When global elites and bureaucrats decide they must “fix” the world, the results often speak for themselves. Take the latest technocratic debacle: Bovaer, a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from cows, marketed as a “climate-friendly” solution. It’s now being shelved by Norwegian dairy producer Q-Meieriene after consumers flatly rejected its so-called “climate milk.”
This is more than a simple story of market rejection. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when governments, corporations, and globalists push policies and products that tamper with the food supply to address a problem that may not even exist.
The Quest to Solve a “Crisis”
Bovaer, developed by DSM-Firmenich, has been touted as a game-changer in the fight against methane emissions—a major target of climate policies. The additive is said to suppress a key enzyme in the cow’s digestive process, reducing methane emissions by up to 30%. Regulatory bodies in over 68 countries, including the EU, Australia, and the U.S., have approved its use.
But let’s step back for a moment. Why are we targeting cow burps and farts in the first place? Methane is indeed a greenhouse gas, but it’s also a short-lived one that breaks down in the atmosphere within about a decade. Moreover, cows and bison have been emitting methane for millennia without triggering apocalyptic climate shifts. Yet suddenly, livestock emissions are treated as a planetary emergency demanding immediate action.
This myopic focus on cow methane is a prime example of how climate zealotry warps priorities. Rather than addressing real and immediate issues—like the energy crises their own policies create—governments and globalists have decided to micromanage how your milk is produced, all to reduce emissions by an imperceptible fraction of a percentage point.
Consumer Rebellion
The backlash against Bovaer has been swift and fierce. In Norway, Q-Meieriene began using the additive in 2023, branding the resulting product as “climate milk.” The response? Consumers overwhelmingly rejected it, leaving supermarket shelves stocked with unsold cartons while Bovaer-free milk flew off the shelves.
Facing dismal sales, Q-Meieriene recently announced it would discontinue the use of Bovaer, stating:
“Demand for Q climate milk has not been high enough to continue production…we phased out the use of methane suppressants in cow feed and are putting this project on pause.”
https://www.nettavisen.no/nyheter/ville-redde-klimaet-med-prompe-fri-kumelk-snur/s/5-95-2166980
This is not merely a marketing failure. It reflects a broader consumer revolt against the technocratic imposition of “solutions” no one asked for. People are increasingly skeptical of being told that their daily choices—what they eat, how they travel, how they heat their homes—must be sacrificed on the altar of climate orthodoxy.
What Are They Hiding?
One of the most glaring issues with the Bovaer debacle is the lack of transparency. Supporters insist the additive is safe, with regulatory agencies claiming that Bovaer is metabolized in the cow’s stomach and doesn’t transfer into the milk or meat. But these assurances don’t address broader concerns.
What are the long-term effects of tampering with the natural digestive processes of livestock? Why is there such a rush to roll out untested solutions before these questions are answered?
This isn’t just about methane or milk. It’s part of a larger pattern of globalist overreach, where unproven technologies are foisted upon the public in the name of saving the planet. The uncertainties and potential unintended consequences are ignored, while dissenters are dismissed as ignorant or conspiratorial.
The Cost of Technocratic Zeal
The Bovaer case reveals the fundamental arrogance of climate policymakers. They presume to know what’s best for everyone, overriding centuries of agricultural tradition and the preferences of ordinary people in favor of top-down diktats.
But their schemes often fail to account for basic realities. Milk production, like most aspects of life, is a complex system with countless interdependencies. Intervening in such systems with narrow, technocratic fixes can easily do more harm than good.
Even if Bovaer’s methane-reducing claims are accurate (and that’s still up for debate), its actual impact on global temperatures would be so minuscule as to be undetectable. Meanwhile, the costs—economic, ecological, and societal—are potentially enormous.
This raises an uncomfortable but essential question: who benefits from all of this? It certainly isn’t the average consumer, who ends up paying higher prices for milk marketed with dubious claims. Instead, the beneficiaries seem to be the corporations and bureaucracies that profit from the endless churn of climate regulations, subsidies, and greenwashing schemes.
A Problem That Doesn’t Exist
At its core, the push for products like Bovaer rests on the assumption that we face a climate crisis of unprecedented scale. But this assumption is far from proven. Climate models—riddled with uncertainties—predict catastrophic warming that keeps failing to materialize in the real world. Methane’s role in this alleged crisis is even less certain.
Yet rather than acknowledge these unknowns, climate policymakers double down on their interventions. The result is a cascade of ill-conceived policies that disrupt lives, erode trust, and impose enormous costs without delivering measurable benefits.
