The Biggest Climate Lie is about Cows

This is a repost with permission from the author.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that people would have to stop eating hamburgers because cow flatulence was an existential threat to life on Earth, most people duly chuckled.  Nevertheless, AOC’s call for cow-culling was taken up by the United Nations, European Union, World Economic Forum, and “Climate Envoy” John Kerry.  Protests defending farming in Holland, Ireland, and Belgium opposed these bold attacks on gentle bovines.  Contrary to slanderous arguments by globalist fearmongers, cows are the solution to many of humanity’s most significant environmental problems.  Here’s why.

The fertile American heartland was created by buffalo.  Hooves pounding the land pressed plants into the ground to mesh with manure and urine, feeding the soil microbiome and nurturing vital soils.  The advent of human technology tore into the ground in reckless tilling, releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air and depleting soil health while proclaiming a “Green Revolution” that initiated the slow desertification of the land.  Synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, and GMO chemical adjuncts have compounded and aggravated the problem.

Some cows are more equal than others

Meanwhile, animal husbandry was similarly absorbed by the industrial Borg, consolidating farms and animals into obscene concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) on a large, dystopian scale.  These concrete-imprisoned CAFO cows are blamed for the consequences of their enslavement — the figures of cow methane recklessly spewed by AOC and her ilk are taken from these unnaturally housed and abused cows.  Cows raised naturally on pasture, allowed to roam and graze as intended, feed soils and protect water supplies.

Cows fed grain produce less methane than cows on grass… unless one includes the pollution generated by planting, seeding, harvesting, and processing all that grain.  Atrazine, glyphosate, neonicotinoids, and a bevy of other toxic chemicals and fuels are immediately eliminated from the cow-feed pipeline when cows are fed grass only.  Grass blades are God’s solar panels — truly renewable, converting the sun’s energy into edible meats through the bodies of livestock, without building a concrete prison or tilling the ground.

Follow the manure

The focus on cow methane is a deliberate ruse by “manure-deniers.”  Cows produce methane through enteric fermentation, but they also generate manure and urine that nurture soils, which in turn absorb methane and carbon dioxide through microbial activity, prevent soil erosion and water loss, and improve the soil microbiome and thus crop productivity — all without the toxic intrusion of the U.S. chemical industry.

If cows are eliminated and replaced with synthetic meats, we are told the environment will benefit: yet the opposite is easily demonstrated.  Synthetic meats are “cultured” in vats using plant matter as a growing medium, likely soy and/or corn.  That soy and corn will be produced using the same destructive GMO practices that are destroying America’s farmland.

Manure can only be replaced with more synthetic fertilizers, particularly urea (nitrogen), which is made from natural gas (aka methane).  Urea production gives off nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas identified by the EPA as having a Global Warming Potential (GWP) 273 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Cow methane from burps is allegedly 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide, but this ignores the increased methane and carbon dioxide absorbed and retained by healthy, manure-enriched soils.  CAFO cows create a pile of manure that must be spread with tractors and fossil fuels; grazing cows spread their nurturing plops naturally onto the land, where their net impact is to sequester more carbon dioxide and methane in the soil than they burp out.

Cows are the cure

Industrial agriculture has cheated nature for a century, abusing the ground and animals upon which human food supplies depend.  Now those same forces have galvanized behind the WEF and the usual elitist suspects to resist efforts to reform this planet-devouring industrialism using regenerative agriculture.  Monsanto (now Bayer), JBS Foods, Syngenta, Dow, and other mighty food oligarchs gather at the WEF table as “partners” to tell the world that only more industrial agriculture and technology can solve the problems they have created.

Bovine climate problems, we are told, do not arise from how cows have been abused and the balance of soil life unnaturally disrupted, but from the cows themselves.  But if sensible, regenerative animal husbandry is eliminated, the chemical spigot will open fully wide to produce meat alternatives.

The WEF and its food-monopolizing corporate membership are deliberately maligning cows to further consolidate market share and profit margins.  Shifting humanity to a factory-only food system in which these companies will continue to synthetically “fertilize” (and kill) the soil for profit will magnify human dependence on industry without benefiting the climate.  Properly managed cows are not climate change culprits: they are the solution to soil erosion and carbon sequestration.