Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown has just signed a law to require dairy farmers to reduce bovine methane emissions.
California targets dairy cows to combat global warming
GALT, Calif. – California is taking its fight against global warming to the farm.
The nation’s leading agricultural state is now targeting greenhouse gases produced by dairy cows and other livestock.
Despite strong opposition from farmers, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in September that for the first time regulates heat-trapping gases from livestock operations and landfills.
Cattle and other farm animals are major sources of methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping gas. Methane is released when they belch, pass gas and make manure.
“If we can reduce emissions of methane, we can really help to slow global warming,” said Ryan McCarthy, a science adviser for the California Air Resources Board, which is drawing up rules to implement the new law.
…
In the nation’s largest milk-producing state, the new law aims to reduce methane emissions from dairies and livestock operations to 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2030, McCarthy said. State officials are developing the regulations, which take effect in 2024.
“We expect that this package … and everything we’re doing on climate, does show an effective model forward for others,” McCarthy said.
Dairy farmers say the new regulations will drive up costs when they’re already struggling with five years of drought, low milk prices and rising labor costs. They’re also concerned about a newly signed law that will boost overtime pay for farmworkers.
“It just makes it more challenging. We’re continuing to lose dairies. Dairies are moving out of state to places where these costs don’t exist,” said Paul Sousa, director of environmental services for Western United Dairymen.
…
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/11/29/california-targets-dairy-cows-to-combat-global-warming.html
The number of Californian people and businesses fleeing overregulation and high costs reached a record high last year. I doubt the new cow fart law will do anything to reassure people who haven’t yet joined the great Californian exodus.
I just thought of an idea! Beano for Bovines! Stop flatulence at the source! Maybe “green” diapers, that could be deposited in an on-site bio-digester. Or perhaps outlaw meat eating altogether… Greenies can live on lentils and bea…. never mind. Just lentils. Beans are way too gassy. Liberalism truly is a disease. I sure hope they soon find a cure!
Good one SketpticGoneWild. ☺ But it be-hoofs me to horn in on your humor. This is such a moo-t law but the cream of the greens will milk it for what it is worth. It churns the stomach.
.
I am going to stew about this all night.
Butter not!
The populace should refuse to sell or serve any meat to the Governor and any government department/employees then see how he likes living on vegetables and tofu. He will surely agree with this in order to reduce the demand for meat products and therefore lower methane production.
From the linked article …
But the biggest target is dairy manure, which accounts for about a quarter of the state’s methane emissions.
State regulators want more farmers to reduce emissions with methane digesters, which capture methane from manure in large storage tanks and convert the gas into electricity.
The state has set aside $50 million to help dairies set up digesters, but farmers say that’s not nearly enough to equip the state’s roughly 1,500 dairies.
New Hope Dairy, which has 1,500 cows in Sacramento County, installed a $4 million methane digester in 2013, thanks to state grants and a partnership with California Biogas LLC, which operates the system to generate renewable power for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District.
Co-owner Arlin Van Groningen, a third-generation farmer, says he couldn’t afford one if he had to buy and run it himself.
It’s not the cow, it’s the cow poop.
The solution for Gov Moonbeam is to eat sh1t!
So incinerating poop creates less greenhouse gas than mixing it into the soil as fertilizer?
Actually, it’s the methanogen bacteria, which likes cows and cow poop, but doesn’t require them. It has been around forever compared with cows or people.
Cut methane by 40%? California tries to legislate flatulence. A limerick.
On September 19, 2916 Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill (SB 1383) that requires the state to cut methane emissions from dairy cows and other animals by 40% by 2030. The bill is yet another massive blow to the agricultural industry in the state of California that has already suffered from the Governor’s passage of a $15 minimum wage and a recent bill that makes California literally the only state in the entire country to provide overtime pay to seasonal agricultural workers after working 40 hours per week or 8 hours per day (see “California Just Passed A $1.7 Billion Tax On The Whole Country That No One Noticed“).
According to a statement from Western United Dairymen CEO, Anja Raudabaugh, California’s Air Resources Board wants to regulate animal methane emissions even though it admits there is no known method for achieving the the type of reduction sought by SB 1383.
In Climate Change remedy tools
both Kerry and Jerry are fools.
Do away with methane,
no more fart? That’s insane.
Enteric digestion still rules. https://lenbilen.com/2016/09/22/cut-methane-by-40-california-tries-to-legislate-flatulence-a-limerick/
Ah Mr. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam, Emperor of California and All Other Domains of Earth.
Her is another Emperor, demanding of a Dairyman, in France, the “Gold” he seeks.
To all the dairy farmers in California tired of dealing with the lunatic climate obsessed twits who are running that formerly great state into the ground- please know y’all are more than welcome in Texas.
That former great state? California is booming. What on earth are you talking about? Texas, on the other hand, is growing at a much slower rate. Why move to a slow growing state?
