Meanwhile, more than 2.8 million people have signed an online petition calling for another UK general election.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
The last time I reported on Bovaer, the anti-methane additive now being used in cattle feed, citizens in the United Kingdom were staging a boycott.
People now recognize that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a life-essential gas and methane is a critical part of the finely tuned biogenic carbon cycle. Consumers are also alarmed by the introduction of a supplement to animals, with no consideration given to the long-term effects of humans consuming meat and dairy products from animals that eat the additives.
Now the UK government is pushing a mandate that is all ‘suitable’ British cattle will be given methane-reducing chemical Bovaer or Bovaer-like products by law by 2030.
A Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) document that details the plan to mandate the use of ‘methane-suppressing feed products’ in English cattle has sparked concern on social media — due to claims the substance can leach into dairy, causing health problems.
It comes after furious Brits have vowed to boycott more than a dozen makers of dairy products including Lurpak, over fears they are allegedly ‘contaminated’ with the additive, which has been questionably linked to cancer.
However, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) on its website says: The FSA safety assessment concluded there are no safety concerns when Bovaer is used at the correct dosage. It does not cause cancer (it is not carcinogenic or genotoxic and poses no safety concerns to consumers, animals or the environment.
Shoppers originally focused on milks and butters made by Danish firm Arla after the company announced the launch of a trial that would see Bovaer given to its cows.
The mandate comes after the British dairy farmers attempted to meet consumer demands for their products to be Bovaer-free. In the post-COVID world, people are hesitant to automatically take the word of “experts” on subjects related to their health and diet.
And it turns out the climate-change argument is not packing the punch that it once did.
At the other end of the argument, Rupert Lowe says that the Government must recognise that the public are not going to accept climate change as an excuse for ‘tampering with healthy food’.
The MP for Great Yarmouth adds: ‘Ruminants have been developing for tens of thousands of years. So you cannot just start messing around with them using an unproven substance.’
The debate over methane suppressants is not going to go away. For now, though, it is hard to see any other British milk producer wanting to sprinkle a single spoonful of Bovaer in the trough.
One of King Charles III’s farming advisers has accused Arla Foods (one of the producers who is testing Bovaer) of ‘re-engineering the cow’ with its trial.
Patrick Holden criticised Arla, which owns the UK’s biggest dairy co-operative, over its controversial pilot of using the feed additive Bovaer across 30 British farms.
Organic farming pioneer Mr Holden – who advised Charles on setting up an organic holding at Highgrove, which became the Duchy Originals brand – said Arla had ‘resorted to feed additives to maintain positive PR for their dairy-farming industry’.
…’The cause in this case is separating the dairy cow from her natural environment of which she is intrinsically a part.
‘Once this separation has occurred, both physically and in the mindset of society, methane becomes a problem which needs to be addressed by re-engineering the cow.’
As a reminder, Bovaer and other anti-flatulence additives being use on cattle are not only adding to the cost of meat and dairy products, but are also irrelevant to “global warming”. It’s being used in 55 countries around the world, including the US.
It’s it any wonder that the UK petition to support a new general election has now hit 2.8 millions signatures.
More than 2.8 million people have signed an online petition calling for another general election, with Parliament now scheduled to debate it on January 6.
The petition has been fuelled by support from Elon Musk, who tweeted “wow” in response to the petition breaking the 200k target in six hours.
According to the BBC, the petition is the third most popular e-petition since 2010.
With the UK government being so tone-deaf, it’s a wonder it will last that long.
Does this legislation include unicorns? I need to know, ‘cos if it does my costs are going to go up and I’ll need to amend my application for my Unicorn Feeding Grant.
And don’t suggest I let them eat cake – cattle cake is very expensive at present.
Well if the unicorns suffer from angina pectoris it’ll do them good… for a while at least.
Amendment 28
Section 1
Congress shall make no law to regulate,
tax, sequester or license atmospheric
Carbon dioxide, Methane, Nitrous Oxide
or any other natural occurring atmospheric
gas. The right of the people to freely emit
natural gas into the atmosphere from any
source, from any place at any time in any
amount shall not be interfered with.
