Underneath the entire ideology of environmentalism is Malthusianism, that is, the idea that there are too many people on this earth and not enough food to feed everyone. The environmentalists today will say that there are too many people on earth and thus food production must increase, and this abundance of food — especially meat — is to the detriment of the environment, because lots of meat productions means lots of cows and other livestock which emit methane into the atmosphere. These emissions from animals are considered greenhouse gasses that are warming up the world and thus pushing the world to its eco apocalyptic end. The eco cult is targeting especially the cows, and wanting people to stop eating meat altogether to save the planet.
The Green terrorists want to force farmers to remove their cows to reduce greenhouse emissions. The reality is that America’s dairy industry contributes roughly 1.58% of the total US greenhouse gas emissions, and it feeds 169 million people their protein requirement; it provides the calcium requirements of 254 million people, and the energy requirements of 71.2 million people. In an article appearing in the Journal of Dairy Science, scientists from Virginia Tech and the US Dairy Forage Research Center looked into the effects of greenhouse emissions if the cows were removed or reduced. The authors evaluated three removal situations — depopulation, current management (export dairy) and retirement. In the depopulation scenario, customers would stop eating dairy products, resulting in the depopulation of the animals. In current management, the population of cows would remain the same, but dairy products would be used for things other than human consumption or simply exported for human consumption. In the retirement scenario, cows would be moved to free graze on pastureland, but their numbers would be reduced to a number supported by the amount of available land. In the study’s conclusion, greenhouse gas emissions did not change at all in the current management situation, with the only change being the drop in nutrition. In the retirement case all essential 39 nutrients for a quality human diet declined.
Greenhouse gas emissions were unchanged in the current management (export dairy) scenario, with a decrease in nutrient supplies, as expected. Emissions declined 11.97 percent for the retired scenario and 7.2 percent for the depopulation scenario compared to current emissions. All 39 nutrients considered in human diet quality were decreased for the retired scenario. The lead investigator for the study, Robin R. White, concluded: “Production of some essential nutrients, such as calcium and many vitamins, decreased under all reallocation scenarios that decreased greenhouse gas emissions, making the dairy removal scenarios suboptimal for feeding the US population.” So if you reduce greenhouse emissions by removing cows, you decrease nutritional needs, such as protein and calcium. An article published on earth.com reported that “The results of the study suggest that the removal of dairy cows from U.S. agriculture would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 0.7 percent, while substantially lowering the available supply of essential nutrients for the growing American population.”
These environmentalists claim to be against the cows because they want to save the planet. But removing the cows only takes away 0.7% of America’s emissions. So how in the world is this significant? It makes no sense to purge out cows to save the earth. A nefarious agenda is underneath the surface. Removing the cows would only bring malnourishment, and perhaps this is the agenda. To starve people, and honor the religion of Malthus — population control.
The argument is that since cows’ belching produces methane gas, their presence is ruining the planet for its contribution to greenhouse emissions. The emissions from cows are not the same as those coming from fossil fuels. The methane coming from cows is the result of the breakdown of food in their digestion system, much like gas rising from a compost bin. Cows and other cattle transform existing carbon, such as grass and other fibrous foods, into methane as part of their digestive process. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, come from carbon that has been locked under the earth for a very long time, and when its released, it’s adding new carbon to the atmosphere. As an example of how cows process huge amounts of carbon, there was a study done by researchers from Michigan State University in which they tracked carbon in the soil in two different ways of raising beef cattle. One was the traditional feedlot system and the other was a method known as adaptive multi-paddock grazing in which cattle, after being allowed to feed on plant life, were moved around the land so as to allow the plants to regrow and protect the soil (plants hold in water and cover the soil from sunlight which takes away water). While the conventional feedlot system produced less greenhouse emissions, the emissions in the second method were offset by the amount of carbon trapped in earth: 3.59 Mg of carbon per hectare, per year. Cows consume carbon by eating plants, and they put carbon back into the soil through their manure which feeds the plants. Cows belch out carbon dioxide, but its absorbed by plants which convert it into oxygen. Its an entire natural cycle. Moreover, the cattle’s hooves, treading upon the earth, help keep more carbon into the soil, which makes it available for plants to grow, which provides food for animals, which provide food for us.
