Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the “Farting Cows” blunder was not her fault.
AOC blames aide for ‘farting cows’ Green New Deal document
by Jerry Dunleavy
March 30, 2019 03:53 PMRep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., blamed an unnamed aide for the document that was sent out to the media and posted on her congressional website during the disastrous February rollout of her Green New Deal climate plan.
…
"I definitely had a staffer that had a very bad day at work," @AOC said in response to a question about her controversial #GreenNewDeal FAQ that mentioned "farting cows"
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 30, 2019
She labeled it a "working draft" that was released too early by said staffer.https://t.co/ea17ZG48nx pic.twitter.com/vLoHFt9faABut the rollout hit an immediate snag: a confusing six-page Green New Deal FAQ document that had also been sent to the media by Ocasio-Cortez’s office and posted on her website.
Among other things, it proposed providing “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work” and called for “a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases.”
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast,” the Green New Deal FAQ document read.
…
The Green New Deal FAQ document which contains the embarrassing farting cows reference;
I think it is kindof sweet that AOC seems to have forgiven whichever unnamed staffer inadvertently helped make her Green New Deal look like such an amateur effort.
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Ah! She is indeed a true politician. She has learned fast to blame everyone but herself.
Canada’s previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, was notorious for throwing people under the bus. link
A grown up says the buck stops here.
GOOD GRIEF!
The Globe & Mail is Canada’s equivalent to The New York Times.
Your link is to a “drive-by” shooting piece.
On that one I was going by my memory of Harper throwing people under the bus. As much as I have profound respect for his intelligence, abilities, and achievements, in that particular regard he was a real jerk.
Harper was the best Prime Minister Canada has had in the last 50 years, Comrade.
I didn’t say he wasn’t. I said he could be a real jerk. I also said I had profound respect for him. I didn’t say I liked him.
“The Globe & Mail is Canada’s equivalent to The New York Times.”
You mean a hard left Stalinist rag?
It’s the national newspaper of record for English speaking Canada. Most folks think it has a Conservative (both small and large C) slant.
I believe the last person who espoused that mantra was Harry S. Truman.
It’s always fun to look up what the ‘S’ stood for.
=============================
Besides, her farting excuse doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Flatulent bovines causing global warming dates back to at least the early 1990’s. In one of the factories I worked, I had responsibility for our environmental compliance programs. I distinctly remember seeing in a newsletter that the USEPA was going to study the amount of methane generated by cows and its affect on Global Warming. That was probably my first revelation that the whole environmentalist movement was a whacked-out scam.
I always think of the vast herds of bison and buffalo that used to roam the plains of North America before they were almost exterminated. I’m curious how much methane they produced vs the methane produced by bovines today. Would be an interesting thesis in a free academic and research environment. I’d think any attempt to research this, though, would bring many dooms upon the head of the researcher who dared to question the current orthodoxy.
Exactly correct for the “vast herds of bison and buffalo”, Buckeyebob, and to double down on the effect the pioneers in covered wagon trains collected the buffalo chips and burned them for campfires. Maybe this should be the starting point for AGW?
Kate Ramsayer of NASA thinks that “Methane is the Billy the Kid of greenhouse gases: it does a lot of damage in a short life”. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2365/seven-case-studies-in-carbon-and-climate/
Buckeye
The problem I have with the cow farts meme is that the methane is generated in the four stomachs of the cows, and is burped out. If someone is unaware of which end of the cow emits methane, can we dare trust their judgement on the management of the whole ecosystem?
Regardless of which end of a cow emits methane, it’s just not safe to smoke around cows, Crispin.
Wasting time studying methane under the premise that it is a greenhouse gas makes a serious error, as methane is not a greenhouse gas, there is no such thing.
Even if methane could warm the atmosphere, its effects are too small to measure, undetectable.
Methane has a 5 year half life in the atmosphere and is thus rather volatile and temporary. The atmosphere has more ways to clean itself than most people realize, as was reported by a scientific team a few years ago. Also, who is to say that methane in the atmosphere is not natural.
Man-released methane could be considered natural as we are natural, but even so, we do not release enough to be a factor in our climate.
Many are not aware that natural gas producers have no interest in leaking methane to the atmosphere as that is exactly what they intend to sell. There is no profit in leakage and, as a result, such enterprises are good at not leaking methane. Thus, the rigorous, Draconian regulations Obama imposed were completely unnecessary and just a financial burden to the industry.
Interestingly the amount of cattle is similar to the number of bison which once roamed the plains. Evil humans merely traded on for the other so it is carbon neutral.
