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The other week I posted a video of House Minority Leader John Boehner claiming that carbon dioxide is no big deal. The statement was in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos about the Republican solution to global warming.

His answer, word-for-word, follows:

“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it’s harmful to our environment, is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

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This interview was conducted on April 19 on “This Week.”

Irish scientists have discovered that adding just a small amount of fish oil to the diet of cattle can vastly reduce the amount of methane produced by, ahem…cow farts.

Climate scientists have long known that, pound for pound, methane is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping the suns rays, making it a highly potent greenhouse gas. An incredible 900 billion tonnes of the noxious fumes are produced each year by methanogen bacteria that live in the digestive systems of ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats.

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The Nature Conservancy announced this week that they have purchased ranchland in Shasta, California and hope to return Big Springs Creek to its former glory as a major salmon run.

The organization noticed the creek’s consistent, glacier-fed flowing water supply should make it the perfect spawning area for the embattled Pacific salmon, but it wasn’t being properly cared for. Years later, they’ve purchased 4,136 acres of surrounding land and plan to fence off the creek to protect it.

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A German study found that cows are major contributors to global warming, and it doesn’t matter if they’re raised on a conventional or an organic farm.

[Creative Commons photo by Jelle]

I’m with Stephanie Ernst over at change.org on this one, though: let’s not blame the poor cows. The culprit here is humans’ taste for meat and dairy and the sheer number of cows we have to raise to put beef on all of those plates.

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With milk prices plummeting and dairy farmers facing increased feeding costs, many are culling their herds in record numbers. It seems that the value of a dairy cow is not what it once was in the industry. Other dairy farmers are not buying. Selling cows that have become too expensive to feed to the beef industry has become the only viable option for the struggling dairy farmer trying to raise cash.

In a further effort to reduce costs, male calves are being subjected to even more callous treatment and cruelty as evidenced by the recent dumping of 30 dead calves at the side of the road in San Joaquin County, California.

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India’s fundamentalist Hindu political group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS) has taken yet another drastic step in its efforts to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness: it has created a new commercial drink made from cow urine. (The Times)

The healing properties of cow urine have been referred to in the ancient texts of Ayurveda, India’s natural medicine. However ancient times were witness to happier grass fed cows. Drinking the urine of today’s cattle that feeds on plastics and other waste will likely translate to imbibing huge amounts of toxins!

Ironically though, the RSS’s objective is not medicinal, nor even spiritual but rather fundamentalist. Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. The RSS takes advantage of this and turns it into a political motive.  Although the RSS has been promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to cancer, its Ayurvedic healing aspect is but a pawn in RSS’s overall fundamentalist agenda.

Other tactics that the RSS has used to draw attention in the recent past include killing 67 Christians in the eastern state of Orissa last year, and assaulting women in a pub in Mangalore last month. It has also targeted foreign business in India, as in 1994, when it organised a nationwide boycott of multinational consumer goods, including Pepsi and Coca Cola.

Image Credit: Creative Commons

Dairy products are part of most American diets on a daily basis, but what is the health and environmental impact of this high demand for milk?

The production of much of the milk in this country is done in large scale-operations, some having thousands of cows.

That’s a lot of manure to be dealt with, this reduces the air quality (especially for people living near the dairy operation), and consistently finds its way into our rivers, streams, and groundwater.

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Yes, if you ever wondered why you often see cows passed out under trees when you drive down the highway, here’s your answer.  Some of them have been chowing down on waste yeast, which is sold to farmers as cow feed.  With an alcohol content of up to 8%, that’s quite a kick!

Let’s amble under the fold and see how green beer-making is going to put an end to this bovine drunkenness - and perhaps even save the planet as well.

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Researchers at the University of Newcastle in the UK have reported, in the scientific journal Anthrozoos, that cows on farms where they are called by name yielded 258 litres a year more milk than those who were not called by name. Given that the average milk production in the UK is around 6 900 litres a year this represents an increase of almost 4%. This zero cost intervention can increase output and in reality reduce the herd size.

Dr Catherine Douglas said

By placing more importance on the individual, such as calling a cow by her name or interacting with the animal more as it grows up, we can not only improve the animal’s welfare and her perception of humans, but also increase milk production.

 

Photo credit: LFL16 on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.        

