Microsoft co-founder and left-wing financier Bill Gates doubles down on one of the odder focuses of climate alarmist activism: manipulating methane in cow flatulence.
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.
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"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."
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."