Eating Less Meat Can Cut Down on Global Warming

LONDON - Eating less meat could help slow global warming by reducing the number of livestock and thereby decreasing the amount of methane flatulence from the animals, scientists said on Thursday.

In a special energy and health series of the medical journal The Lancet, experts said people should eat fewer steaks and hamburgers. Reducing global red meat consumption by 10 percent, they said, would cut the gases emitted by cows, sheep and goats that contribute to global warming.

There are more than just global warming reasons to not eat meat, especially beef.

Each year we the people subsidize "poor ranchers" and "poor farmers" to the tune of several billion dollars for various agricultrual programs. For one we pay farmers billions for their corn crop. We pay them not to grow it, and to grow it. We pay them to store it and we subsidize their transportation costs to ship it. Anyone who has ever been around a cattle feedlot in the west knows that they are a collection area for vast quantities of cattle cheney that pollutes streams and contributes to global climate change. And it does so through all of the corn fed to the confined cattle.

Then there is the very real issue of subsidizing farmers to overgraze grasslands on Federal land. Each cow and her calf is called an "Animal Unit" and to feed an animal unit the rancher pays for that unit on a monthly basis, or an AUM - animal unit per month. Each spring, range conservationists look at the structure and health of grasslands on public land and determine how many AUM's the land can support without harming the grasslands. From that local managers determine that they can allow X AUMs per month to graze on their (your) federal grasslands.

But lets say the "poor" rancher has 150 cows and their calf (150 AUM) but the land can only support 100 cows and their calf (100 AUM). The rancher, who invariably votes a straight Repignican ticket is told by the local resource manager that he can only graze 100 of his AUMs. Pissed and knowing that he made his campaign contributions to the Repignican sitting in the Congress representing him, the Repignican rancher calls his Congressman and complains that the Federal agency he deals with is jerking him around. After all, he has 150 AUMs he wants to graze to fuck up public lands and he has contributed to the Repigncans since before Christ and he wants something done now.

The Repignican Congressman knows that the only way he will stay in office is by buying as many votes as possible decides to exert his influence and buy this vote. He calls the Director of the agency allegedly harming his constituent, tells the Director that his constituent is a loyal Bushie and needs to fuck up the grasslands no matter what that liberal range conservationist said, and he wants it fixed now.

The Director (lets say its Dale Hall, Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service) doesn't want to get in trouble with the loyal Bushies higher up the food chain from him, so he determines, in the absence of any data to support the decision, that the range conservationist he has never met was wrong. Suddenly viola!! A phone call goes to the Regional Director who calls the Assistant Regional Director who calls the District Refuge Supervisor who calls the Refuge Manager and says that despite his data being actual data, the Director has determined that the loyal Bushie can graze 150 AUMs on that pasture. And it shall be.

And the 150 AUMs harm the native prairie and the local wildlife is hosed and nobody cares because the vote was secured for the Congressman.

And thats why I absolutely positively refuse to eat beef whose farts and piles of Cheney in feedlots contribute to global warming.