“Now should be environmental vegetarianism’s big moment. Global warming is the single biggest threat to the health of the planet, and meat consumption plays a bigger role in greenhouse gas emissions than even many environmentalists realize.” - Ben Adler

This quote above is from an article by Ben Adler in American Prospect, titled “Are Cows Worse Than Cars?”. It really stands out as a reminder of the clearly divided environmental movement. By and large, the movement towards environmental sustainability has just plain ignored the impact that dietary choices have on global warming. Curious, isn’t it?

On the one hand, we can support cleaner energy, buy more efficient cars, and reduce our consumption of products derived from petroleum, and yet with our other hand, eat a burger that has a carbon footprint bigger than most SUVs.

“I think it’s amazing that even the greenest of green liberal environment activists, the vast majority of them tend to consume meat at the same rate as people who think global warming is a hoax. Meat consumption seems to be the last thing that progressive people address in their lifestyle. If I had a nickel for every global warming conference that had roast beef on the menu, I’d be rich.” - Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network

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After years of debate and planning, the St. Paul, MN city council has voted unanimously to move forward with a unique plan to produce biogas from manure and ethanol waste in rural farms and pump it miles to power an enormous paper recycling plant.

The energy-efficiency of recycling paper is not the best, so this plan is a welcome alternative-fuel twist to the standard process.

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Previously believed to be a food-borne disease, researchers have discovered that some cows are genetically predisposed to contract bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The report shows that up to 48,000 cattle in the United States alone could carry the gene.

The study concludes that even under the best grass-fed, grazing conditions, cows could still contract the fatal disease. “Our findings that there is a genetic component to BSE are significant because they tell you we can have this disease everywhere in the world, even in so-called BSE-free countries,” said Juergen A. Richt, the professor at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who conducted the study.

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That scent is so rich, so savory, so earthy, so pungently sweet that just one whiff seems to bury you in an olfactory pleasure dome. And if you keep basking in the aroma, you may well feel driven to grab a pitchfork, plop a straw hat on your head, stick a blade of grass in your mouth, and head on out to the fields. This is especially true on those oh-so-humid mornings in the peak of summer, when the air is so moist and dense that you almost have to put on scuba gear. But any old day is a great day for cow poop.

I confess that I am no connoisseur of creaturely caca, but I would bet that none can compare with the quality of a cow’s. Horse manure comes close, but it pushes pungency at the expense of sweetness, plus it is not very good for fertilizer. The feces of fowls is not even in the same league; it is far too acrid, not to mention slimy and sticky and all around offensive. Elephant excrement is similarly versatile (for example, it makes a great alternative source for paper), yet so far it lacks the time-tested dependability and widespread availability of cow dung; pachyderm poo is thus still an exotic delicacy rather than a common staple. (I cannot speak to its odoriferous character, alas.) And nobody would sing paeans to dog and cat poop. Look at how tenderly people carry those telltale plastic bags when walking their dogs–usually with one arm extended as the dog pulls the leash and the other arm, hand, and pinching fingers extended as far away as possible with the bag bobbing in the air. When it comes to the felines, we have managed to train them to go potty in specified places, cover it with “fresh scent” granules, and graciously shake off anything sticking to their paws. I suppose “domestication,” in part, means proper toilet training…or “house training,” as it is called. And as for “humanure”…I am not even going there.

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Via: It’s Getting Hot in Here

For a more in depth post on the anti-farting vaccine, please visit Planetsave.

Confession time. I have to admit that I may have been a bit of a grumpy environmental blogger, failing to give due credit where credit is due..

In particular, I have frequently complained about bio-fuels driving up world food prices in absence of a few wider considerations, I’ve been dismissive at the EU’s lack of ability to actually implement anything that makes a real difference to the environment, and most recently I described an environmental tax levied on cows as the most stupid idea ever. So it is maybe time to examine these issues in a more positive light – negativity is, after all, the enemy of progress.

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Having waited all week for a relevant wildlife related idea to pop into my head, I ventured onto Google to look for information on local Swiss animals. I was surprised to learn that the chief animal topic in Switzerland does not relate to rare alpine species becoming endangered due to de-glaciation, or to urban foxes, or squirrels, or other wild animals, or to any thing else I might have guessed, but is principally related to the fair treatment of animals used in meat production.

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They milk 1000 cows at Wapnö castle outside Halmstad, Sweden, and during the process of cooling the milk from 37 to 3 degrees C, they have devised a way to capture that heat and use it to warm up the castle and workshop buildings.

The Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences has just received $590,000 to support research into how diet affects a cow’s methane emissions. Livestock are blamed for 28 percent of the world’s human-caused emissions of methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Photo courtesy of Man vyi at Wikimedia Commons