It’s easy to make money change hands a lot and create an illusion of growth, something lefty-libs are very experienced at doing. Such Keynesian sleight of hand only works for so long, until the economic reality exposes and topples the house of cards, like the tide washing away a sand castle.
I’ll take slow real growth over fast fake growth.
I have family in California. It is on the ropes. Broke. Business is fleeing.
First of all carbon emissions from enteric fermentation is surface carbon and part of the surface-atmo system, not extraneous carbon previously sequestered for millions of years and now being injected into the atmos (callender, revelle, hansen 1981, ipcc). This extraneous carbon is supposed to be what’s scary because it is a perturbation that could destabilize the surface-atmos carbon cycle and the climate system. Enteric fermentation cannot do that. Also, in the presence of natural geological sources, there is no evidence that changes in atmos merhane are correlated with enteric fermentation emissions.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674147
Also the uncertainty in emissions from wetlands is “unquantifiable”.
Not to worry. BigPharma is working on a flatulence vaccine.
Where’s Mosh, Griff, Toneb etc to defend this idiocy
Come on guys, you continue to let your religion down. !!
Unlike you, they usually stick to talking about things they know something about. Every now and then they weigh in on something that can be reasonably understood to have a hole in it by basically anyone who possess basic reasoning skills, but for the most part they talk about stuff they have actually spent a lot of time trying to understand. You just talk… and sneer, and build straw men.. and so on.
“Unlike you, they usually stick to talking about things they know something about.”
They do?
You’re funny!
Actually, they spend their time replying to things they ~think~ they know a lot about.
Pot-meet-kettle projection at its finest.
Think of the ice!!
Griff basically just pastes that .gif of arctic ice, and that would be a stretch even for them to put that here.
I really have a beef with this offal law.
they’ve sniffed a whole lot of dairy air, tho
You get a gold star next to your name.
You misspelled “dairy air” (you know, where the methane comes from)!
…and they are very accomplished at producing BS.
Methane rapture from forage! Another brain fart from the ecomaniacs. Next up, a program to train cows to chain smoke so that methanous erructations can be combusted at source into our beloved CO2 which will then be magicked away by the meditation of the windmills.
dairy industry is as much a creature of government as the green gang is.
they are not private enterprise, they are subsidy farms.
for america to be great again, that has to stop.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell
As usual, Thomas nails it!
Milk, Milk . . . “Let Them Eat Cake”.
Josh, could you please draw us a genetically modified cow suitable for living in California?
Wherever you read the words “a heat-trapping gas”, you know the rest is just a load of bull.
Actually the gas in the atmosphere that traps the most heat energy is N2 and nothing is being done to reduce N2 in our atmosphere.
Is Ryan McCarthy related to Gina McCarthy?
anyone in the bay area will get this:
http://imgur.com/oL1VbKN
This is what happens when burrOcrats making the rules have rarely done anything of consequence outside of their city — in this case, that would be like never having milked (or touched) a cow…
From what I read they want the ranchers/dairies to build processing plants to capture the cow manure methane and store it. One rancher/dairy has at the cost of over $4 million dollars, subsidized by the tax payers. Where I’m at they take the manure from the feed lots and dairies to the fields, it is called fertilizer, good for the plants and soil.
Raw manure is not good for plants and soil, or drinking water, or air quality.
@Retired Kit P
November 30, 2016 at 1:23 pm: It is okay, at recommended rates, and well-spread.
Is that why nothing grew where the buffalo roamed?
Any clue on the effect (if there is any) on global temperatures?
None. But it’s the thought that counts.
… or the lack thereof.
Why do global warming alarmists worry about emissions from cows and sheep when pastoral farming adds no net carbon to the atmosphere and in fact is a carbon sink? Do they not understand the carbon cycle?
Grass grows and forms hydrocarbons (fibre sugars and cellulose) by photosynthesis i.e. absorbs CO2. Every molecule of carbon in the grass comes from CO2. Cows and sheep eat the grass and convert it to meat, bones, leather and milk so some of that carbon is locked up for good. The carbon in the methane (CH4) that they emit also came from the carbon in the grass. It is lighter than air so rises in the atmosphere and is oxidised back to CO2 and water. This cycle has been happening for eons and if there had been any effect on climate we would have seen evidence of it in the past.
Considering the the majority of these farms are more than likely large-scale factory farms, I’m inclined to think that the percentage of grass-fed cows is quite low compared to those cows that are fed with subsidized corn.
All true, in addition to the fact that methanogen bacteria were around before cows, are not strictly dependent on them, and will continue to do their thing with vegetable matter regardless. And of course, as you say, the methane is short-lived. The world can survive methanogen bacteria, as well as silly politicians.
There you go again SR, using common sense. You’ve been warned about that.
Governor Brown needs a personal methane detector installed, with an accompanying thermostat-nuclear device. Too much methane….BOOM!😜
That goes without saying. But IMO the worst are the ones that have touched a cow, have been touched by a cow, and are, after that, the professionals.
People who have merely touched a cow usually have little idea on how hard work keeping cows is and don’t value it very high.