Section 2
All activity commercial or private within
the United States and all territory subject
to the jurisdiction thereof for the purposes
of altering climate is prohibited.
The Congress and the several States shall
have concurrent power to enforce this article
by appropriate legislation.
Or something like that !
How are you on repealing the 17th Amendment?
.
You know, the one which took away the right of each state’s governing bodies to select its two senators and instead treat each of the two senators as at-large ‘representatives’ across all US House of Reps districts in the member states.
You must have had some reason for asking that question.
Side question: Are you familiar with, and/or have you read or perused [what are called in the US] The Federalist Papers? Getting and or setting some background now for any continued discussion …
I never read the Federalist Papers but I did read a great biography of Alexander Hamilton who made major contributions to them. I do intend to read all of it when I get a chance.
Hamilton was perhaps the worst of them
How ’bout if you make your stupid point instead of asking obnoxious questions.
Pfffff ….. ( SO MUCH for taking the ‘good faith’ approach )
GOOD DAY SIR.
It was an amendment. The States ratified it.
I would, however, offer an idea on a related topic.
Get rid of the winner take all in those 48 states and have the electors elected by voting districts with the other 2 by popular state vote.
With that, the presidential election does not get decided by the so-named battleground states and candidates will have to address the nation, not just 14% of it.
How are you on repealing the 17th Amendment?
Sounds good to me.
I think it was a bad thing, markedly reducing the guaranteed sovereignty of each state, but then having senators appointed by a state government such as is found in CA or NY may not be better.
The goal should always be having the government represent the “will of the people”. Few nations are good at that.
I can see a problem with that. Someone could open up a natural gas spigot and create a dangerous fire hazard. Freely emit needs a concise definition.
I would also include oxygen and nitrogen gasses to the list, along with argon and the rest of the known trace gases. Being as broad as it is written, a new gas could be slipped in and the amendment would cover it.
Constricting the right of the people to just natural gas might also need some rethinking.
You want legislation (Federal, State or municipal) to be concise? “They” don’t want that, and “they” are in charge.
Now 2,977,729 signatures
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700143
173k have signed up against Khan’s gong
This isn’t tone-deaf, but deliberate crashing the system. INGSOC kulakisation of the British farmers will be the least of it.
“… made by Danish firm Arla …”
No, they only operate there. Try the country north of Denmark, where they don’t have much competition left due to purchases.
According to Wikipedia:
By the end of the 20th century, Arla had a 65% market share in Sweden.
On 1 October 1970, Mejeriselskabet Danmark (MD) was established by four dairy companies and three individual dairies. In 1988, the company changed name to MD Foods. In 1992, MD Foods and Denmark’s second largest dairy company, Kløver Mælk, signed a financially binding co-operation agreement, and in 1999, the two companies merged to become MD Foods, gaining 90% of the Danish milk production.
In April 2000, MD Foods merged with Swedish Arla and formed Arla Foods A.m.b.A with headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark, and became Arla Foods as it is known today.
Looks like the once “liberal” Scandinavians are fully behind corporatism.
This – net zero etc – is the “change” Starlin is talking about.
Change for the worse.
Starlin. Is that Stalin’s nicer cousin?
I can’t see a petition against this on the Government website but there are two on Change.org
https://www.change.org/p/stop-adding-the-feed-additive-bovaer-to-uk-dairy-cows-feed
https://www.change.org/p/halt-the-introduction-of-bovaer-into-cow-feed
I’ve signed both as I want choice not compulsion
Form an orderly queue!
I created a UK.Gov petition for any UK reader interested.
Petition Here
Signed
Two more signatures added, says it needs a total of 5 before a link is created.
Currently there is so much flatulence in Westminster extra help from the British at large would go unnoticed anyway.
Starmer has always been a long way behind when it comes to trying to keep up and it is only our quaint electoral system that has put him where he is on a feeble percentage of the votes cast. The Tories are as much to blame for the lack of sensible reforms at Westminster Palace which might produce a proper representation of the public at large (i.e. it may exclude most current Labour and Conservative MPs and be more in tune with what most people want – reform without the capital).