Even worse, cows are not the actual source, but the microorganism that get into their gut via their diet. These “methanogen” critters make methane when in low-oxygen environments, such as a cow’s gut full of CO2 and varopis things other than oxygen.
But the real kicker is that these things pre-date cows, and live all over the world, under the ground, and under the ocean, in swamps, and in decaying plant matter, and don’t need a cow to generate methane in the first-place. They were doing it millions of years earlier all by themselves.
And as you say, there are plenty of other ruminant species out there. Methanogens even can work in a human digestive system.
So “getting rid of cows” seems to me just an excuse to try to control what people choose to eat. If they were really serious about the methane they’d invent some wacky program to “rid the world of methanogen bacteria”. I’m sure there’d be no “blow-back” (pun intended) from that hare-brained scheme, any more than the unintended consequences of introducing bunnies to Australia. /sarc
(It was a complete disaster).
If an angry vegan comes up to you and says “even if killing poor defenseless cows for food wasn’t bad enough, think of the methane they produce!” you can tell them all about methanogen microorganisms.
Why has everyone ignored that groanworthy pun? 🙂
Had to clean the coffee out of my keyboard first. :<)
Common decency.
By the way most of the CH4 comes out at the front end when the cows chew the cud, so it should really be “belching cows”, not farting.
My horse farts for about the first 3 minutes of a trail ride. Feeling “fuelish”, we call it. That’s nothing compared to the compost heap as far as gas generated.
Folks come out to shovel compost into buckets or have me fill their pickups with the loader. Top-dressing vegetables with it goes a long way.
Horses are caecalids, not ruminants. They only produce about half as much CH4 as a ruminant and it is true that they largely get rid of it by the rear aperture.
Or as a friend of mine once said: “horses must be the most nervous animals there are, they can scare themselves into a runaway by their own farting”. It had happened to him.
When a cow gets ‘bloat’ the rumen swells up with gas and can be relieved by puncturing with a trochar and cannula. At one time it was a popular trick for the vet to set light to the escaping gas – until the time when the cow panicked, bolted round the barn and set the whole place on fire. Or so I was told as a student.
“Never trust a fart” is an important axiom that we old folk with untrustworthy bowels live by. Also, if you have worked cattle, you know that when she raises her tail, the cow does not intend to pass methane. Don’t stand close. If she has been on rich green feed, you will be wearing it.
When you get older, farts are like bad tenants; don’t try to force them out or they’ll leave a mess. Yes, don’t trust them.
“She has learned fast to blame everyone but herself.”
Yes, she has, but it’s not good for a politicians to be constantly on the defensive and that’s just where AOC is at right now.
She made another gaff yesterday by claiming the 22nd Amendment was passed in order to prevent FDR from being reelected, when the facts are FDR died in 1945 and the 22nd Amendment didn’t pass until years later (1951).
FDR’s actions while he was president triggered the 22nd Amendment vote but it wasn’t used to prevent him from being elected again as AOC claimed.
She shouldn’t be giving history lessons if she doesn’t know history.
to Be fair … AOC has learned all her “history” from lunatic leftwing websites, mother jones magazine, and her leftist professors at Boston Univ. She knows nothing BUT leftwing propaganda.
That’s the impression I get from AOC as well, Kenji.
Don’t forget the K-12 years of propaganda as well. :<)
Of course … which leftist Hillary-voting NY suburb was that?
She’s no dummy, don’t underestimate her. Che considered a science career. Once she figures out Washington, she may become very dangerous.
https://www.societyforscience.org/content/ssp-blog/intel-isef-alumna-headed-capitol-hill
Ric Werme
She’s no dummy, don’t underestimate her. Che considered a science career. Once she figures out Washington, she may become very dangerous.
Oh she’s dangerous alright. She is smart as a tack and she’s suggesting the US gets things like universal health care and a minimum wage, things rest of the civilised world take for granted – even the conservatives there. Things the vast majority of American want.
The US conservatives and their media allies are crapping their pants and that is why she is being attacked.
We used to take things like polio and having most children die before the age of 5 for granted as well.
Even though minimum wage does no good and always harms the poorest, we do have one, and have had one for decades.
The US also has universal health care. What we don’t have is free health care for all. Like the minimum wage that is something that sounds good to those who have no capacity for thinking, but always ends up creating more problems than it solves.
Ric, you may be right, but to me anyone that releases or permits the release of her Green New Deal is either a totally inept manager, incapable of thinking rationally or plainly sits on the low end of the IQ scale. I know she has now thrown one, unnamed member of her staff under the bus for (paraphrasing) ‘releasing a preliminary version before it was ready’, but I would guess there is a very high probability that she had at the least read it and approved it as a working document.
to Ric Werme,
Was that “Che” a Freudian or deliberate mis-type? She is clearly a Che Guevara protege in her politics.