The solution for environmental problems is not removing cows. This entire narrative was brought into question by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a University of California, Davis researcher and air-quality specialist. In July of 2022, Mitloehner said this in regards to people who think doing massive removals of cows will save the climate: “they are being deceived by misinformation that puts undue blame on animal agriculture. In reality, it is the burning of fossil fuels that poses the biggest threat to our planet. Campaigns that rally against animal protein by inflating their climate impact serve as smokescreens, diverting attention away from the main climate menace.” According to Mitloehner, methane which is belched out of cows, is a “flow” gas, meaning that as it is emitted, and it is also being destroyed in the atmosphere in a 12-year cycle. So again, even within a world view that is within an environmental worldview of a prestigious researcher, cows are not harmful to the environment (this should be no surprise). So then why in the hell are these eco cultists attacking these animals? It is not far-fetched to suspect that an agenda is at hand.
The people who point the finger to cattle as though they are environmental hazards, really are ignoring the importance of these animals. Cows and other cattle are constantly eating carbon — grass and the leaves and stems from grain like corn, wheat and oats — and convert them to nutrients that we need, protein and calcium in milk and beef. More than 50% of cow feed is actually just grass (farmers call it hay and silage). They are fed some grain, but this a small part of their diet in comparison to all of the fibrous things they eat. More than half of what they eat is grass, and another huge chunk of their diet consists of leaves and stems from things like corn, wheat and oats, almond hulls, canola meal (the remnants from producing canola oil), citrus pulp (the leftovers from squeezing orange juice and other beverages) and more.
These are all things that we humans cannot live on. Yet cows live off of these things and, in turn, they give us milk and meat, two foods that can sustain us. Also, how can they say that cattle is such a threat now, when prior to the mid-1800s, there were an estimated 30-60 million bison, over 10 million elk, 30 to 40 million Whitetail deer, 10 to 13 million Mule deer, and 35 to 100 million pronghorn and caribou roaming North America? Was such a huge number of animals ruining the environment before the mid-1800s? There are 30.1 million beef cows in the United States as of Jan. 1, 2022. These cows are ruining the planet, but the nearly hundreds of of millions of animals that were living here before the mid-1800s were not?
They will argue that it was different because these wild animals were free roaming and their manure was used by dung beetles who reduce methane emissions. But, in America before the settlement of Europeans, the bison, elk and deer populations were producing 86% of the methane emissions (known as CH) that the US’s current livestock population produces today. One study concluded: “Overall, enteric CH(4) emissions from bison, elk, and deer in the presettlement period were about 86% (assuming bison population size of 50 million) of the current CH(4) emissions from farmed ruminants in the United States.” According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), all livestock in America represents 3.9% of greenhouse gas emissions. Out of this percentage, beef cattle only represents 2% of total greenhouse gases. At the global level, American cattle’s greenhouse gas emissions are less than 1/2 a percent of the world’s emissions.
This means that if we were to get rid of all of America’s cows, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions would decrease by only 2.6%, and the world’s emissions would go down by less than half of a percent, and the biggest impact that it would make would be people being devastated by the lack of nutrient availability. The environmentalist green radicals want us to get rid of cattle in the name of saving the planet, but all this would do is starve people, making them deficient in calcium, vitamins A and B12, and EPA, DHA, and arachidonic acid. In fact, while America’s cattle only make up 3.9% of its emissions, wasting food makes up 8% of its emissions. To quote Mitloehner: “Food loss in the U.S. contributes to 8% of ALL GHGs emitted – that’s more than all U.S. animal agriculture”. So instead of tackling wastefulness to help the climate, the green fanatics want us to waste more food by removing cows. How does this make sense? Globally, the emissions from cows only account for 3% of greenhouse gasses, as we read in Nutrition Today: “Globally, all of agriculture accounts for 24% of GHG emissions; within that dairy is responsible for 2.7% (3% if you factor the additional GHG produced when older cows are no longer able to produce milk efficiently and are sacrificed for meat).”