The parliamentary dictatorship isn’t going to change its ever tightening grip on power
If you are suggesting the introduction of proportional representation, the likely outcome is that no single party would have an overall majority. We would therefore have a coalition government. Given that they are virtually indistinguishable from each other and had an informal pact with each other at the 2024 General Election, the most likely coalition would be one between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. At the last election they had 46% of the total votes between them. Depending on which system of PR was used, that 46% might give them an overall majority. As an aside, the Scottish Parliament uses PR. From 1999 to 2007, the Scottish Government was a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition. Since 2007, there has been an SNP Government, often depending on support from the Greens. If current support for each party is maintained until 2026, it looks like Scotland might be back to a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition after the 2026 election.
PR would deprive Labour of an overall majority at Westminster, but it could put them in a position where they are almost permanently the main government party.
Atmospheric CH4 is a mere 1 to 2 ppm .It is insignificant compared with CO2 at 380 ppm and water vapour at 100 times this amount. Yet the lunatic UK government particularly Ed Miliband insist on suppressing it with another burden on agriculture.
They are lunatics!
The Climate Alarmist planet they live on is not the Real World.
There is no climate crisis. Only in the minds of Climate Alarmists.
As Seneca said: “Human beings suffer more in their imaginations, than in reality.
I bet Cicero said something interesting as well.
He might even have said something pertinent, like Seneca did here.
And cow farts represent less than 10% of atmospheric methane. The purpose is not to “reduce warming”. It is to keep the vegan nutjobs onboard the climate campaign train.
“with another burden on the people
agriculture.”The burden goes well beyond just agriculture.
Particularly when 10% of 1ppm represents a climate emergency
I plug farmers because as well as getting bugger-all for their milk, they are facing a swingeing increase in inheritance tax under this Labour government which will force many to sell up and leave the land. Labour will eventually emulate the Bolsheviks collectivizing farms as they (the Bolshevics ) did in the Ukraine leading to famine and starvation. This a dangerous government we have in the UK adept at using Soviet style disinformation.
The famous van Wijngaarden and Happer paper of 2020 supports you. It shows that doubling methane (approx 100 years?) would lead to a forcing increase of 0.7 W/m2, less than a fifth of CO2. Figure 5 shows where in the absorption spectrum methane acts and how tiny its effect is. Indeed, visually, it is hard to see how doubling could cause an effect this big, small though it is.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098
When people don’t understand numbers (or the results of measurement and computation) they can be easily scared by useful, but often meaningless, words.
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CH4 in dry air is 1.929 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air contains 0.0014 g of CH4 and has a mass of 1.29 kg. This minute amount of CH4 can not heat up such a large mass of air.
The reason for the low concentration of CH4 in air is due to the initiation of its combustion by discharges of lightning. Everyday there are thousands of lightning discharges, especially in the tropics. We do not have to worry about CH4.
Exactly and the same goes for N2o nitrous oxide at less than o.8ppm is ludicrously cited as a dangerous warming gas – quoted to me by former Justice Secretary Alex Chalk.
re: “In the post-COVID world, people are hesitant to automatically take the word of “experts” on subjects related to their health and diet.”
.
[Speaking of which] Anybody looked at the all-cause mortality numbers for the last few years?
.
Bueller?
.
https://www.mortality.watch/
What’s concerning to me is that Bovear is chemically speaking propylene glycol mononitrate.
It mimicks the substrate of a key enzyme in the methane biosynthetic pathway of methane producing bacteria. My problem is, that organic nitrated compounds are potent vasodilators which deliver nitrous oxide the smooth muscle cells of the vasculature. For example, nitroglycerin is used for heart patients. I don’t know if it does the cattle any good to be chronically vasodilated. Of course, there’s tolerance that sets in, but one needs studies to find out when that happens, and if there’s side effects with the livestock.
Trials are so pre Covid…
When grown men stop believing in God to explain the inexplicable they’ll believe in cow farts and burps and God fearing virgins should stay well away from volcanoes.
Meanwhile, UK wind power has dropped off a cliff again. Wind+solar is making less than 5% of demand this afternoon.
I wish we could drop Miliband & co off a cliff.
