A BRILLIANT take on cows, methane, and climate

The premise is broadly correct, yes (as everyone with an elementary school-level familiarity with the carbon cycle would already know), although the first two lines are extremely poorly written, confusing, and not correct without qualification. Here they are, for review:

Activist: “Every cow adds carbon to the atmosphere.”
Farmer: “Only if the total number of cows is increasing.”

What the hell is this mealymouthed garbage supposed to mean? That if you add another head of cattle to the heard, then suddenly every cow starts adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere? Because that’s the way it is written.

This is certainly not the case. Why, indeed, would an increasing population behave any differently in this regard then a stable population, since all individual animals are carbon-neutral over the course of their lives? The only thing this could possibly mean is that a large enough cattle herd (and we’re talking hundreds of billions of cattle here) would denude the Earth of enough vegetation such that the remaining quantity of green plants could no longer serve as a proportionate carbon sink. But that is:

A: Completely irrelevant on realistic planetary scales.
B: A red herring that muddies the waters and is extremely poorly conveyed, to boot.
C: Incorrect anyway, since the now starving cattle would die and quickly bring the plant/cow population back into balance.

I really hate cheesy crap like this. This is what you would expect to see in some old fogie’s AOL email chain, not in any kind of serious policy discussion. Kitschy, insulting, and cloyingly bad.