AOC has been on the rampage about cows and their methane gas for years. She doesn’t care if it means the end of ribeye steaks and cheeseburgers for the entire American population. She’s on a mission to put an end to climate change – and if that means eliminating the entire population of cows, she’ll do it.
There’s just one problem: cows aren’t the biggest problem. Besides, dairy farms are already committed to reducing the emissions of gas. It turns out, that when farmers control what the cows eat, the gas can be reduced.
There’s a bigger problem that AOC should turn her attention to.
Beavers in the Arctic have been regularly increasing their emission of methane gas.
It’s not just coming from their rears, either.
Beavers build dams that can cause flooding. That causes streams and creeks and ponds to flood the vegetation. All of the streams and creeks and ponds become devoid of oxygen. Combine that with rich organic sediment, and you’ve got methane gas released as the material decays.
When the permafrost thaws, you’ve got even more methane being released thanks to the heat being carried by the water.
Arctic beavers are to blame for most of this – and a study was published over the summer in Environmental Research Letters.
Research professor Ken Tape of the Geophysical Institute explains, “What we found is that there are lots of methane hotspots right next to ponds and they start to diminish as you go away from the pond.”
AOC is right to be concerned about methane because it is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to greenhouse gases. It will trap heat into the Earth’s atmosphere – and as the planet heats up, a variety of problems can occur.
When you look at global greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA estimates that methane accounts for 20 percent of it all.
Cows aren’t the planet killers AOC wants to make them out to be. The biggest planet killer is fossil fuel production.
Since she obviously doesn’t want to deal with how fossil fuels are produced, she should look at what the beavers are doing. Perhaps if she were to do something intelligent, we could get behind her.
At least if she were to go after beavers, it wouldn’t mean eliminating a significant food source for us. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t been dining on beaver burgers and French fries every week of my adult life.