‘The Peoples’ Hysteria’.
==================
On the subject of Leftist Professors. I find it interesting Prof. Allen Dershowitz commenting on the college entrance scandal said, “In the past it would not have been a problem because the students would not have made it through but now they just pass them”.
I think she learns almost everything from her campaign manager, Chakrabarti and the other members of the so-called “Justice Democrats,” now headed by a woman named Alexandra Rojas. These are the people who spoon fed AOC the Green New Deal. Now I think she wants them to own a little bit of its embarrassment. Unfortunately for her, now she’s looking weak and puppet-like.
BTW, The Justice Democrats is the organization that auditioned from ten thousand nominees and chose AOC to act as their Congressional candidate in New York. For the record, they also love the female Muslim Congress critter from Minnesota (I forget her name), feminists and activists on the left, like Linda Sarsour, and others of that ilk. I think AOC is an honest-to-god airhead, useful idiot type, but also that she sincerely believes in this organization and its goals. The organization is absolutist and purist in its ideology, an understands and cares little about the complex job of national coalition building. This is probably going to hurt the Democrats, electorally, in the same way sometimes the religious right splits people in the squishy center away from the Republican party.
Here’s a bunch of this stuff direct from the horses (Cenk Uyger, Chakrabarti, Rojas) mouths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXwOu0mQNw8
Around the 6 minute mark, Chakrabarti hilariously uses the term “a radical fringe core of centrist Democrats.”
Given the number of dead voters and the dead candidates who have been elected to office, at least it made sure FDR couldn’t come back.
http://listverse.com/2018/08/14/10-times-dead-people-won-elections/
And the Amendment excluded whoever was the sitting President at the time of ratification, which turned out to be Truman. He was the last American who could have been elected more than twice.
In the 21st Century universities converted the “Dog ate my Homework” excuse into a full humanities course in the Political Science curriculum.
AOC took the Hillary Clinton graduate course in assigning blame, wherein on Day 1 all students are admonished “Only take credit for positive outcomes even when you cannot articulate your contribution or accomplishment” the first week of class is devoted to how to talk about what you have accomplished without actually explaining anything that you accomplished. Then the balance of the semester is all about how to defect and redirect blame for bad outcomes onto everyone else.
“AOC took the Hillary Clinton graduate course in assigning blame”
AOC is now saying that since Hillary is out of the public eye, the Right needs another female to bash, and AOC thinks she is the new target of the Right, for that reason.
No, AOC, it’s not that the Right needs a female target to bash, it’s just that you and Hillary offered such stupid ideas, that you are impossible to ignore. The Right bashes “Beto”, too and he’s not a female. The common denominator is the offering of stupid ideas. Gender is not a consideration.
The left is desperate to believe that those who oppose them are evil.
It’s the only way they can effectively dismiss all ideas they disagree with them.
It’s not like they have the intellectual horsepower to actually refute those they disagree with.
(Did I just mention “horse” in an article about AOC?)
Standard procedure – accuse your adversary of misogyny, sexism, racism, xenophobia, fascism, climate denialism (or whatever else is deemed fashionable) whenever they start losing the argument on facts. It’s so pathetically predictable.
Just look at Wex’s post down below.
When was the last time you heard anyone on the left accept responsibility for anything?
No matter what she did or did not do, she will never, ever take any responsibility for anything connected to her that makes her look stupid or bad or just plain dumb, It’s always, always, always someone else’s fault.
Always.
Standard customer service explanation of cock-up: she just omitted the ‘who no longer works for us’ part.
Zero Brain Wave (ZBW aka AOC) has not realized that the captain of a ship is responsible for every bloody thing the crew does, good or bad. A captain has to know every system and factor in the structure, functioning, and use of the ship. The captain is also expected to train and then ensure that the crew does its job.
If ZBW’s crew failed, it was her failure as well. Period.
Guaranteed that AOC will hold the CEO of GM responsible for no toilet paper in the restroom.
Miss, can you please stop looking at your phone to see if you won the casting call, and just make the vodka martini I ordered.
Perfect!
Heh, we have to propose this in order to see what’s in it.
====================================
if she had a cat …it woulda been kicked
AOC #Liar.
Fair do. She’s an actress. She had a bad script. Blame the scriptwriter not the performer.
I think you are right, she actually behaves like politicians you see in bad movies. That’s probably where her frame of reference cam from, a lot of crappy movies and too much TV. She should probably go back and watch video of Regan’s speeches, but only for style, because if she paid attention to the content it would probably make her head explode.
