Environmentalism went wrong from the beginning. It's an ism, a movement, primarily a political hack and so subject to all of the nonsense and distortions of any movement as it pursues power and forgets its purposes. It was immediately hijacked by wackos and opportunists. The wackos sought to use environmentalism to advance their obsessions, the opportunists sought power, fame and fortune.

Among the multitude of foolish planks in their platform is the anti-meat fetish, recently harnessed to the climate nutter bandwagon.

I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the meat eating and climate change issue following the UN report. The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/industrial agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance or possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of confusing the public. It is obviously to someone’s benefit to make meat eating and livestock raising an easily attacked straw man (with the enthusiastic help of vegetarian groups) in order to cover up the singular contribution of the only new sources of carbon—burning the stored carbon in fossil fuels and to a small extent making cement (both of which release carbon from long term storage)—as the reason for increased greenhouse gasses in the modern era. (Just for ridiculous comparison, human beings, each exhaling about 1kg of CO2 per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per year than fossil fuel transportation. Maybe we should get rid of us.)

If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on grass on my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2. The pasture-raised animal eating grass in my field is not producing CO2, merely recycling it (short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals (and human beings) have since they evolved. It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased greenhouse gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/ chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/ transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I think about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live, from our own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without ruminant livestock able to convert the pasture grasses into food. It would not be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the stony and/or hilly land that has served us for so long as productive pasture. By comparison with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated for a vegetarian’s dinner, if done with motorized equipment, are responsible for increased CO2.

Some of the worst, most sociopathic enviro-nutter groups are awkwardly backing off their former positions. It isn't that they have come to their senses, it's that they have become political liabilities rather than assets. They still try to parse the ideas to retain some of their no less foolish but not currently so risky positions.

The above grafs - from the belly of the beast, nutter central - is almost sensible. It's truish that pastured ruminant operations are not sources of CO2 emissions, but no operation is 100% pastured unless it is in one of the very few places on earth where grass grows 12 months of the year. Everyone else has to feed out some stored forage, and unless they use pre-industrial methods - real horsepower - that means machinery, just like the soya growers. They are part of the agricultural system and any supposed purity is illusory, at best free riding on the system as a whole but never achieving even that tainted level.

But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc. Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from their manure cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there be other contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? It has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is diminished. A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 - 49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing only two or three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in diminished availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds, for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might not the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified digestibility? I am sure that future research will document other contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they are raised.

Uh oh, "It has long been known". BOHICA, the myth machine is rampant. Fertilization does not reduce plant diversity. Improved pastures - those that have been overseeded with valuable forage species - have a more complex mix of species, not a less complex mix. NO2 is produced by a thriving population of soil microorganisms as part of the nitrogen cycle where organic matter is decomposed. It doesn't matter if the organic matter has passed through a ruminant or not, the same thing happens in the end. However, it happens faster on healthy, fertile pastures. Everything is faster in such places. Plants grow faster, animals grow faster, and microorganisms grow faster. The carbon and nitrogen cycles are faster. More carbon and nitrogen are sucked from the air, more is sent back.

The blunder here is the same sort of intellectual sloppiness that gives us the defective UN report in the first place. The attempt to debunk some of the UN myths while keeping others may be politically expedient and a bit less traumatic for enviro-nutters, but it is intellectually impoverished bunk.

But what about clearing the Brazilian rain forest? Well, the bulk of that is for soybeans and if we stopped feeding grain to cattle much of the acreage presently growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture again and we wouldn’t need Brazilian land. (US livestock presently consume 5 times as much grain as the US population does directly.) And long term pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous amount of carbon in the soil.

My interest in this subject comes not just because I am a farmer and a meat eater, but also because something seems not to make sense here as if the data from the research has failed to take some other human mediated influence into account. But even more significantly, if we humans were not burning fossil fuels and thus not releasing long-term carbon from storage and if we were not using some 90 megatons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, would we even be discussing this issue?

It's a problem as old as the range wars. Natural grasslands and forests are cleared and broken for crops, not livestock, and the livestock would not be raised in forests at all if the grasslands hadn't been fenced and plowed. But the use of nitrogen fertilizer has nothing to do with it. That's a residual phobia of enviro-myth makers.

If those people concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gasses, instead of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous output of greenhouse gasses due to fossil fuel and fertilizer use by a greedy and biologically irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a truthful statement even if they weren’t perceptive enough to continue on and mention that the only “new” carbon, the carbon that is responsible for rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, is not biogenic from livestock but rather anthropogenic from our releasing the carbon in long term storage (coal, oil, natural gas.) Targeting livestock as a smoke screen in the climate change controversy is a very mistaken path to take since it results in hiding our inability to deal with the real causes. When people are fooled into ignorantly condemning the straw man of meat eating, who I suspect has been set up for them by the fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how easily human beings allow themselves to be deluded by their corporate masters.

This is a fascinating mix of rational and irrational beliefs. It's an obvious truth that a main reason for the increase in atmospheric carbon is the use of fossil carbon. Another culprit not mentioned is soil cultivation - no matter how it is done - since it reduces the amount of carbon sequestered in soil, reduces organic matter and diminishes soil life, which is harmful in a variety of ways, not just the emissions problem.

But all of this could be done without fossil fuels. Imagine a solar or nuclear powered civilization carrying on exactly as it does today but powering its machinery and synthesizing its chemicals using non-fossil energy and feedstock sources. That's where things are moving for a variety of reasons as civilization continues to make technological advances. Indeed, these technologies would not just end emissions of fossil carbon, they would draw down the fossil carbon emitted in the past, cleaning the atmosphere of past sins.

The UN report is foolish but it is good to be clear about its manifold defects. Its hunker down, just say no, hair shirted self-abnegation can at best save a few little green teacups of carbon emissions that will have no useful effects on climate change but cause misery and increase expenses for all of humanity. It is precisely the wrong approach to the problem of emissions though it satisfies the obsessions a a few deranged constituents and increases bureaucratic meddling. It's a jobs program for power mad politicians and greedy bureaucrats that exploits our legitimate environmental concerns while doing nothing useful about them.