Cow Ends Cause Problems
Since we work with people and organizations that have differing views about biofuels I just thought I’d point something out. (This is because of a news release sent to me today by E – The Environmental Magazine. They’re “mental” all right. I won’t even put a link to them here for you. You can Google it.)
While it seems like everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon to blame ethanol for everything from Mexican tortilla prices to global warming (a myth), there’s a growing movement to blame livestock and you know who that affects. I hope this gets discussed in Denver next week.
We’ve already seen this coming but this is a pretty blatant push. Here’s an excerpt from their release:
Ask most Americans about what causes global warming, and they’ll point to a coal plant smokestack or a car’s tailpipe. But it’s two other images that should be granted similarly iconic status, says the July/August 2008 cover story of E – The Environmental Magazine (now posted at www.emagazine.com): the front and rear ends of a cow.
According to a little-known 2006 United Nations (UN) report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” livestock is a “major player” in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s more than our entire transportation system.
Can’t we all just get along? At least in agriculture? We’ve got enough problems with wackos like this out there. By the way, we enjoyed a nice steak dinner tonight. Does that mean I’m helping save the planet?
It's time to thank our farmers and ranchers for all their hard work to feed us.
1 Comment
MasseyFerguson
That idea has been bandied about for a while now, and almost always from urbanites (in my personal experience, ymmv). One interesting thing to note is the current trend among farmers, both in NW Iowa where I live, and around the country (as evidenced by the numerous tractor and ag forums I visit each week). Many farmers have firmly decided that global warming, in its entirety, is a myth. “Sure had a long winter – kinda blows the global warming idea out of the water”. (Nevermind that global warming is partly experienced via increasingly marked extremes in weather, not warmer temperatures everywhere all the time, but anyways)
The question then is how the farming community is going to respond to allegations that they’re behind global warming when many are currently trending toward denial of it. My gut reaction is that (on a personal level) they’ll ignore the allegations rather than educate themselves about how to respond to such comments.
Any comments or observations about that topic:? You spend a lot of time traveling and speaking with people, maybe you’ve observed otherwise.
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