She appears to largely TV educated. A sci-fi clone, as described in this new song by Michael Franks:
Pop – Thanks for that tune.
She thinks Captain Planet was a documentary.
Wasn’t Al Gore one of the writers?
Her current script that she is reading says that the Republicans passed the 22nd amendment to stop FDR from staying on as President because his New Deal was so popular. Someone needs to point out that FDR died in 1945 and the 22nd was passed in 1947.
True, but ratification was not completed until 1951.
Ratification was completed when the Minnesota Legislature ratified the amendment on February 27, 1951. On March 1, 1951, the Administrator of General Services, Jess Larson, issued a certificate proclaiming the 22nd Amendment duly ratified and part of the Constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
If being given a taxpayer-funded income because you are unwilling to work is reasonable, refusing to pay any taxes to fund that income is quite reasonable too. Neither are reasonable in the real world and I would expect to hear more reasoned debate from an infant’s tantrum.
We need to have a serious conversation concerning this and we should start the discussion with cow farts.
” given a taxpayer-funded income because you are unwilling to work ” That sounds like most in the government, especially Congress and Senate.
Bulls eye! 10 points to you!
She supposedly believes in New Monetary Theory, an idea that governments can afford to fund anything they super-duper want, just by printing more money, and they won’t suffer inflation if the reason is important enough. One wonders, if that’s true, why would they even need to take taxes at all. That is, if one wasn’t an airhead.
You need taxes to punish the people who don’t support you. They need to be discriminated against and made poor.
The Chinese are a bit more advanced down this road than we are, but I suspect that we can catch up..
If it was sent out to the media and was on her congressional web site then she owns it.
And if she lets incompetent “staffers” post stuff on here web site she can’t even run a small office. Who would listen to her about how to run the economy , much less the planet.
If it were a typo, the fact that none of her staffers noticed it tells you a lot about the people she hires.
You have to pass it out to know what’s in it.
Oh heck, you beat me to it.
==================
And, you know, the thing about AOC… she’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When she comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be living… until she talks, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.
h/t Quint
Like shark eyes
Dontcha know she’s the Boss?
========================
No ! She’s cute and she has lovely eyes. You’re just being mean because you don’t agree with her politics.
She’s a beautiful woman, even if she don’t know squat, that’s beside the point. She’s cute.
Hey look at the opposition : Feinstein, Pelosi, Mad Max ?? Nah, she cute.
And she lacks the ability to read before …?
AOC is just another establishment pawn.
“Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work” is not a mistake. It’s very deliberate self sabotage, a twisted description of ‘basic income’.
There was a young woman who lived in an upstairs apartment next to my house. She was a pleasant enough person. Politically she was a radical “progressive.” She had a “feel the Bern” bumper sticker on her car and was in favor of all the proposed government gimme plans. But you see here is the thing. She never paid her taxes. Even though she lived in Illinois she drove around with an expired Wisconsin license plate on her car. She never bought a village vehicle tax sticker.
My nephew’s sister-in-law is a socialist. I mean a true believer who overdosed on the Kool-Aid. She’s even been to Cuba and Venezuela. But she has always been paid under-the-table and has never filed an income tax return or paid income tax. She has student loans that are in default from her fancy undergraduate degree and her masters degree. She and her boyfriend just skipped out of the country to Mexico City leaving behind her student loans, unpaid rent, and maxed out credit card. Yeah, socialists are a special breed.
They rationalize it with “Why should I pay for a government I don’t believe in?” Maybe I should declare as a ‘socialist’ as well… or at least until after tax day.
Of course no one else is permitted the same privilege.
Where does this end? Shouldn’t free dental care also be provided to those unwilling to brush their teeth?
Every time AOC (ex bartender waitress) speaks – I hear Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” song – “the waitress is practicing politics”.
Anything is possible when you don’t no what your talking about.
‘The Green New Deal has momentum
– 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the
Green New Deal ”
Yet another prophecy that has gone away in a cow fart.
How typical.
First whine that the stupidity of the left is being talked about.
Then accuse the right of being racist and sexist.
The only hatred being shown here is by you Wex.
Sorry Petit_Barde, I was intending to respond to Wex. I could blame it on a glitch in the system, but I won’t.
MarkW, it was obviously the fault of one of your staffers. That’s the excuse du jour for today. (never mind that you don’t have staffers, never let the facts get in the way of making excuses).
Who cares! She is not a powerful Congresswoman. Why does the right promote her? Because she is a minorty woman so they can push all the right hate buttons?
Lets get this website back to its science roots and talk about climate. Anthon, earth to Anthony.
