Flatulent Propaganda
Last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson as on The Daily Show last week, laughingly assuring the American public that the EPA won’t be regulating cows. Jon Stewart laughed along and they moved on… right past the opportunity to tell people something they really need to know.
Ever since methane’s role in climate change became known, the meat and dairy industries have been making jokes about cow farts and cow burps, thereby reducing the idea of regulation of their industry to the nonsensical image of the government ordering animals not to belch or pass gas. As long as we are laughing about fart cows, we’re not thinking about how it is that their flatulence adds up to climate change.
According to this EarthSave report:
By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture.
Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Whereas human sources of CO2 amount to just 3% of natural emissions, human sources produce one and a half times as much methane as all natural sources. In fact, the effect of our methane emissions may be compounded as methane-induced warming in turn stimulates microbial decay of organic matter in wetlands—the primary natural source of methane.
With methane emissions causing nearly half of the planet’s human-induced warming, methane reduction must be a priority. Methane is produced by a number of sources, including coal mining and landfills—but the number one source worldwide is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year.
So, the regulation of animal agriculture is really a rather urgent matter for the EPA. The meat and dairy industries are lobbying hard to exempt animal agriculture from the EPA’s new regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.
EPA Lisa Jackson’s laughing dismissal of the regulation of cows signals that the meat and dairy industries may have found favor with her. Read this Eastern Shore Sanctuary Action Alert for more information and to learn what you can do to voice your views now while the EPA is still accepting public comments on the question of Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse gases.