The rejection of “climate milk” shows that ordinary people aren’t buying it—literally or figuratively. They’re tired of being treated as pawns in a game they never agreed to play.
Conclusion: The Limits of Control
Bovaer’s likely impending failure is a small but significant victory for consumer choice and common sense. It’s a reminder that no amount of regulatory approval or corporate greenwashing can override the will of the public.
More importantly, it exposes the futility of trying to engineer society around speculative climate fears. Whether it’s tampering with the food supply, banning gas stoves, or pushing unreliable renewables, these interventions inevitably backfire because they’re built on a flawed premise: that a few technocrats can redesign the world better than nature itself.
The next time globalists and bureaucrats come calling with their latest scheme to “save the planet,” we would do well to remember the lesson of Bovaer: the problem they claim to solve might not even exist, but the damage their solutions can cause is all too real.
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Business as usual, methane is increasing at about 7 ppb every year*. By 2100 how much will that steady increase run-up global temperatures. If anyone can show that it’s more than an unmeasurable 0.1°C by 2100 they should pipe up and show the source and their work.
*Source: NOAA Global Trends Laboratory
ppb?
NOAA?
How do you cope?
Again, aren’t emissions from animals neutral? If not, why not?
What does NOAA have to say about what happened with the methane concentration between 1998 and 2008, and why? Why is the annual growth so variable, and why did the trend in annual growth apparently change about 2004?
Milk from uncontented cows. Bloated is no way to go through life, let alone give milk.
Udderly true.
The minor little problem is that methane’s GHG potential is measured in dry air. Real world, the absorption spectrum of CH4 is overlapped totally by that of water vapor, so it has an inconsequential effect.
The CH4 radiative forcing is computed, line-by-line, in modern codes, as is the radiative forcing of other GH molecules. The line overlap is taken into account.
Where the codes are wrong is the use the metric – GWP. The metric is non-physical, but the IPCC has pushed it for 30 years in spite of that fact.
A new problem, however, is arising. That is the GWP for fugitive H2 is as large or larger than for CH4. H2, the love-child of the energy transition and Net Zero 2050 results (according to models) in larger climate effects than CO2 and CH4. I wonder if that reality has sink home yet.
H2, like O2 or N2 is a symmetrical molecule. As a consequence, is has no GHG effect. That doesn’t mean that it’s not dangerous in handling.
CO2 is symmetric too. CH4 is symmetric too.
There are lots of symmetry lines. And of course you can have rotational symmetry too.
Reality is not well understood by the priests of climate crisis.
There is a long list for the entry “Bovines.” Do they all have the ruminant digestive system? [stomachs of four compartments?]
I’m going to relax with my feet out toward the wood stove
and sip on a nice red wine. And wonder is there a compound
that will allow grape fermentation without producing CO2?
Like combustion, the formation of the stable product CO2 provides much of the energy that is used to drive the reaction.
May we never forget the lessons from the Covid debacle.
But those lessons have been silenced.
Old news.
Move along. These aren’t the droids you are looking for.
/sarc
It is worth noting that when the “global elite and bureaucrats” try to fix cow food the only consequences are reduced methane emissions. In contrast when the free market tried it the consequences were mad cow disease that resulted from feeding cows, sheep and other cows. So who are you going to trust the free market or bureaucrats?
Neither has a monopoly on mistakes, stupidity, greed or corruption. However, one can decide to participate in the free market or not through deployment of one’s capital. Government dictates one’s participation in taxation and bureaucratic regulations through force of law.
That is an excellent succinct assessment.
Safe and effective indeed
You love bureaucratic totalitarianism, don’t you Izzy-dumb.
And no, you have zero-clue that the only consequence is a tiny reduction in a totally ineffective trace gas.
The only consequences so far…
Unnaturally interfere with the natural digestive process of cows.
What could go wrong?
It was the failure of bureaucracies in UK and France to carry out their properly mandated functions viz. identifying the risks of infected material entering the human food chain that caused the BSE outbreaks.
“the only consequences are reduced methane emissions”
You know that how?
Wondering if a side by side taste test was ever done between the franken milk and the milk the consumers continued to buy?? If the additional cost for feed passed onto the consumer was the only issue, I’m sure that Gretta and her consort would have paid the extra cost for the virtue signalling the woke are so apt to do. No effect on the cows or milk is the official narrative which we all know by now is a lie.
Where I used to live in England we got our milk direct from the farmer who came round with a horse and cart and you went out with your milk jug. I was age seven and I drank milk, subsequently, the government decided this was unhealthy and determined that all milk would be pasteurized. The taste changed and I haven’t drunk milk from then until now. I wouldn’t be surprised if this additive also changed the taste.
