It’s The Cows

Once again, I’ve had an interesting on-line “debate” in our very own “The Potomac News.” This time, the issues was global climate change. The letter to the editor (LTE) that started the debate was titled “Global warming: Another big, fat lie,” which is a fairly neutral title that gives one no hint of the general tone of the letter.

But the ensuing four day on-line debate in which I was a vocal participant was even better. From this debate, I learned the real cause of air pollution. Never mind billions of smog-belching cars, trucks, trains or airplanes. Ignore the millions upon millions of coal-fired power plants, factories, and house chimneys. No, I learned that the number one cause of all the world’s air pollution are cows.

Right.

The theme of the debate from the Conservative side was that cows are in fact the biggest single cause of global air pollution. A secondary theme was that Al Gore is a wild-eyed nutcase lunatic liberal who’s single-handily caused massive politicization of the non-existent global-warming issue, but doesn’t speak for the Democratic party. Whatever. I’ll stick with the cows.

Actually, the concept that cows are in fact the single biggest cause of global climate change (which doesn’t exist other than as a liberal conspiracy) is an advancement in Conservative thinking. Back in 1981 then president Ronald Reagan famously uttered his timeless opinion on the environment:

“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

So, there we have the basis for the Republican environmental policy of the past 25 years. Cut down all the trees and we’ll get rid of air pollution.

Fast forward to the present, and we seem to have a bit of dilemma. We’ve cut down a lot of trees all over the world since 1981 but have a lot more air pollution. This bit of reality must have been very stressing to Conservatives. Even though reality isn’t a big deal to most Conservatives now-a-days, the fact that air pollution is a bigger problem today than back in 1981 must have intruded upon some Conservatives perception. Armed with the revelation than perhaps trees aren’t really causing air pollution, these Conservatives leaped into action and conducted exhaustive research into the source of air pollution.

Their findings; the real culprit was cows.

This must have come as a serious shock to many Conservatives, knowing that we could have solved the world’s air pollution problems years earlier by simply bombing India back into their pre-cow era. Now-a-days of course, bombing India just isn’t an option. It would disrupt all of our call centers leaving millions of Americans unable to figure out Microsoft’s latest update. But the cow revelation also creates a bit of dilemma; the faster we eat cows, the more of them there seems to be. What-to-do?

There is some controversy over this finding that cows cause air pollution. Some people continue to insist that trees, particularly oak trees, in fact do emit more air pollution than cows. Squirrels are probably involved.

Dairy farmers are also upset because cows are targeted, but not pigs, chickens and other farm animals. They claim that this shows a clear anti-cow bias that violates some equal-protection clause of our Constitution.

I’m sure the best and brightest in the Bush administration are now working on a policy approach to reducing the world’s emissions caused by deadly pollution-emitting cows. To help them out, I say we grab the bull by the horns and start a grass-roots promotional campaign to increase awareness of this bovine flatulence problem. I’ve actually developed a slogan to kick-off this awareness campaign:

“Eat a cow, save the planet.”

You heard it here first.

Note: I do accept that cows and other farm animals contribute to localized smog problems, particularly with factory farms. But to claim that cows are a larger cause of air pollution that fossil-fuel emissions is simply bulls%&t.