(LifeSiteNews) — Microsoft founder and left-wing philanthropist Bill Gates is still brainstorming ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by manipulating cow flatulence, he shared in a recent interview with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
On the October 30 episode of Hoffman’s “Possible” podcast, Gates explained that while work is ongoing to make cow-less meat more appetizing, in the meantime, “many” other solutions are being pursued to the “problem” of the methane emitted by cows as a result of digesting the grass they feed on, which climate activists claim is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
“So one is to vaccinate the cows in a way that their gut bacteria that emit the methane, which is also called natural gas or CH4, which is the second most important greenhouse gas, you can vaccinate them and that species of bacteria isn’t there,” he said. “Their [cows’] stomachs are very special because they can eat grass. It’s a three-stage fermentation process, basically. There’s another way you can change what they eat, and you could either put that in their water or their feed. There is a drug to change the microbiome, not a vaccine, but a drug. That looks very promising.”
“And then there’s a solution where you stick a sort of a metal thing into the skin of the cow, and it actually burns the methane,” Gates went on. “And all of these look to be quite cheap and implementable, even in Africa. And so this is one where I wasn’t hopeful when I got started a decade ago. And now it’s just a question of which solution for which country ends up being the best.”
Bill Gates: “Cows are about 5% of global emissions, which is pretty unbelievable. Wild. And if your goal is to get to zero, you don’t get to skip the cows or the steel or the cement or any of those big areas. So there’s a whole class of solutions of making meat without cows.”… pic.twitter.com/TUx9FIyOtM
— Camus (@newstart_2024) November 17, 2024
Climate activists’ calls to mitigate cow flatulence has long been considered one of the more humorous manifestations of left-wing environmentalism, but it too has a dark side. Reacting to calls in the European Union last year to get rid of tens of thousands of cows in the name of net-zero carbon targets, National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford called it a resurgence of “eco-primitivism.”
“The apocalypticism that runs through current climate policy is just another example of the millenarian thinking that has bedeviled humanity over the centuries,” he wrote, criticizing climate activists’ “relentless insistence that we must all make do with less ‘to save the planet’” as “just another example of pointless asceticism.”
“I had not, however, expected animal sacrifice to have made its way into climate fundamentalism, but here we are — old habits and all that,” he continued. “Animal sacrifice never, I suspect, ever persuaded any deity to offer a helping hand or, for that matter, hold off from some act of wrath. Likewise, the killing of the cows won’t achieve anything other than to act as a demonstration of control by those managing climate policy. Will it make any material difference to the climate? Almost certainly not.”
Such extreme measures, critics note, are in the name of an underlying threat that is either exaggerated or nonexistent: “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet.
Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.
AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.
Some experts have even argued that CO2 emissions are more an environmental blessing than a curse.
John Christy, director of the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center, says that climate-related fatalities have actually dropped significantly over the past century, from a global average of 484,880 in 1925 to just 14,893 in 2020. “CO2 cannot be the cause of something not occurring,” he said simply. “CO2 has been unfairly demonized because it is actually plant food in its atmospheric form, and it is the consequence of generating carbon-based energy, which unquestionably improves lives around the world,” Christy added, and that CO2 is better thought of as the “currency of life.”
“It is ironic that the very same carbon emissions responsible for harmful changes to climate are also fertilizing plant growth, which in turn is somewhat moderating global warming,” said Jarle Bjerke of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, co-author of a 2018 NASA report on the continuation of the trend “that the world is greener than it was in the early 1980s,” one of numerous pieces of evidence to that effect.