Even if we were to remove all emissions from cattle worldwide, it still would lead to only a fraction of the decline in temperatures that the environmentalist want. Look at the words of Prof. Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford’s Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, Professor of Geosystem Science in the School of Geography and the Environment, and a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. Allen said in July of 2022: “even if we were to eliminate methane emissions from the entire ruminant herd worldwide we would [only] shave a few hundredths of a degree off global temperatures … that is [equivalent of] a few years of fossil-fuelled warming”. Myles also rejected the methods by which we are measuring methane’s effect on global temperatures: “We are still using this old … metric of CO2 equivalent emissions which doesn’t actually reflect the impact of methane emissions on global temperature”.
There was a study done in 2017 by animal scientist Mary Beth Hall (a scientist at the US Dairy Forage Research Center in Wisconsin) and Robin R. White (professor of animal and poultry science at Virginia Tech), in which they modeled a US food system without animals and concluded that eliminating all meat consumption in America (which would mean removing all cattle), would only decrease US emissions by 2.6%. Danish environmental economist Dr. Bjorn Lomborg agreed and said that “eating carrots instead of steak means you effectively cut your emissions by about two per cent”. Lomborg, a vegetarian for ethical reasons, says: “There are many good reasons to eat less meat. Sadly, making a huge difference to the climate isn’t one of them.” So, shave off emissions by a few percentages, make everyone malnourished, remove the livelihood of farmers, and this is somehow saving the planet? Its an agenda of malnourishment. They will argue, ‘WE CAN JUST TAKE CALCIUM SUPPLEMENTS!’ So you eco-terrorists wants us to live taking synthetic products like some lab rats? Sounds like some dystopian scene from Brave New World.
In 2021, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, President Joe Biden called methane “one of the most potent greenhouse gasses” and stated that both the US and Europe would work together to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030. To help further push this pledge, American and European officials at a side event at a United Nations climate change conference in Germany in June of 2022, pointed the finger at one thing: the agriculture and livestock sector, particularly in Asian and African countries. Not oil and gas leaks — which contribute to 60% of oil and gas methane emissions — but farmers (even in poor countries), were the target.
While politicians will talk about reducing emissions, they will still allow for oil to be drilled. The fact that the Biden administration is currently opening up public lands to new oil and gas drilling, tells us that oil is still on demand — and understandably so. Its also understandable that we have meat and dairy farms. Meat and milk are still high in demand, just like oil. But then why go against the farmer? Why go against the farmlands of Africa 80% of which are managed by smallholder farmers? They say it will be to prevent natural disasters caused by climate change.
But deaths by natural disasters are so much fewer than they once were. In 1931, there were over 3.7 million deaths of natural disasters worldwide, mainly because of floods in China. The causes of these floods were the result of natural shifts in climate. From 1928 to 1930, China had a long period of drought. In the winter of 1930, the weather was harshly cold, creating to large amounts of snow and ice in mountainous areas. In early 1931, the melted snow went downstream and flowed into the middle course of the Yangtze River during a time of heavy rain. Usually the region went through normal rains in the spring, fall and summer. But in early 1931, there was massive flooding. By June, those living in the low areas had been pushed to leave their homes. There were also unusual numbers of cyclone. Normally, there were two cyclones in a year. But in July of 1931 alone, there were nine cyclones alone hitting the region. Four weather stations that were positioned along the Yangtze River reported twenty-four inches of rain for the month of July.
The river reached its highest level since record-keeping began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Such flooding led to the deaths of over three million people. Tell me, if such destructive weather happened in China today, do you think the climate activists wouldn’t be saying that its the cause of agriculture and cars? And these floods happened at a time when the world did not have near the population or industry that we have today (the world had around two billion people at the time). Yet in our own times, we have over seven billion people and massive amounts of industry and farming, and the number of deaths by natural disasters have been brought down by nearly 100%, and this is due to modern preventative measures. According to data from the International Disaster Database EM-DAT, the yearly number of deaths from natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, droughts, storms, wildfires, extreme temperatures—and this includes deaths resulting from mass displacement following disasters—is 75% lower than it was a century ago.
