The notion that "people go funny in the head when talking about politics", from Politics is the Mind-Killer, has abundant support. We saw it, and continue to see it, in the Iraq war controversy as well as climate change non-debate.

[W]e may . . . be in a situation where analysis is viewed as being more useful as a tool of persuasion than clarifying the consequences of a wide range of alternative courses of action. In such a situation policy analyses will be far less important than the political dynamics.

A recent example of such a situation that will be familiar to most readers is when the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq and then fixed the intelligence to meet the policy. Any analysis that supported invasion, regardless of its intellectual merits, then became "right" even if for the "wrong reasons." Sure, some policy analyses were still needed after that decision, for instance, to determine whether 110,000 versus 130,000 troops would be needed. But I view this as a far different sort of analysis than focusing analytical attention on the broad question of what might have been done about Saddam Hussein. In that situation, once the politics were settled, then such wide-ranging analyses became completely irrelevant. But arguably that is exactly the sort of analysis that mattered most of all and for the lack of which were are suffering today Climate change, of course some will say, is different. . .

Once your have the political answer in hand, analysis then ceases to be a tool that provides insight on alternatives and then becomes a tool of marketing, and sometimes a way to limit debate. Harvard's Martin Weitzman acknowledges this explicitly in the review paper (here in PDF) on Stern cited in the Times article:

As the Review puts it, “establishing a carbon price, through tax, trading, or regulation, is an essential foundation for climate-change policy.”

Was invasion of Iraq an effective response to the Saddam Hussein threat? Saddam Hussein is gone, so that policy worked in that sense, but have things improved? Not obviously, though much blood and treasure has been spilled. That was a likely result known before the invasion, but the political decision had been made.

Is some sort of carbon-prohibitionist system an effective response to the climate change threat? No, it won't reduce the threat by a detectable amount under optimistic assumptions, and there is no obvious reason to be optimistic. Carbon emissions on a world wide basis will continue to increase for a century as we develop new energy systems. The loopy idea that "the right carbon tax could do much more to unleash the decentralized power of greedy, self seeking, capitalistic American inventive genius on the problem of developing commercially-feasible carbon-avoiding alternative technologies than all of the command-and-control schemes and patchwork subsidies making the rounds in Washington these days" fails to deal with the issue. It's a world wide problem and a structural problem of current energy systems. Nibbling around the edges of this huge issue - saving "little green teacups" of carbon - is foolish. But the political decision has been made and we are now merely neeping about the details of a settled position.

This sort of wasteful and ineffective political posturing affects many aspects of society in the zeal to collect teacups of emissions. The arguments for policy details have the same form as those for Iraq invasion: "the Bush Administration decided to invade Iraq and then fixed the intelligence to meet the policy". This sort of "fixing" is done using a variety of techniques such as selective use of data and skewed interpretation of it. Here's an example of that in carbon-prohibition efforts.

Livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, reports the FAO. This includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide. Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation.

Is there any truth lurking in there? Not much. You have to conceal great gobs of information and torture the rest to come up with those figures. How do livestock cause co2 emissions? They breathe, like people, so that's a little bit, but all animals breathe. Are they arguing that all animals should stop breathing?

They get their numbers by making lots of assumptions about how animal food is produced. Rather than the more intelligent and obvious response of debating various food production methods for their co2 implications, they attribute the emissions to the animals themselves, for instrumental reasons.

How about nitrous oxide? This is produced by denitrifying soil bacteria which eat nitrogen compounds. It doesn't matter where the nitrogen compounds come from, the result is the same. The nitrogen fixed by legumes in an organic vegy patch meet the same fate as nitrogen from organic manure, rain enriched by lightning produced nitrates, or manufactured nitrates. It's all food for bacteria. Does it make any sense at all to attribute this nitrous oxide to livestock, and then argue that livestock should be eliminated? Only for those whose minds have been killed by politics.

Some of the methane could get captured from livestock that are in buildings. Also, the types of compounds found in grasses and other feeds affect how much methane gets generated. Feed genetically engineered for easier digestion would lower methane emissions.

