Bill Nye, who is not, in fact, a scientist but rather an engineer with no formal instruction in climatology or meteorology, has finally hit on what he believes is a perfect solution to curbing global climate change: tax meat eaters for cow farts.
Nye revealed his miraculous solution to the Daily Beast Monday in a comprehensive interview ahead of the second season premiere of his Netflix show, “Bill Nye Saves The World.”
“[T]his is what we can do and it’s a win-win: to have a fee on carbon,” Nye suggested. “So if you are raising livestock and producing a lot of carbon dioxide with your farm equipment and the exhaust from the animals, then you would pay a fee on that and it would be reflected in the price of meat, reflected in the price of fish, reflected in the price of peanuts.”
Nye went on to claim that the tax would be a “free market way to reckon with the real cost of a meat diet to the world.”
Cow flatulence contains methane, which is, yes, a greenhouse gas, which traps the sun’s heat at a rate around twenty times higher than carbon dioxide. But according to a study produced by the University of Michigan and Tulane University, although cows are dangerous to the Earth’s atmosphere, even combined with the farming and livestock industry as a whole, they contribute only about 8% of the United States’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Most of the livestock-based greenhouse gas emission comes from the developing world, and it’s here where Nye’s big plan falls apart. You see, Nye has no agenda for starving children in the third world who rely on meat to provide the protein necessary to ensure they do not fall prey to malnutrition; he’s only interested in punishing American meat-eaters.
“Mr. Nye said his policy prescription would apply only to the developed world, given that in developing countries, ;you need protein and your agriculture may not be sophisticated enough to provide you the protein. So we’ll see. I don’t want to get in the business of judging people who aren’t vegetarians,'” the Washington Examiner reports.
So you’d pay more for your meat, to make little to no dent in global greenhouse gas emissions.
Nye claims conservatives are “against” the idea not because it’s stupid and potentially ineffective, but because they hate taxes and regulations. But there’s the rub: conservatives may, in fact, recognize that such policies don’t create lasting change, and that the government may not be best positioned to police what individuals eat on a daily basis.
In fact, a study published back in March of this year shows that so-called “climate deniers” actually live more ecologically sound lives, and contribute fewer pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, because they’re not waiting on the government to decide whether or not to levy a tax on cow flatulence.