Careful there Strat. If anything happens to Miliband in the near future you might be getting a visit from the Rozzers 🙂
Another ignorant question: Doesn’t the UK ban certain US food imports (beef? chicken?) for being fed growth hormones or being treated in some “unhealthy” manner? I wonder how that relates to this feed supplement.
UK had a ban on imports of US chlorinated chicken and hormone fed beef whilst it was part of the EU which was extended by the Conservative Government after we left. Think it is still in place at the moment.
Growth hormones, antibiotics, how we do so pollute our food supplies.
Methane IS irrelevant, but you do not have to argue with misinformation. That chart above suggests humans would contribute only ~0.3% to the GHE, or about 0.45W/m2. That’s not true, period.
Equally untrue are however lots of “consensus science” claims over methane. The GWP (global warming potential) figure is based on phantastic, baseless connections between methane and ozone, or counter factual lifetime assumptions.
Counting basically all ruminant CH4 emissions as “anthropogenic” is another issue. Ruminants have been there before, in large numbers. To deal with that there is “tactical science” baselessly claiming bisons would only emit 1/3 the methane cattle does.
And even then, total lifestock is maybe responsible of a 0.05W/m2 forcing. That is definitely less than aviation does, even based on the “official” figures. Aviation is a much bigger thing in reality btw. But hey, why bother about private jets when you can take away ordinary people’s food?
https://greenhousedefect.com/basic-greenhouse-defects/methane
If the cattle population is stable, and it has been for at least a decade, then the methane emissions have achieved equilibrium. Methane has a short atmospheric life time.
story tip:
Miliband and the Met Office make the Daily Sceptic:
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/12/12/ed-milibands-department-claims-30-year-average-temperature-is-higher-than-the-warmest-year-on-record/
You have to wonder if the British public is finally waking up to the fact that the BBC has been lying to them about climate change for decades. Probably not, but we can hope.
Anti-flatulence additives to cattle feed is about as smart as lawn darts.
The world needs much more Will Happer and much less enviro-insanity. Let those who want to live a fossil-free life head off to the global-warming-free Antarctic and make their nests there. The rest of us are more interested in building up society rather than tearing it apart.
And the British have reservations about Bovine somatotropin and chlorinated chicken?
we beg to differ! There is no danger from our but gases.
It seems that we need to kill all the cattle that produce methane, bankrupt farmers, and have no food, all because of global warming.
Cattle, buffalo and other bovines have been farting methane for hundreds of millions of years. Before that there were huge plant eating dinosaurs. So how come the atmosphere isn’t 99% methane by now. Simple, it’s a cycle. Cattle eat grass and fart out some methane. Methane is unstable in air that’s 20% oxygen. It reacts with oxygen to produce CO2 and water. Grass absorbs the CO2 and water to make more grass material. Cattle eat the grass. Round and round it goes. The methane level from cattle is at a steady equilibrium, with no accumulation. It’s like when rain falls on the land and runs into the oceans, which would raise the ocean level until the tip of Mt Everest was under water, except it’s a cycle. Rain runs into the ocean. Ocean water evaporates and falls as rain. Worrying about methane from cow farts is as silly as worrying that we’re all going to drown because rain is raising the sea level.
This is just a testament to the lobbying skills and power of big pharmaceuticals. Dsm-Firmenich in this case.
Does the “you can lead a horse to water but … “apply to cows in any way?
Beano for bovines? Sounds like a plan. . . but how about administering anti-fart meds to all the flatulent wild animals as well? What good would it do to de-fart domestic herds if billions of birds, lizards, wolverines, walruses, giraffes, and other critters are allowed to continue emitting methane with wild abandon?
Then there are termites. A trillion or so wild, all-natural termites emit prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide AND methane when you add ’em all up. When you think about the climate havoc termites cause, it’s a miracle we’re not all dead already.
Climatistas — if they’re willing to make the efforts they insist are necessary — should fan out across the deserts and jungles and crumbling wood buildings of the whole world, and give Beano to each and every termite, so they stop contributing to the Heat Death of the Universe.
Just a speck of Beano on the point of a pin, carefully fed to each termite should yield two, massive benefits:
Saving the world.Creating enough jobs to eliminate unemployment worldwide.