Eat a Big Mac: Buy a Carbon Credit? | NewsBusters.org

Will we be forced to buy carbon credits from Al Gore in order to assuage our guilt over eating Big Macs or other types of hamburgers? Perhaps. As we saw recently in NewsBusters, there is a theory out there that Bovine "Burps" contribute significantly to causing global warming due to the release of methane by cows during their "burping" process. And now environmental whackos want us to cut back or eliminate our consumption of hamburgers in order to keep bovine methane from destroying our planet. Here are some excerpts from the July 16 article by Jim Motavalli in the San Antonio Current expounding on this subject:

Ask most Americans what causes global warming, and they’ll point to a coal-plant smokestack or a car’s tailpipe. They’re right, of course, but perhaps two other images should be granted similarly iconic status: the front and rear ends of a cow. According to a little-known 2006 United Nations report entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” livestock is a major player in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions (measured in carbon-dioxide equivalents). That’s more than the entire transportation system! Unfortunately, this incredibly important revelation has received only limited attention in the media.

How could methane from cows, goats, sheep, and other livestock have such a huge impact? As Chris Goodall points out in his book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, “Ruminant animals [chewing a cud], such as cows and sheep, produce methane as a result of the digestive process … Dairy cows are particularly important sources of methane because of the volume of food, both grass and processed material, that they eat.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the American meat industry produces more than 60 million tons of waste annually — five tons for every U.S. citizen and 130 times the volume of human waste. Michael Jacobson, the longtime executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, adds the fact that just one midsize feedlot churns out half a million pounds of manure each day. “The methane that cattle and their manure produce has a global warming effect equal to that of 33 million automobiles,” the Center reports in its book Six Arguments for a Greener Diet.

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