Methane is produced by bacteria digesting cellulose, the complex carbohydrates of cell walls. It's the main component of plants and the great hope of many bio-fuel schemes: cellulosic ethanol from grasses. Feeding livestock foods with more simple carbohydrates, such as grain, or engineering plants to have them in the leaves and stalks as suggested above, puts those methane producing bacteria out of work. But everywhere, all over the earth, those bacteria will find other employment digesting cellulose. The little green teacups of methane evaded by jiggering animal feed would not be relevant to the world from a climate change perspective. Besides, emissions would increase in the production of these feeds compared to the environmentally benign practice of growing productive polycultures of grasses and forbs and grazing livestock on those swards.

The political slide to carbon-prohibition is being exploited by every cult on the planet to advance their otherwise unrelated agendas. Not only is carbon-prohibition a foolish and ineffective response to climate threats, it enables a wide variety of other inimical interests.

Animal-rights activists and those advocating vegetarianism have been quick to pick up on the implications of the FAO report.

"Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products," writes Noam Mohr in a report for EarthSave International.

Compounded bullshit. An edifice of false data and silly analysis is built on the carbon-prohibition political decision. None of it will help the climate or improve the world in any other way, unless you count satisfaction of cult beliefs. It makes no more sense than catering to a creationist agenda, but it has some of the same political dynamics.

Politics truly is the mind killer, though some of the minds being wasted were already close to death.

Update:

Here's another cult seeking to exploit carbon-prohibitionism to piggy-back their agenda.

The harmful environmental effects of livestock production are becoming increasingly serious at all levels--local, regional, national and global--and urgently need to be addressed, according to researchers from Stanford University, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other organizations. . .

Large-scale livestock operations provide most of the meat and meat products consumed around the world--consumption that is growing at a record pace and is projected to double by 2050, said symposium organizer Harold A. Mooney, professor of biological sciences at Stanford.

Food consumption is projected to double in any event due to increased population and reduction of food insecurity among the currently food insecure of the world who number in the hundreds of millions. The extra 2 or 3 billion people have to eat something.

"We are seeing land once farmed locally being transformed to cropland for industrialized feed production, with grasslands and tropical forests being destroyed in these land use changes, with resources feeding livestock rather than the humans who previously depended on those lands," added Mooney, who co-chaired the scientific advisory panel for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

It will continue, and must continue, since world production of food, fiber and fuel needs to double or triple. Old fashioned peasant systems are inadequate to the task. It's telling that this is the sort of fellow who produced the nonsensical Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. These folks have no clues about the subject, and just bloviate at public expense.

According to the FAO, when emissions from land use are factored in, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions derived from human-related activities, as well as 37 percent of methane emissions--primarily gas from the digestive system of cattle and other domesticated ruminants--and 65 percent of nitrous oxide gases, mostly from manure.

See the discussion above. They pulled these numbers out of their butts and played with them.

The problems surrounding livestock production cannot be considered in isolation, nor are they limited to the environmental impact, Mooney said, noting that economic, social, health and environmental perspectives "will be critical to solving some of these problems. We hope to develop a greater understanding of these complex issues so that we may encourage policies and practices to reduce the adverse effects of livestock production, while ensuring that humans are fed and natural resources are preserved, today and in the future."

Bullshit. Mooney is an old fart buddy of Paul Ehrlich, Carl Folke and other losers who got it all wrong in previous decades and are hanging on in their old age trying to peddle stuff long past its sell-by date.

Subsidized industrial agriculture methods developed in the green revolution made grain production very efficient and cheap. Huge quantities could be produced on lands that previously supported very few. But there were no markets for that much grain, so it was fed to animals. Now it is being burned for fuel since that is subsidized too. Grain production will continue to increase to supply these markets, and prices will rise as well due to competition.

Every kernel of grain taken from the mouths of livestock will be burned for fuel. This may please folks like Mooney, but it won't help the environment. Anyone with any knowledge at all - and a tiny bit of intellectual honesty - can see that ever more land will go into agriculture as population rises to half again its current level. There isn't a lot of arable land not currently in production so more marginal lands, such as forests, are now going under the plow. To reduce that pressure productivity must rise. More must be produced on existing lands using the same amounts of water. This requires greater skill and precision as well as improved crops.

It doesn't matter whether agricultural production is used directly as food by humans, fed to livestock or burned as fuel. As long as the production has uses it will be produced. Charlatans like Mooney have no grasp of the dynamics of the system. Once you gain a useful understanding of the subject is becomes clear that we need better methods rather than prohibitions. It isn't a political problem, it is a technological problem. Politics can make things worse by skewing the system and impeding evolution, but it can't make things better.