By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times.
O’Hare airport will finally get its goats. The Department of Aviation of the City of Chicago has awarded a contract to a private firm to provide 25 goats to munch vegetation at the city’s airport. These “green lawn mowers” will help reduce carbon dioxide emissions to sustain the planet.
Last fall, when the project was bid, Amy Malick, head of sustainability at the Department of Aviation, commented on the planned use of goats in hard-to-mow areas, “They may have steep slopes, very hard to get to with heavy machinery, and those machines also emit pollution. They’re burning fossil fuel. So as a sustainability initiative we’re looking to bring in animals that do not have emissions associated with them, at least to the same extent that heavy machinery would.”
A shepherd will herd the goats across 120 acres at four different sites on airport property. The 25 fuzzy critters are expected to clear vegetation each day from a square at least sixteen feet on a side.
Chicago is not the first city to employ animals to reduce airport vegetation. Sheep are used at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and goats are used at San Francisco International. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport deployed goats as early as 2008, but stopped because “it was not cost effective.” How can a guy with a lawn mower be as cost effective as a herd of goats?
A single one-way Boeing 747 flight from Chicago to London emits about 200 tons of carbon dioxide, or about 5,000 times the annual emissions from a gasoline-powered lawn mower of a homeowner. It appears that emissions savings from O’Hare goats will be relatively small. But what about methane emissions from the herd?
On the other side of the world, about 10,000 miles from Chicago, the government of Australia has a different solution for global warming. More than a million wild camels, called “feral” camels, roam the outback of Australia. They munch up the foliage and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from both the nose end and the tail end. Each camel produces more than one ton of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. Feral goats are also part of this severe climate problem.
But the enlightened Australian government passed the Carbon Farming Initiative Act in December of 2011. The act calls for “The reduction of methane emissions through the management, in a humane manner, of feral goats, feral deer, feral pigs, or feral camels.” “Management” companies are now flying over the outback, shooting goats and camels from helicopters, and earning carbon credits. Maybe the Aussies should use goats instead of lawn mowers at airports?
So goats are both grazed and shot to reduce those evil carbon dioxide emissions. It’s all part of this mad, mad, mad world of Climatism.
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Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.(which they don’t like at San Jose State Meteorology Dept.)
@ur momisugly Janice Moore says: May 10, 2013 at 7:38 pm
Meatloaf! Love the song!
Oh, [sniff, sniff] Phil Jourdan (whose logic is impeccable — ALL criminals blameshift), I had forgotten all the lyrics except for the line above, so, inspired by your comment (grrr), I went on line and listened… WAAAAA! That hurt.
Well, a good cry is always welcome.
It is, musically, a good song, but I sure don’t want to listen to it again any time soon!
WHY do you love that song? Hmm? You BROKE SOME POOR WOMAN’S HEART, didn’t you!
@ur momisugly Janice Moore May 10, 2013 at 8:51 pm
We have a “all genre” station and they just played it yesterday. And yea, I am a Meatloaf fan.
I am glad the experience was melancholy! It was for me.
Well, let’s see. Goats are ruminents. Ruminents emit green house gasses as well as liquid and solid bio wastes, all of which will pollute the environment to some degree. Anybody study this?
Dear Janice,
Up at the top toolbar is an item that says “Test”. Click on it. There you’ll find formatting suggestions, and a place where you can try out formatting and play around with stuff like linking, see how it’ll look in your comments.
And please, don’t read that as me being condescending, I’m not trying to be that, and you’re far from the first person to try out stuff in the regular comments. Hope you’re having fun here.
Thanks, K. D., your kindly advice is much appreciated. You did not come off as condescending in the least, but how kind of you to clarify. I am grateful you took the time to help me! Others are, no doubt, even more grateful, LOL.
I am having TOO much fun, here. [I do try to wait until the main discussion has petered out or comment on threads where my zaniness is closer to being OT]
Learning a lot – even about formatting.
Bye for now and, until next time,
PRAISE THE LORD (for helpful people like you)! #[:)]
Sorry to hear that, K.D.. Thanks again for being a parakleto (sp?). (Aw, shucks, I’d better just say it in English in case my Greek spelling is waaaay off: one who comes alongside to help.)
******************************
“OT” — ON or OFF topic? Ooops! in post above, I meant ON topic — time to quit. (%’)zzzzzzz
No story of goats and aviation is complete without a reference to The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble (which was originally published in 2003, not after 2008 as one might think). It’s well worth reading, as carbon ‘credit’ ‘markets’ in their best days displayed unnerving similarities to the events described in this story.
AndyG55 says:
Seriously? Goats on an air field.. what could possibly go wrong !!
It’s not just goats which can be a problem, there have been incidents to groundskeepers operating next to active runways without radios. (Possibly also some with radios but without understanding ATC terms, airport layout or that runways have two designations.)
