On Tuesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) had a pointed response to Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), who is a vegetarian and was quoted saying that the earth “can’t sustain” people eating meat. Cheney tweeted, “Hey @CoryBooker I support PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals. @BeefUSA#WyomingBeefCountry.”
As The Daily Wire reported, Booker had spoken to VegNews about his belief that ”industrially produced animal agriculture” was having a deleterious environmental impact on the earth. VegNews reported:
While claiming he does not want to lecture Americans on their diets, Booker says Americans need to be nudged into fake cheese because the planet cannot sustain the “environmental impact” of the food industry. “You see the planet earth moving towards what is the Standard American Diet,” Booker said. “We’ve seen this massive increase in consumption of meat produced by the industrial animal agriculture industry.”
“The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” he said. “It’s just not possible.” Booker says the “devastating impact” of greenhouse gases produced by the meat industry is “just not practical.”
“The numbers just don’t add up,” he said. “We will destroy our planet unless we start figuring out a better way forward when it comes to our climate change and our environment.”
Booker co-introduced the Green New Deal, which had its own problems with cows. He stated:
Climate change is a pressing and serious environmental and economic crisis that threatens the way of life for our kids and grandkids. This challenge must be met with a commitment from the federal government that is commensurate with the level of commitment we saw in this country during the original New Deal. And that’s exactly the type of determination this proposal brings. Communities of color, low income communities, indigenous communities and our family farmers are on the front lines of climate change, and I’m particularly encouraged that this blueprint addresses climate change in a way that promotes both economic and environmental justice.”
In the FAQ for the Green New Deal, it stated:
Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the economy to replace it — this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible. We set a goal to reach net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to full get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast …
The USDA reports, “The January 1, 2018 inventory of all cattle and calves in Wyoming totaled 1.32 million head, down 1 percent from the January 1, 2017 inventory, according to the January 1 Cattle Survey conducted by the Mountain Regional Field Office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA. Beef cows, at 714,000 head, were unchanged from the previous year. Milk cows were unchanged from last year at 6,000 head. Wyoming’s 2017 calf crop, at 660,000 head, is unchanged from 2016.”