I think that’s more the homogenisation rather than the pasteurisation.
Having the cream layer on top of the milk does give a different taste for the same butterfat content.
I would be surprised if the flavor didn’t change, and that may well be why people were so quick to boycott it.
Solution to any problem, real or perceived, has a cost passed on consumer, in this case as higher food prices.
In other words, any activity that consumes resources but does not increase production causes inflation, which in this case is an indirect form of carbon tax.
I also suspect that inflation is the only guaranteed consequence of bureaucratic activity.
PS Any solution is also an activity that has some carbon footprint. So, even if methane were a problem, and even if efforts to reduce it were effective, the extra CO2 emissions would negate at least part of the perceived reduction in greenhouse effect.
“…try to fix cow food…”
If there is some something wrong with cow food, why are there so many cows?
That old saying comes to mind, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”.
Free market. I trust the free market every time over bureaucrats. Always.
Products, services, and ideas have to compete to succeed in the free market. They have to be better, more useful, more practical, more appealing, cheaper, make more sense. Bureaucrats don’t have to compete at all. They’re not elected so the public can’t fire them. They can pursue any crazy idea they want—and they do it all the time—and the public can do nothing to correct it except complain. The free market forces refinements. Bureaucracy prevents it.
When I was in the Navy we had a gun we called the civil servant, because it wouldn’t work and you couldn’t fire it.
Your trust of government seems to be greater than for most of us on the west side of the ‘pond.’ It is free market pressure that is responsible for the failure of the experiment conducted by bureaucrats in Norway. If some similar unanticipated problem had arisen after a protracted use of the anti-methane additive, would you be so quick to support the bureaucrats?
…that we know of. Right now. It took a while to figure out prion disease, remember?
The claim that methane can cause global warming began with the 1976 paper by Wang, Yung, Lacis, Mo and Hansen ‘Greenhouse effects due to man-made perturbations of trace gases’, Science 194, pp. 685-690. The planetary atmospheres group at NASA Goddard had been told to switch to earth studies as NASA funding dropped significantly when the Apollo (moon landing) program ended in 1972. In this 1976 paper they copied the one dimensional radiative convective (1-D RC) model published by Manabe and Wetherald in 1967 and created warming artifacts for 10 minor species including methane and nitrous oxide. The earlier paper claimed that a doubling of the CO2 concentration from 300 to 600 parts per million (ppm) would increase the equilibrium temperature of the earth by 2.9 °C for clear sky conditions. This was just a mathematical artifact created by the oversimplified 1967 model. There were three fundamental errors. First, they copied the 1896 Arrhenius steady state air column approach that created a warming artifact when the CO2 concentration was increased. Second, they imposed a fixed relative humidity distribution on the air layers in their model. This created a ‘water vapor feedback’ that amplified the initial Arrhenius warming artifact. Third, they used a time integration algorithm that allowed the small increases in temperature at each model integration step to accumulate over time. In the real world, such small temperature increases are overwhelmed by the much larger daily and seasonal temperature fluctuations.
The NASA group did not perform any model validation or due diligence. A paycheck was more important. Further details see ‘A Nobel Prize for Climate Modeling Errors’, Clark 2024.
We’ve been told that we need to kill millions of cows because they produce methane, that we need to bankrupt farmers, and have no food, all because of global warming. Nonsense.
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 because air is about 20% oxygen. Methane reacts with oxygen to produce CO2 and water. Grass plants absorb the CO2 and water to make more grass. 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. They’re both cycles that are now in a steady state.
At least some of you are probably familiar with the writings of James Herriot. In his memoirs of his early days as a vet, working mainly with farm animals, his life, along with that of a few other people, was interrupted by WWII when he was called to serve in the military. Reminiscing about things he missed while serving, things which were mostly tied to the farming people and the land where he had settled after finishing school, he mentioned in passing that certain progressive groups had been campaigning for ending all farming in England, then turning the farm land in national parks. They believed England no longer had any need to raise its own food. Faced with the ongoing war struggle he wondered how they though the English people could survive if they faced foreign enemies that might be able to bar access to the food growing countries they would become dependent upon.
The assault upon agriculture isn’t a recent phenomena. It is just finding new excuses.
The assault upon agriculture isn’t a recent phenomena.
And it’s something I find impossible to understand. What is the end goal? Is it really massive depopulation? If so, what to those pushing it believe is going to happen if they achieve their goals?
Go read the 1960s vintage The Population Bomb.
In both WW1 and WW2, the U-boats almost defeated the UK by cutting off it’s food supply.