Here’s some interesting science news to help fill the gap for you.
https://www.academia.edu/38606977/4.2_ka_BP_in_Anatolia_The_Crisis_Years_and_Aftermath._An_International_Workshop_on_Bronze_Age_Archaeology_at_Yasar_University_Izmir._May_17-18_2019
Oh, not powerful? Check out the committee she’s on. Freshperson congress critter and she gets a high profile committee? And who do you think has been touting all her garbage? Liberal MSM. Get your facts straight before you go all intersectional and make her a victim. The right is only responding to her dangerous socialist fantasies. And if the Green New Deal isn’t relative to this site then you really need a reality check yourself.
Don’t like a particular topic? Just don’t look at it. Simple.
Like most leftists, Wex wants to shut down any discussions that he can’t control.
More of the juvenile “free lunch” brigade.
AOL is exhibiting classic symptoms of Cognitive Dissonance. All good grist for the MSM mill.
Bigger boys/girls/ did it and ran away, doesn’t work for 5 year olds or adult politicians
AOC in retreat. Now spending more time and bandwidth trying to justify past statements and actions than proclaiming new stupid crap! I don’t think that is such a good thing but I expect that this too will change and she’ll be back in all of her ignorant glory.
Don’t forget about the other freshmen that the the justice dems and sunrise foundation supported. Kamala Harris hasn’t yet soiled her reputation with them. Ilhan Omar is also waiting in the wings. What looks to us like a single snake is actually a Hydra with many heads. While we attack AOC, the others lurk in the background.
When you are the boss, you are always the one responsible. Even if someone else actually made the mistake.
Beyond that, only an idiot doesn’t read something being but out under their name before it is published.
put out, not but out. I guess that makes me as big an idiot as AOC.
No, not at all. That was just a typo. AOC moments are things like using the word “cow” for “kowtow”, which she actually did in one tweet I saw. She thinks well of herself and tries hard, but the substance just isn’t there.
At least I didn’t blame it on a staffer.
Mr. Watts please keep AOC out of your Blog, it’s not worthy. Keep it to the science which is much more important, thanks. Freddie from Switzerland
Global Warming has no science in it, only politics.
As long as AOC remains noisy and deadly, her alarmist views should be subject to commentary.
Stoller Freddie March 31, 2019 at 7:25 am
Goodness, don’t be such a kill-joy, it is all in good fun. It is Sunday afternoon and a fine time to poke a little fun at N.Y.cities voter’s mistake.
By the way she is already being “primary-ed”
michael
Stoller Freddie
Plan B: don’t read the political posts.
If you can’t detect them from the title of the post, the first 5-10 words usually does the trick.
Freddie, there is no science in climate science. It’s been all politics at least as far back as when Hansen and friends picked the day of the year that is historically one of the hottest to hold their congressional appearance, turned off the AC and opened the windows the night before in order to put on a show of how hot things were getting.
Wait till someone tells AOC about termites.
Why, is she worried about her teeth?
Is that some reference to the plan to replace red meat with insects?
Nope, termites fart methane. Or belch it. Or someways awful.
============================================
They fart it. However neither cows nor thermites can really make methane. It is the bacteria they have in their guts to break down cellulose who produce it.
Now you have me confused, how does thermite create methane?
It’s hermits, from eating out of musical fruit cans.
=======================
Is there any hope that the adults might get back in charge someday?
Nope.
Where did all the adults go?
They’ll mostly all die off before the unyet born will. Yep, ‘strue.
==================================
Doesn’t matter; diesel, natgas or electric as long as there is a bus you can throw someone under.
There are some new electric buses here!
https://www.sustainable-bus.com/electric-bus/copenaghen-purchase-41-electric-buses-full-electric-fleet-2030-movia/
100% coal fired fleet.
griff March 31, 2019 at 8:18 am
Here you go griff, just what the Copenhagen ferryboat fleet needs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpDaJVXehMM
God help them went the tide goes out or a good storm pays a visit.
michael
They have actually tried it, but it won’t work, not even up at Elsinore where the sound is only 4 km wide. They can’t charge the batteries fast enough.
However there are successful electrical ferries. They use a cable lying on the bottom and roll it on and off a big wheel aboard as they shuttle back and forth. Of course it will only work over distances of a few hundred meters. And they have a get-you-home diesel in reserve.
Great. Had ‘em in the 1950s. No batteries required. We called them trackless trolleys. The question is, how is the electricity produced?
AOC farts again.
Well at least whenever AOC throws an unnamed staffer under the bus … it’s an electric bus. In her mind. Her silly little girlish mind.