New Zealand is beginning to conduct scientific inquiries into possible methods to prevent cows and other farm animals from naturally releasing more methane gas into the environment, in an attempt to control so-called “global warming.”
ABC News reports that the government of New Zealand is pushing to reduce carbon emissions in the country by 47 percent by the year 2050. As farming is a major part of New Zealand’s economy, half of the greenhouse gas emissions from the island nation come from the country’s estimated 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.
“I don’t believe there’s any other place that has the breadth of ambition that New Zealand has in terms of the range of technologies being investigated in any one place,” said Peter Janssen, a principal scientist at government-owned research company AgResearch. Janssen claims that methane within animals is produced by microbes that live inside the animals, which are ultimately not essential to producing high-quality meat or milk; as such, he says that he has spent the last 15 years developing a vaccine for such microbes.
One of the moves taken by the government has been to announce a new tax on farmers for animals that burp and thus release methane, the first of its kind in the world, which has led to widespread backlash from farmers.
Another proposal has called for selective breeding, which will first be tested next year on sheep farms and may soon be applied to cow farms as well.
“I think one of the areas that New Zealand scientists, particularly, have made some great progress is in this whole area of animal breeding,” said Sinead Leahy, principal science advisor at the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Center. “And particularly, a lot of research has been done into breeding low emissions sheep.”
Scientists are also attempting to develop genetically modified clovers for animals to eat rather than naturally-grown grass, which they believe may reduce methane output by 20 to 30 percent.
All of these proposals and more are part of the broader international push to push back against what some claim to be “global warming,” the theory that emissions of greenhouse gasses by human activity are actively harming the environment and making the planet uninhabitable. History has shown, however, that the impact of human activity, even in modern and industrialized society, has had a negligible impact on the world atmosphere compared to the thousands of years of human history. Nevertheless, left-wing politicians have pushed the apocalyptic narrative of global warming, also known as “climate change,” in a bid to enact more authoritarian policies on longstanding traditions, industries, and activities.