Correct. Add to it that livestock numbers have been stable for decades, so methane cycling is in equilibrium.
When:
I think of the regulatory agencies telling us the the COVID vaxcine will stop you getting COVID and that it was safe..
When a regulatory agencies says something is safe there is a likely chance they have no idea at all..
There is no evidence of adverse effects so the product is considered safe.
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
If one closes one’s eyes, one cannot see what is directly in front of one’s eyes.
I presume the manufacturers staff volunteered to be test run dummies 🙂
Cow constipation could be worse than we thought !
To save our poor, fragile planet from the ravages of ruminant digestion, I propose that ALL climate alarmists forgo meat and dairy products for the foreseeable future! That should bring down the costs of said products for the rest of us; not in time for my Xmas prime rib, but maybe by summer, brisket will be even more affordable!
In addition, those same alarmists should also adopt a plant based diet, including a quart of seed oil, and a pound or two of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup every week! This will help to support the American food and health system that has been kindly overseeing the skyrocketing rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity over the last forty years. Think how much the planet will benefit if you get a debilitating, chronic disease; or get entirely removed from the gene pool! A true GAE patriot would happily comply!
Add to it that all climate alarmists be required to consume a daily dose of Bovaer to eliminate their methane flatulence.
Nope… it comes from both ends from these people.
Very important article. No government not at the international, national, state or local level has shown that they know what is best for us. Covid and the climate fiasco have removed any doubt that we should not blindly follow our governments. Governments are necessary for limited purposes, regulating cow farts isn’t one of them. All governments need an attitude adjustment.
Governments need to return to of the people, by the people and for the people.
The top priority of government is protecting the people from the government.
“where unproven technologies are foisted upon the public in the name of saving the planet.”
.
Yes.
.
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, time and time again, products rushed into mass production without thorough testing and development have almost universally been found to suffer one and very often more than one of the following defects:
The vast majority of new products fail to achieve market acceptance despite extensive technical, manufacturing, quality, safety and marketing testing.
Why should mandated products with “expedited”, i.e. insufficient, testing, especially safety and quality, be expected to have a higher market acceptance?
From what I’ve read it reduces methane output from cattle by 30%. Methane from cattle is only part of the total from farming.
Not really going to do a measurable amount to either methane or global temperature even if methane is a Climate disaster in the making
Humans are short-sighted!
No one bothered to ask the aurochs
“story tip”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/where-did-aurochs-live?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
The concentration of CH4 is 1.92 ppmv. One cubic of air contains 0.0014 g of CH4 and has and has a mass of ca. 1.20 kg. This trace amount of CH4 can not heat up such a large mass of air. Once again the claim by the IPCC that CH4 is a “menacing molecule” is a lie.
The reason the concentration of CH4 in air is so low is due the initiation of its combustion by discharges of lightning. Everyday there are thousands discharges of lightning, especially in the tropics.
How much of the CH4 in air is from natural sources such as swamps, bogs, muskeg, wild ruminate animals, decaying vegetation, seeps from the oceans, and especially tropical termites?
Jet planes with their large engines are vacuum cleaners for CH4 as are all vehicles with ICE’S. Natural wildfires burn up CH4.
We really do not have to worry about CH4.
And so-called environmentalists are pushing to re-introduce beavers into areas where they have been extirpated. Increasing wetlands coverage will increase methane production and even feeding the beavers Bovaer will not help because they are not the primary source of the methane.
I remember being coerced into buying swirly light bulbs to save the planet. Money, money, money.
I went for halogen globes..
Ok cost more but better light.
Those horrid floro things with mercury in them ??
Lasted about 2-3 weeks ??
The global climate has been excellent, from a human standpoint, for over 10,000 years.
It is still excellent.
Greenhouse gases have helped make it so. CO2 is a wonder gas without which we would not be here. It is essential. Period.
CH4, the simplest hydrocarbon, is also a miracle of design, the carrier of tremendous energy, which, with its cousins, has made our civilization possible.
For the past few decades, however, a few influential, but obsessed, people have lost their commonsense, and want the rest of us to follow them over a cliff – any cliff will do.
The ‘experts’ have warned of a falling sky, but the sky has refused to fall.
The reasons are just the commonsense ones we all understand.
This example of cows and CH4 is yet another example of moronic efforts to deprive us of a great life. To reduce (maybe) CH4 emissions from cows by 30%; people are forced to feed ‘climate milk’ to children – I do not think so. Widespread GMO foods are damaging enough.
It is perfectly clear that some people have far too little USEFUL work to occupy their time.
THAT can change.
“Widespread GMO foods are damaging enough.”
Looks like they got you with that one, the real problem is ultra-processed foods.