From 1907 – 1916, a little more than 325,000 people died each year due to natural disasters. A hundred years later, in the period 2007 to 2016, the average yearly death toll had dropped to 80,386. And it was during this same period when the world’s population rose by more than five billion. Most people think that deaths by natural disasters are growing, and such a perception is molded by environmentalist hysteria, a paranoia that they want people to be possessed by to get them into a frenzy behind the green agenda of getting rid of all meat from the human diet.
They will argue that the flooding in China (which led to the deaths of over three million people) was limited to only one country. But, these floods in China were happening during the same time as the Dust Bowl, which began in 1930 and killed seven thousand people and led to a half a million Americans becoming homeless. There were also thirty-six tornados in 1932 that struck the south planes and killed around 334 people. In 1925 there were a series of tornados that hit the midwestern and southern United States and killed 751 people. So here we have droughts in China from 1928 to 1930, which leads to massive flooding in 1931 that kills millions; we have tornados in midwest and southern America in 1925 that kills hundreds; we have the Dustbowl in the 1930s that kills thousands; we have tornados in 1932 that kills hundreds. You can imagine the newsreels if such destructive weather were happening today. “TORNADOS IN THE MIDWEST, TORNADOS IN THE SOUTH, DUST BOWL IN THE GREAT PLAINS, FLOODING IN CHINA.THIS IS CLIMATE CHANGE!”
If such a series of natural disasters were occurring in the 2020s, they would be saying that this is climate change and that we need to bring down emissions to a net zero by purging the world of cows and fossils fuels. Yet today the chances of being killed by a natural disaster is almost zero, not because we got rid of cows or cars, but because of modern preventative measures. So why hate on cows when all we need to do is implement systems that actually prevent deaths?
The green terrorists want to make us do policies that will lead to starvation. The world witnessed this in Sri Lanka where the eco-cult got a chance to impose its agenda. The president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, commenced a policy of replacing conventional farming methods with organic farming. The government got rid of chemical fertilizers, and this caused rice production to drop by 20% in the first six months after the shift to organic farming was implemented. Food prices skyrocketed to dangerous levels; the cost of vegetables quintupled. According to Bjorn Lomborg: “It turns out that synthetic nitrogen is directly responsible for feeding four billion people, more than half the world’s population. … Wealthy consumers can take the related price increases, but many poor households in the developing world spend more than half their income on food. Every 1% hike in food prices tips another 10 million people into global poverty. Advocating for global organics implicitly means suggesting that billions should forgo food.” The Dutch government wants to implement the green policy on its cow farmers. According to the Economist, the Dutch government’s agenda is that “30% of the country’s cows and pigs will have to go, along with a big share of cattle and dairy farms.”
At the heart of the green agenda is Malthusianism — the ideology that teaches that there are too many people on earth and this is detrimental to the food supplies. While Thomas Malthus taught that a high population would lead to food shortages, today’s environmentalists teach that too many people means an increasing food demand which will lead to more livestock and farms which will devastate the earth. They are different, but in both worldviews people are the problem — the more humans the worst it is for their goddess mother earth. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drafted a report with Malthusian hysteria, stating that “climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050.” These are the very same types of people who screamed about overpopulation decades ago.
Paul Ehrlich, the Jewish environmentalist who screamed and hollered that tons of people would starve in the 1970s and 80s (and this obviously never happened). Ehrlich wrote: ”The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The apocalypticism appealed to the neo-Malthusians. But it was all nonsense. In the year 1968 — the very year that Ehrlich’s book came out — Asia produced 46,321,114 tons of maize and 439,579,934 tons of cereals. By 2011, Asia produced 270,316,205 tons of maize and 1,289,633,254 tons of cereals. Hundreds of millions of people did not starve, and the neo-Malthusian lunatics were wrong. They are telling us of food shortages, and yet they want to force famers to remove food and adopt organic methods that’ll drop food yields. How does this make any sense? Perhaps food shortages is the intention of such an agenda.