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More than half the world’s people (4.3 billion) own smartphones, and practically everybody has access to one. All the information in the world is available to everybody. Yet willful ignorance and superstition still flourish.
From TikTok to YouTube, the web is currently seething with videos of smugly self-righteous people pouring milk down drains (or, in some cases, toilets). “Can’t fool me,” they say. “We know you’re trying to kill us, or control our minds, or something like that.”
The focus of all the fury is Bovaer, a new feed ingredient for cows and other ruminants (sheep and goats) that greatly reduces their methane emissions. Methane is a major contributor to global warming, and of all the proposed quick fixes for excess warming this would have the biggest impact.
The world urgently needs fast-acting fixes, because in June 2023 the average global temperature jumped by almost one-third of a degree. That is the total amount of warming that conventional climate models were predicting would happen by the mid-2030s.
The only greenhouse gas we can cut rapidly is methane, which on a day-to-day basis accounts for about a third of the current warming. (Carbon dioxide does more harm in the long run because it stays around for centuries, but a methane molecule does a huge quick hit — 26 times more warming in a single year than a CO2 molecule — and is gone in 10 years.)
The methane burped out by the world’s one-and-a-half billion cows is a mere byproduct of the chemistry by which cows process hard-to-digest grass in their specialized stomachs, but it accounts for about 30 percent of all the world’s methane emissions. Its great virtue is that we can make it go away fast.
Bovaer does that job. It’s certified safe for use in 58 countries and just a quarter-teaspoon per day per cow mixed with the cattle feed will cut a herd’s methane emissions by 30 percent for dairy cows, and by 45 percent for beef cattle. Done worldwide, this would have about the same impact on warming as shutting down the global aviation industry — twice.
We are not going to shut down either industry, and there is no magic pill for aircraft. But Bovaer, developed in Belgium, could be rolled out everywhere in just a few years. What reason could there be to delay it?
One reason is cost: Treating one cow for one year costs around $50, so many farmers will not use it without government subsidy, legal compulsion or both. That’s easily done, but the other obstacle is bigger: the “superstitious peasant” factor.
These metaphorical peasants are not actual farmers, who are usually well informed about agricultural matters and will do the right thing if they can afford to. The problem is the urban peasants who live online and eagerly swallow any old rubbish that is put before them, especially if it has a conspiratorial, paranoid quality.
The claim that the Bovaer additive in cows’ feed can end up in the milk is not just false; it is physically impossible. The digestive system in mammals is entirely separate from the lactation system (mammary glands) that produces milk. Nevertheless, the boycotts of supermarket milk alleged to contain Bovaer are proliferating.
Almost all medical and dietary innovations now get this treatment, from the false claim in 1998 that the MMR vaccine causes autism (one-quarter of American adults still believe it today), to the 22 percent who believe COVID vaccines caused thousands of deaths in 2021, to the people today who think Bill Gates is trying to kill them with poisoned milk.
Why Gates and not Elon Musk? Because Gates is backing an Australian start-up called Rumin8 that is working on another dietary supplement that suppresses methane production in cows.
The willfully ignorant will always be with us, and they’re noisier than most other people. But they’re usually a minority; keep going anyway. It’s just another cost of doing business.
