Climate Change: No magic required

Retiring National Agriculture spokesperson Nathan Guy thinks that the Zero Carbon Bill's methane targets are "unachievable" and will need "magic" to get there. Hardly. The target is only difficult if you assume that cow numbers are fixed in stone and cannot change. If you don't assume that, then no magic is required. If we want to halve methane, simply halve the number of dairy cows.

But isn't that "impossible"? Hardly. To steal a line from the climate change deniers, cow numbers have always changed. Halving dairy cow numbers would merely reduce them to the level they were at in 1990. It requires no "magic", or even any mass-culling. It can be done within a decade, simply by not replacing cows within the normal business cycle.

Farmers' claims about the difficulty of reducing emissions don't tell us anything about reality. All they tell us about is the narrowness of their minds and their unwillingness to change. These people should not be allowed to dictate our survival. Instead they should be ignored.