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 hope the 3 million + illegal voters in California who keep these politicians in power, enjoy paying more for meat and dairy products or enjoy not having a livestock and dairy industry.
And I thought the politicians in my poor country were bad!
All Meat and dairy products should be banned in california. Long prison terms should be handed out for people convicted of possession of even tiny amounts of meat and or dairy pruducts including anythihg made from any part of an animal.
at least they should print shock pictures on diary packaging like starving polar bears etc….
“enjoy paying more for meat and dairy products” But most of them don’t pay for their food to begin with anyway. The government can just raise taxes to offset the higher food subsidy cost. But the CA rich, the primary source of CA revenue, are leaving CA taking their businesses with them – http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426974/why-businesses-leave-california-sarah-rumpf – so eventually the socialists will run out of other people’s money as just Margaret Thatcher always told us.
At which point California will need to be bailed out. So eventually California will export the cost of its lunatic policies to the taxpayers in the rest of the US.
California is doing well and running a surplus. What are you talking about? http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/11/17/66216/california-analyst-projects-2-8-billion-budget-sur/
This man is definitely an excellent candidate for looney bin.
Lord, please throw some brain on CA.
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
That’s the point. Moonbeam gets rid of all that dirty industry for the Californian luvvies. They can pay the extra cost of shipping the milk, meat, veg etc back to luvvie land
The cause of methane is not really the livestock but the organic material that they eat. Dead organic material will eventually result in methane release weather it is eaten by an animal or not. So to fight methane production all forms of organic material should be removed from and permanately banned from the state of California including humans. As us humans leave we need to cover the ground throughout the state with long acting herbicides that will not break down in the environment. Maybe we can also do our part to kill off life in the oceans as well.
Rather than passing a law to regulate Californian Cow Methane emissions, it would have been better if the Californian Legislature had passed a law regulating harmful emissions from Californian Politicians by at least 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2030.
Okay I know I am going to catch it for my ah, pun, but oh well.
Since we are on the topic I submit to you the proper way to “milk a cow”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/30/wisconsin-judge-refuses-to-order-hand-recount.html
Seems the folks in Wisconsin recounted the fee for the recount in is now between 3.5-3.9 million dollars.
Someone may have forgotten to factor all the O.T.
michael
But wot about the water vapor?
It’s had to believe that some bureaucrats are beavering away to micro-control humanity in such futile efforts. Reminds me of the residents of Laputa.
If CO2 is a less potent GHG, we could fit cattle with a pilot light….
So it was, in not-so ancient Rome, that senators rose to their feet and gave powerful oratories on the subject of – wait for it – Farming.
They espoused the benefits of fallowing, crop rotation, manure, lime etc etc.
So far so good.
But The Romans managed to trash vast swathes of Southern Europe and North Africa.
What were forests, orchards, gardens and greenery became, and still is, an effective desert. They sucked all the organic carbon out of the dirt so plants didn’t thrive, temperatures rose in then day, dropped at night and – surprise surprise -The Climate Changed
Now we have the same thing happening. Great, good and well-intentioned lawmakers tell us that cows fart, belch and waste the climate.
Sadly, they’ve got cows all wrong. Cows are not dumb stupid things. And yet this is in a world of Disney and Attenborough where animals are all sensitive caring things that talk to each other and generally ‘care’
Bizzarre.
Cows are very fussy eaters, they are *not* stupid munching machines that mow their way across fields eating everything. They know, having had millions of years experience, they know to eat only the leaves off the grass plants. They know the leaves are the sugar factories where they’ll gain rapidly absorbed nutrition.
They avoid as best they can eating the stalks and also grasses that have seeded. Stalks are just cellulose (indigestible) and the seed are protected by a husk, again indigestible. So the cows paddle on the stalks, muck on them, p1ss on them and generally mash the stalky stuff into the ground. Where it feeds all the little critters, bugs, beetles, worms and not least, the soil bacteria.
Farmers in olden times knew this. Modern farmers either have not been taught or realised but are mostly under colossal pressure to produce ‘cheap food’. Thus, when they see their cows paddling round a field seemingly wasting huge amounts of stuff, they leave the cows in there until they have eaten it. Or they come along with a huge mowing machine, slice it all off an inch above the surface and bale it, or make silage or preserve it somehow for feeding in one humongous mash later.
