Radical Reformers

Target Cow Burps

Radical Reformers have gone from Never Trust Anyone Over 30 to Never Trust A Cow, which will strike ordinary folk as odd, but for Radical Reformers isn’t much of a plop.

It turns out that cows, in addition to providing dairy products, meat and hides – things already seriously suspect to Radical Reformers – cows, well. . .OK, no holds barred here, cows burp. They’re ruminants, which means they chew their cud and have specialized stomachs.

This will not come as a revelation to those acquainted with cows, but it was news to the Radical Reformers, and when they discovered that cow burps contain methane, their horror knew no bounds.

Methane is one of the gases that cause climate warming. Climate warming is bad. We have this on no less an authority than Al Gore, who has transferred his expertise on winning elections to the climate debate – the pay is better, the lifting is lighter, and by the time he’s proven right or wrong, all concerned will be long dead.

So cows burping methane into the atmosphere clearly had to be addressed along with natural gas production, landfills, coal mining and the like. The Environmental Protection Agency said ruminant livestock accounted for 28 percent of global methane emissions from human-related activities,

Burping cows are a special challenge. After all, they spend most of their time just being cows, not reminding themselves that they should burp into a special collection device, which in any case hasn’t been invented.

Not to worry. In the craziness of the current environmental discussion, paying a tax to cause environmental harm is somehow better than causing the same harm without paying the tax. Never mind that the harm goes to the environment in any case while the tax goes to the government. Government needs your tax dollars, and you trust your government, don’t you?

The American Farm Bureau Federation took a dim view of the possibility that the EPA might tax farm animal burps, noting in March that “it could cost farmers and ranchers $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 per beef cow and $21.87 per hog. The fees were arrived at using publicly available government data.”

That observation caused a stir in the farm states. Farm state politicians who know a threat of having to seek gainful employment when they spot one were pretty uniform in saying it was a lousy idea. Horse trading continues in Congress, and a bill without a cow-burp tax may not be approved until later.

What should be disapproved from the git-go is discussing cow burps at all. Cows are ruminants, ruminants burp. If that’s the issue, what about the 30 million or so deer that not only eat our tulips but burp brazenly after doing so? If we think ruminant burping from about 94 million head of cattle is a problem now, what about when an estimated 90 million American bison roamed the continent, burping at will? Not to mention all those deer, antelope, African and Asian buffalo, giraffes and camels?

That might require some thinking, but that’s not the strong suit of Radical Reformers. Having declared something a sin, they will oppose it in all its forms, even if it winds up with them tagged with a cow-burp tax.

If by some quirk Congress approves any nonsense of this sort, the first herd to be taxed should be the one corralled in the United States Capitol.

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