Guest Post: Methane and the beleaguered Farmer 

A guest post by Spartacus Stultus Clima Mutatio:

New Zealand Farmers will soon likely have to pay tax on the emissions their stock produce, in an effort to meet the reductions in green house gas emissions, that we promised under the Paris accord 2015. Just how imposing a tax reduces methane is difficult to understand, but here we are.

Cows and Sheep belch out a tiny amount of methane, as a bi product of their 4 stomachs breaking down grass and turning it into protein. 

Cows eat the equivalent of 10 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide every year* and expel 100kg of methane. Of the remaining carbon, about a quarter of it returns to the land as dung, and rest goes off the farm as animal growth, milk, meat, fibre and ultimately the carcass of the animal itself. 

It’s all part of the wonderful and infinitely complex circle of life.

According to scientists the 100kg of methane a cow passes every year is, molecule for molecule, about 30 times worse than CO2 so the cow expels the equivalent of 3 Tonnes of CO2

When you do the maths, cows take out the equivalent of about 6 tonnes of CO2 from the air every year

Let me put that to you again, cows are net sequesters of CO2.

None of this matters of course, scientists say that most of the CO2 Animals sequester ends up back in the atmosphere in no time and, anyway, it’s the methane that’s the problem. 

When I suggested to one scientist that it wasn’t fair to tax farmers on naturally occurring animal processes, he said “It’s not a matter of being fair, it’s that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, so if we can decrease the amount we emit, then that’s a good thing”

Scientists, bless them, busy themselves with “the science”. They focus on the heat trapping potential of gases. They live in their heads, and don’t have a wider perspective on just how trivial the effects are. 

Intellectual incest, birthing retarded ideas. 

What scientists say is no doubt correct in as far as it goes, but they can never, of course, present the full picture of a wonderful and infinitely chaotic atmosphere.

Questions like how much of the carbon the cow or sheep ingests ends up in deep storage, is a question unable to be answered, because it’s just too complicated, but it’s not zero. Grazing land for example holds about 15 tonnes per ha more carbon than Cropping land, and about 10 tonnes more than forestry land. That report is here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00288233.2017.1284134

There is no definitive answer to the net impact that animal farming has on the atmosphere but the real-world effect on any animal emissions will be nothing. It’s like saying you increase a lake level when you piss in it. 

Objectively true, but also pathologically stupid.

This is the elemental fight in the climate change arena. the effects of the actions we are forced to take are vanishingly small but we are told; 

Every little bit counts 

We have to do our bit. 

We must pay for our privilege.

We are guilted, coerced and blackmailed precisely because we all want to do the right thing.

We buy electric cars, tilt at windmills, accept higher prices, put useless taxes on farmers, not so that the temperature will be cooler in a hundred years, It won’t. we do these things to show that we are “good people” 

And because our politicians have mindlessly signed supranational agreements that are equally flawed and meaningless, why?  Well because thousands of autistic scientists came to a consensus, 200 other countries signed it and well we don’t want to be the pariah.

And so here we are.

Here’s 4 other relevant facts around this;

• The Paris accord specifically states (page 104, summary for policy makers) that efforts to reduce emissions should “not threaten food production.”
• Methane degrades in the atmosphere, having a half-life of 10-12 years, CO2 lasts for hundreds of years
• The latest IPCC report on page 1016, states that the currently used metric, denoting methane molecules being 28-30 times worse than CO2, overstates their warming potential by 3-4 times. 
• Because of falling herd numbers, the total amount of methane in the worlds atmosphere due to NZ livestock has fallen by 12-15% since 1990

*(Cows eat about 5 tonnes of dry matter grass per year, half of which is carbon, that’s derived from CO2, that comes straight out of the atmosphere through the grass absorbing it via photosynthesis.

One tonne of elemental carbon makes 3.7 tonnes of CO2) 

The post Guest Post: Methane and the beleaguered Farmer  first appeared on Kiwiblog.