And *that* is why cows produce methane. Its comes from uncontrolled anaerobic decomposition of the cellulose that they’ve been forced to eat. Left to their own natural devices they’d have mashed it into the ground.
Basically, we have turned the insides of our cows into huge stinking farting burping and belching compost heaps. Nice huh
Fairs fair though, vegetarian folks inflict the very same upon themselves and as we see here, want to inflict it on the rest of us. sigh
Sometimes, with stupidity like this, and AGW, you wonder just how long Mother Nature’s patience with us will last…..
http://www.sciencealert.com/images/articles/processed/cow-seaweed_1024.jpg
I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned
http://www.sciencealert.com/adding-seaweed-to-cattle-feed-could-reduce-methane-production-by-70
{Hmm? That didn’t quite feel like sand between my toes…. }
Here’s how to waste €7.7m taxpayer’s money:- http://www.ruminomics.eu/index.php/final-conference-presentation
and no published report/paper in a reputable journal. Disgraceful.
From MEASUREMENTS OF THE RADIATIVE SURFACE FORCING
OF CLIMATE Evans & Puckrin
Table 3b: Measured Summer Downward
Surface Fluxes
Greenhouse Gas Summer
Fluxes (W/m2)
1998 1999 Past
CFC11 all 0.15 0.11 0.15
CFC12 all 0.29 0.24 0.27
HNO3 0.075 0.063 0.066
CH4 1.16 0.60 1.08
N2O 1.14 0.64 0.89
O3 2.57 2.47 2.61
H2O 178 256 251
CO2 10.5 10.5
Table 3a: Measured Winter Downward
Surface Fluxes
Greenhouse Gas Winter
Fluxes (W/m2)
1999
2000
Past 1999 2000 Past
CFC11 0.13 0.10 0.14
CFC12 0.24 0.22 0.28
HNO3 0.061 0.065 0.052
CH4 1.30 1.29 0.96
N2O 1.34 1.41 1.04
O3 3.03 3.17 3.27
H2O 94.1 105.4 125
CO2 34.7 30.9
Two things to note from these tables, from samples which range from just over 100W/m2 to around 270 W/m2, the CH4 contribution never gets much over 1 W/m2 and the profound difference between Winter and Summer measures for CO2.
“Measurements of the downward radiative flux have been made for several important greenhouse gases. At mid-latitudes in summer as compared to winter, our measurements show that the downward surface flux from H2O has doubled to 200 W/m2. The water increase causes a reduction of the fluxes from the other greenhouse gases.”
This study was done in North Central Canada. The 200W/m2 to 270W/m2 summer figures there are dwarfed by temp and humidity numbers over the vast majority of the planet for the vast majority of the year. The study was done nearly two decades ago now and when I first came across it, I assumed there would be a gold rush of further science using the spectral analysis technique to finally develop some meaningful data on what was really driving global temps. Its been a couple of years since I last searched for some,but there haven’t been more than a handful of similar works. The most significant one was done at the South pole. It’s almost as if the people handing out the grant money didn’t want to see what this technique could reveal.
Forgot the link in the above
https://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_100737.htm
You need to click on Extended Abstract to see the tables & graphs read most of the paper
According to this, methane is an even smaller bit part as a greenhouse gas than CO2. With the vast majority of being natural.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
just help me do the maths…
According to wikipedia, animal waste accounts to 5% of all global methane sources.
How many of the farm animals worldwide live in California? For convenience let us say 1%. Which accounts to 0.05% of the global methans sources.
Now California likes to reduce this only from cows, let us say half of all animals. 0.025%.
California likes to reduce this by 40%: 0.01%
Half of the production will move outside california or the goal will not be achieved fully: 0.005%
I think the actual number will be even lower.
How many degrees will this reduce from global warming?
I think the Californian governor and his advisers are just too lazy to do some calculation and are just believing some statements or papers.
This is just an example of an alliance between two far left groups united in their struggle to assert totalitarian control. The Green Group created the CO2 fog in order to control “the environment” while the Vegan Group want to use the CO2 fog in order to stamp out eating meat. I.E., if you buy into the CO2 fog one can piggyback (pun) all other authoritarian “causes”. Oh, and they’re working on doing the same thing to conservatives, free speech, deniers, et al, in order to become, truly, Borg (Star Trek) Earth.
