Washington Whispers

Sen. Thune Says Horse Feathers to Global Warming Veganism

By Paul Bedard

October 27, 2009 RSS Feed Print

By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers

Nothing gets a cattle-state senator riled up more than elites promoting vegetarianism in the name of public policy. So you can imagine what South Dakota GOP Sen. John Thune thought when Britain's Lord Stern, a leading authority on global warming, called on the world to give up meat to save the planet.

"With falling beef prices, higher costs of production, and onerous cap-and-trade legislation looming, the last thing ranchers and employees of America's meat industry need right now is elitist lecturing and misinformation from Lord Stern—a reported meat eater," Thune told Washington Whispers.

What got him going were Stern's comments that "meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world's resources. A vegetarian diet is better." Stern, an economist, told the Times of London that cows and pigs are a significant source of greenhouse gases.

Thune has seen this before, of course, and this year was able to prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from pushing a "cow tax," where producers are taxed for "naturally occurring livestock emissions."

Said Thune: "Fortunately, we've been grilling the cow tax efforts here in D.C. but need to keep the fire on these extremist views from across the pond."

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Tags:
energy policy and climate change,
global warming,
John Thune,
food and drink,
recession

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One day, unless human population is brought under control, all food production will have to be non-meat. Meat production is wastful and not space efficiant. With a population spiralling out of control space is rapidly being taken up for people to live, reducing space for agriculture. Also with a higher population to feed farmers will have to switch to the more efficient plant based foods to feed the world. Thankfully though this is not going to happen any time soon, don't think I could survive without bacon.....

George 3:33PM October 30, 2009

BG of KS needs to do more research so that he/she can get it right. First study your 5th grade science books. Look up the law of "Conservation of Matter". What you will learn here is that carbon "is neither created nor destroyed" The carbon that cattle, pigs, people, fish (any thing that breathes) emit in to the atmosphere must come from the food that animal eats. In the case of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs etc they get it from the plants that they eat. The plants get their carbon from guess where? The atmosphere. So any carbon regardless of form emitted from live stock into the atmosphere had to come from the atmosphere in the first place. Let that sink in for just a moment... OK so animal production by the laws of nature, and physics is at worst carbon neutral.

Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by increased plant growth. Cattle, sheep, goats and other foraging animals eat grass which causes the grass to grow even more, thus taking more carbon from the atmosphere. Is there a light coming on yet? So what happens to the grass if the animals don't eat it? It stops growing, dies, and then rots, returning carbon back into the atmosphere as guess what? Methane gas. Swamps, Termites and decomposing plants are the single largest source of global carbon emissions.

But they produce NO FOOD for people.

Now lets take this analysis just a little further. Not all of the carbon that animals get from eating plants goes into the atmosphere. Obviously much of it goes into the growth of the animal itself and thus acts as a carbon sink. Furthermore some of what goes in the front end of an animal comes out of the back end in the form of manure. This carbon then goes into the soil to build yet another carbon sink by building the organic matter of the soil. So cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens actually have a NEGATIVE carbon footprint. If you eliminate them, carbon in the atmosphere will actually INCREASE, and Global warming increases. What will happen, as what usually happens with kooky liberal ideas, will be exactly the opposite of intended.

So to save the world, eat a liberal.

FHJ of NE 9:34PM October 29, 2009

Why don't we cut to the chase. The problem isn't meat its humans. Solution introduce cannibalism. Anyone for Stern Soup?

Limey 1:45PM October 29, 2009

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