause more damage than their gas-guzzling neighbors.
Study author and environmentalist Chris Goodall concluded that the average 3-mile drive to a supermarket would add 0.9 kg of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, whereas, “if you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You need about 100 [grams] of beef to replace these calories, resulting in 3.6 [kilograms] of emissions, or four times as much as driving.”
Sounds crazy until you consider the cost of food transportation and refrigeration. The only real solution to fighting greenhouses gasses, according to Goodall: exercise less, eat less, and become a couch potato.
But even in agnostic Europe, today defined by religious fervor for fighting global warming, skepticism is growing about our sanity or ability to fight global warming through reduced emissions.
As the G-8 Summit wrapped in Italy last month (with officials returning to their homelands via private jet), American and German leaders gathered in Berlin for the American Council on Germany’s annual summit. Predictably, global warming was a hot topic. But while one Bundestag member boasted that Germany has seen the creation of more than 200,000 green jobs during the current economic downturn, he was subsequently forced to concede that the jobs were created almost exclusively through government dollars.
And these jobs may just hurt the cause. As Holger-Heinrch Haibach, a member of the Bundestag’s global warming committee, told me, legislators were recently informed that Germany’s program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by cars may result in greater nitrogen pollution.
Time to go sit under a tree to ponder? Think twice. While trees are heralded as shields against global warming, researchers from multiple nations have found that plants contribute 10 to 30 percent of all methane in the atmosphere.
Oh, you’ve just got to love that cattle smell. It may just be better than all other alternatives. Unless, of course, the alternative involves chilling out on your couch.
Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@i2i.org) is a policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden. She was a member of the Colorado Voices panel in 2006.
