AOC Coming For Our Hamberders?

We’ve been hearing climate stupidity from the right wing for years but lately Trumpublicans have kicked it up a few notches. They’ve decided that the surest way to attack a Green New Deal and bring about the annihilation of most life on Earth is to tie it to America’s love of hamburgers.

In order to drastically reduce our carbon emissions to avoid global catastrophe, it’s not enough if we all drive electric and use renewable energy to power our homes, other sources of carbon also need to be brought down, like American livestock, which account for almost ten percent of our carbon emissions caused by the methane in their burps and farts. To put it in perspective, you burp or fart out a quarter pound of methane each year. A cow gasses out 265 pounds of methane a year. We have 94 million cattle in this country – that’s 25 billion pounds of methane, which is a lot.

As Republican leaders usually reach for simpleton talking points, they’ve decided that the only way Democrats must want to solve this problem is to kill all the cows.  What they miss is that this particular climate challenge can be solved a number of ways. Vegetarian meat replacements have popped up in the market (still not enough wheat free!) and lab grown meat will soon arrive. For the sake of argument, let’s say we keep eating meat just as we’re doing (which entails a lot of horrific abuse on the animals but that’s another story) and find a solution.

Believe it or not, UC Davis researchers discovered that feeding a cow seaweed with their diet reduces their methane output by more than 90%. That’s a huge reduction without killing a single cow. Providing enough seaweed for 94 million cows means we’d have to farm it off our coasts, which would provide not only jobs but would help remove the carbon we’ve already sunk into the ocean and help replenish oxygen supplies in dead zones. You could probably build a niche market today for such methane-free beef but in order to get the greatest carbon benefits you need economies of scale. That’s where a Green New Deal could come in, providing the regulation and infrastructure funding to push a changeover in carbon-producing industries faster than the market would allow.

So that’s just one way we could deal with the cow problem, I’m sure there are dozens, but as a society we need to find creative economical solutions to many of the carbon-emitting industries poisoning our atmosphere. This is going to take government intervention on a massive scale, on par with our mobilization for World War Two.  If we’re to survive and flourish, we need our best and brightest on the case, developing and implementing plans across a range of industries.

It doesn’t help that the Republican party has chosen to frame our environmental challenges at the sub-literate moron level.  The slack-jawed Fox zombies and ditto heads believe we are coming for their hamburgers and televisions. I say we’re coming for their televisions because Trump has thrown out his “you might not be able to watch TV if the wind isn’t blowing,” line several times in the last month. Yes, America, we have people stupid enough to believe him.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t coming to take our hamburgers away, she’s trying to stop us from swallowing bullshit.

For All The Cows – Foo Fighters