Maybe the goats could be fitted with transponder collars so they would show on ground radar.
There are airports where large animals, both wild and domestic, are a common problem.
Chris B says:
Maybe there’s a crop that could be planted, grown and harvested on that 120 acres rather than simply feeding methane generators that require human supervision.
How many crops would you have left once you eliminate those which could attract birds or where the plant itself is potentially hazardous to aircraft? Planting and harvesting crops also tends to require people (together with tools and machines.)
Grass still looks like a good choice given those criteria. Domestic grazing animals produce milk, meat and leather as useful byproducts.
Philip Bradley says:
What is interesting is that feral animals (camels, goats, pigs, cats, foxes, and more) are far and away the biggest environmental problem in Australia, but any proposal to control them invariably has the greenie animal lovers up in arms.
All of which are recently introduced species… Anyway shouldn’t “rabbits” be first on the list.
IIRC the “greenies” also give aboriginal hunters a pass. Probably because most of them arn’t stupid enough to get into a fight with people better armed than they are.
I’m more than a bit confused by the statement that a 747 flying between London and Chicago would emit 200 tons of CO2. As far as I know, a 747 can carry somewhat more than 200 tons of fuel. Don’t know how much would typically be consumed on the flight in question, but the claim of emissions possibly exceeding the entire weight of fuel on board, and certainly exceeding the weight of the aircraft (which I believe to be about 33-35 tons empty,) strikes me as dubious. Any insights into this would be appreciated.
Best thing to use for hard-to-mow areas is something called a DR Field and Brush Mower. Using it, one man could probably mow the 256 sq feet the goats are expected to do in a day in ten minutes. One would think that an airport would have better sense than hiring goats to do the job, at probably 4x the cost.
Janice Moore says:
May 10, 2013 at 7:36 pm
He did – look in the right side nav bar under the May calendar and above the links to other sites. “Ric Werme’s guide to WUWT (updated daily)” Well, usually updated daily. It gets tripped up by novel unicode characters in titles.
Suggestion to everyone (including me) – take an occasional tour of both nav bars and revisit (or visit) some of the links that look intriguing.
Crustacean, carbon in the fuel, bound with hydrogen, is liberated and bonds with Oxygen from the atmosphere. You can do the math from there, but O is a lot heavier than H, and there are 2 atoms of O bonding with those C atoms.
The hydrogen liberated from the fuel also combines with oxygen and that gets emitted as Evil Greenhouse gas. It often turns into Evil Albedo Increasing Cirrus.
When Zepplins ruled the sky (well, when zepplins zipped between the US and Europe), the water in the engine exhaust was condensed and saved to maintain the weight of the aircraft to keep it close to neutrally buoyant.
Yeah, goats are good jumpers.
My father learned that, had to keep raising the fence (so ended up with a higher fence than if he’d started hight).
Worse, some sheep emulated the goats and found they could jump fairly high. Goats can take care of themselves far better than sheep – which are a dumb domestic species. So if the sheep get out you now have a dumb tasty animal on the outside of the fence.
Running sheep and goats together protected the sheep – goats would sense danger and run for home, the sheep would be sheep and follow. I’ve seen the whole collection run a third of a mile to home.
Emission of methane by mammals probably depends on what they are eating.
PETA? The t-shirt in hog country of eastern IA said “People Eating Tasty Animals”. I was raised on goat milk and meat, as millions of Mexicans may have been, and many millions around the world were. (They are more manageable on a small scale, including they can be grabbed and manipulated by a human – can’t do that with cows and horses. Do note however they are normally de-horned when quite young, unlike the goat in your illustration.)
The goats will bed down at the site, tethered as needed, as the need for their services is only in warmer weather when the offending vegetation grows. In winter they live on a farm elsewhere (Maybe they could be moved around as bees are to match the season, though with greater difficulty – summer at ORD, winter at LAX.) Rain shelter can be made with tarps, or tents, or an old trailer especially for the herders. At Chicago airport the goats will be outside the security fence.
This is all more feasible than people unfamiliar with goats grasp – some herein are behaving like climate alarmists: assuming, extrapolating from a little knowledge, etc.
The cities of Kamloops BC and Seattle WA use goats in some locations – tough terrain, rough foliage, that’s their niche. Goats supplied and tended by a specialized service.
Whether or not it is economic I don’t know, but I point out that chemical weed control is expensive. I do like Alan Watt’s idea of having a goat farm at the airport to improve the economics. 🙂
I see a booming trade in coastal Aussies who want some free goat/camel meat. Both are GREAT if handled right. All *I* get to shoot are the **** feral hogs here in TX, and while they’re tasty, they can also kill you and are surprisingly stealthy. Y’all Aussies won this one.
CodeTech and Ric Werme–
Thanks for the CO2 explanation; saved me from making ill-informed statements in less congenial venues.