Actually this is good. You shouldn’t be drinking cow’s milk anyway. Cow’s milk is designed for calves to grow rapidly not for humans.
It’s optimized for baby cows, that doesn’t mean it’s of no use for other babies.
I would agree that cow’s milk has limited benefits for human babies not yet weaned on solid food. It does provide those at that age a valuable source of high quality protein. However, as soon as one can get protein for other foods, cow’s milk should be off the menu. Even grown cows don’t drink cow’s milk.
That’s not what I said.
The idea that cows milk is of limited benefit is contradicted by all the facts attesting to it’s benefit.
and, by golly, milk and chocolate chip cookies taste great! One of the finer pleasures of an advanced civilization!
To Tom in Florida
November 30, 2016 at 7:11 am
The biggest problem we have on the dairy farm I work on is cows feeding off each other. Once one cow starts sucking off another, and these are 3 – 5 year old cows, other cows start copying. The only solution is to cull the herd of any suckers, as soon as we spot them. They drag the condition of any compliant cows down very quickly, due to the constant sucking.
It’s a moo (t) point. What people choose to eat or drink is between them and their doctors (and even then, not so much). Besides, milk is used in a lot of things we eat, like cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, and used in baking. What gets me is that for many years, they pushed the whole nonfat nonsense (which I refused to buy), because of the misguided notion that saturated fat was “bad”. Not unlike the notion that CO2 is “bad”.
Actually it’s one of the best foods available. It’s had a lot of negative press – with a lot of BS just like this – and absolutely all of it agenda driven.
no, it’s not.
your stomach knows to move things into the intestine when they are liquid.
unless you’re a rare scandinavian or an infant who is still producing rennin
(http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/rennin)
the milk shoots right through and the protein is not exposed to acid for digestion.
so you feed your gut flora.
never mind any lactose intolerance issues,
despite the dairy association inserting their propaganda into your grade school textbooks, milk (when drunk) is not very digestible by normal humans who are not infants.
I would wager that if the California government were told there are 50,000 cattle guards in the state, they would say “That’s way too many, we’ll retrain them”
I think they would prefer “catch and release” training for the guards (hehe)
No, the SEIU (state employees’ union) would launch a campaign to unionize the cattle guards.
California sounds like a sterile place. The only thing they produce there is boring movies. Everything else is imported.
Well, what’s happened is that they’ve all gone activist control freak. It’s not ‘if it feels good do it’, it’s an austere, rigid, totalitarian ideology – generally imposed on those who don’t get a say in the matter by those who are unaffected by it. It’s ironic – the ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ crowd is the puritan, judgmental, label-maker, conformity set. You wanna do your own thing, the LAST thing you are is a progressive.
The original California gold rush brought a great influx. It seems logical that the California BS rush should cause the opposite.
I read somewhere that in the early 1800’s there were 50 million buffalo in the US. Did this cause climate change? Or is it only cows in California which can do this?
The grass that the cow ate, (or moose or bison or deer or yada), took CO2 from the air. Methane from the cows eventually breaks down into CO2 just like the methane from soil microbes or termites etc. breaks down into CO2. Cows and all other animals are therefore GHG neutral this indicating that this is all a complete fraud and there is an ulterior motive they are not revealing to us.
I suspect that that is all one big land grab by CA “fat crats” and next they’ll attack pig and chicken farms to pave over even more pastureland and build more apartment complexes and shopping malls. More people and higher real estate values = bigger tax base = more government corruption.
So, California is going to round up and kill all livestock? That is the only way to stop “emissions” from livestock. Good luck with that.
One of the greenie schemes are methane digesters, which extract methane from bovine manure, and convert it to electricity. The things aren’t cheap – New Hope Dairy, with 1,500 cows installed one for $4 million, with the help of state grants, and a partnership with Biogas. Since it is “renewable” energy, dollars to donuts that electricity is given generous subsidies. Good thing California has plenty of extra dough lying around.
BZ
” I doubt the new cow fart law will do anything to reassure people who haven’t yet joined the great Californian exodus.”
It must be true, ’cause I read this on the Internet:
California proposes state name change to “Cowlifartia”!
This is just another evil plot by the vegans to take over your menu!
Soon this old ad will become reality in Cali…..
http://del.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/10/54f942a2bd317_-_wheres-the-beef-ad.jpg