Both
CH4 is a greenhouse gas but nothing to worry over. Most methane comes from swamps and rice paddies in any case. Most cows live in Africa. Unless you wish to break the rice bowl of 3 + billion people, leave CH4 and cows alone.
This anti methane thing re live stock is a bit confusing.
In Australia we have wild
Camels,
Buffalo,
Pigs,
Goats,
Deer,
Horses.
Unless I am mistaken, they all produce methane.
Dot tell me Kangaroos don’t pass wind.
Domestic horses. Lots of then and they can pass a big enough wind blast to scare the horse next to it.. Methane??
Then on stations there are numbers of cattle, and sheep, which are not hand fed – Methane
What about septic tanks for sewage. I am sure they produce some methane as well.
Some main city sewage systems also produce methane and it is released to air..
Not to mention some land fill garbage dumps – Methane.
This whole methane issue is simply stupid.
It is simply a way they have chosen to vilify natural gas. They want top stop easy access to cheap energy. The reason they (the control freaks) don’t want people to have that easy access is because it gives ‘ordinary’ people actual power, which is not what the control freaks want.
“Don’t tell me Kangaroos don’t pass wind.“
How do you think they jump so far and so high !!
People pass methane up to 20 times a day if I remember the study correctly. More than 10 times definitely.
It depends. Older ones more often. That’s why as we get older we get larger private offices while keeping younger in cubicles.
I’m an old fart, and I ‘plan’ to keep on keepin’ on for some time yet. I am also told at times, that I am ‘full of hot air’, so I attempt to release that from time to time.
Ah. That explains my office. And here I thought it was merit based.
As I mentioned in another post, Bovear is an organic nitrate compound and potentially a potent vasodilator, which readily get distributed through the body. How does the vasculature of livestock react to it, and does this have consequences for their health?
Yes and we certainly should be concerned about ingesting it ourselves.
People pay for Viagra.
Yes, so do not drink climate milk with lunch while at work.
Sounds like it could help my hypertension.
“The additive is said to suppress a key enzyme in the cow’s digestive process”
What are the consequences for the cow if this is as described? Surely this must be harmful for the cow. Have they thought this one through?
If a cow can’t properly digest its food, how does it make milk and/or meat?
I would guess that there are side-effects that just haven’t been noticed yet. When you mess with a natural system there are always unintended consequences. The question is what is the magnitude and severity?
No.
I haven’t read any studies about this particular product, but some of the other methods of reducing methane production reduced feed conversion efficiency at a comparable rate to the methane reduction.
Remember mad cow disease caused by cows being fed cows?
The technocrats are impatient. They have technology and with it comes all the solutions.
Any problem can be anticipated and any solution conceived as long as there’s plenty of money to do so. I mean, look at the internet. It’s revolutionised the human condition.
Who has the greatest control of money? Politicians of course, and they are always looking for solutions to all those pesky problems consumers and the proletariat generate, in fact, lets anticipate what problems they will create and we can head them off at the pass with ready made solutions they didn’t know they needed.
Technology is expensive, but that’s what tax money is for, the common good; and it’ll make politicians look good, the public will be grateful they are saving their lives, and no one can accuse them of rejecting capitalism and progress.
The problem is, no one understands the technology.
The internet was an accident, eventually embraced by the public after uncountable failures to craft it to suit commerce by……a book store, Amazon. The very technology the internet threatened to displace altogether was to be it’s own undoing.
However, counterintuitively, more books are sold now than ever in history.
Which is why I say no one understands the technology, because it’s not about technology, it’s about the human condition. Whilst humankind is slow to rouse, it’s quick to anger and people eventually twig to the idea they are being manipulated. They usually don’t even know how they are being manipulated but intuitions tells them they are. And technology doesn’t do intuition.
Meddling with the most basic of western needs, the humble bottle of milk, might just prove the wake up call for many of those unaware of what’s going on around them, but with that uncertain, intuitive feeling they are being had.
Act in haste technocrats, and learn to repent at leisure.
No one understands the unexpected, unintended consequences of technology.
The hype of new and improved, the embracing of keeping up with the Joneses, the drive for consumerism, all of it, plays a part.
Will this discourage those that wish to save the world from forcing their ‘solutions’ on us?
Somehow. I doubt it.
If Bovaer prevents bacteria from producing Methane in a ruminant’s gut, that same methane will be produced by bacteria once the ruminant has deposited its gut contents on the soil so the same quantity of methane will be produced anyway. What a total waste of money.
Interfering with the normal digestive processes of any animal, us included, cannot be good no matter how you look at it.