Business, Political Commentary, Science And Society

And So It Begins

24 Comments

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is suing the EPA over Climaquiddick:

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has filed a petition to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. to overturn the EPA’s recent greenhouse gas “endangerment” ruling.

The ruling states that gases believed to cause global warming pose a human health risk and is the first step toward their regulation by the EPA under the Clean Air Act. The NCBA and other producer groups fear the ruling could lead to lawsuits and new restrictions on the nation’s livestock industries.

…The cattle group points to Climategate, in which critics allege that e-mails stolen from Great Britain’s University of East Anglia show bias and manipulation of data by scientists on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The fact that the EPA relied on some of the IPCC’s data to make its finding makes the ruling questionable, Thies said.

Discovery should be quite enlightening. I expect this will go all the way to SCOTUS.

24 thoughts on “And So It Begins”

  1. Bo Derek was on O’Reilly saying cattle are taking range away from wild horses. I was thinking the solution is simple… we should eat horses.

  2. I love this part:

    In a statement to the Capital Press, an EPA spokeswoman said the agency is confident that it will prevail in court, adding that the Supreme Court had ordered the agency to answer the endangerment question.

    There would be “no basis whatsoever” to deny “a fact that is recognized by overwhelming scientific consensus” that the earth is warming, the statement said.

    Pass the buck (SCOTUS made us do it) and cloud the issue (the Earth is warming not that man is making the Earth warm)

  3. Bo Derek was on O’Reilly saying cattle are taking range away from wild horses. I was thinking the solution is simple… we should eat horses.

    That’s not far removed from the Bureau of Land Management’s solution of just killing them.

  4. Aside from methane emission restrictions, are there other ways that the EPA’s rules on greenhouse gas emissions can harm the cattle industry?

  5. Note that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and that many herbivores produce great amounts of it.

    Therefore, clearly our first step in protecting the planet should be to kill all deer, goats, cows, and other wildlife, as they are likely putting out a lot more greenhouse gasses than humans are.

  6. Man, those cattle ranchers don’t take no bull. Remember when Oprah made the claims about Texas cows infected with mad cow disease a while back? They sued her ass six ways to Sunday. Funny thing is, now looking back on it the whole mad cow thing was wildly over blown by the media. Really nobody in American ever got the disease and one had to eat the brain and spinal cord to contract it (them’s not good eatin’). Kinda makes you think about the media’s push on AGW don’t it?

  8. So are Europeans, going by time of introduction alone. 😛

    And wasn’t it the government’s quick response to Mad Cow, i.e., stopping the importation of European beef immediately, that kept it from being a problem here? Correct me if I’m wrong, please.

  9. Ethan, regarding why BSE (Mad Cow) never became an issue in the US, you are mistaken. Since the only pace that BSE outbreaks occurred during this ‘crisis’ was the UK, and the beef was shipped elsewhere during that time without any spread of the disease, it is unlikely that the quarantine in and of itself had any significant impact.

    Josh explains quite effectively why this is the case, e.g., you don’t get it if you don’t each a variety of parts of the cow that Americans simply don’t eat in any quantity. A side factor is that the majority of our animal feed sources, though often repellant (we often mix animal protein into our feedstocks, thus making our food animals cannibals) are more carefully monitored (largely by the stockraisers themselves) than is the case in the EU. Seems that cattle being found diseased and/or contaminated is very bad for business, hence many of the agribusiness that raise them pay some attention to quality control of the entire cycle. Benefits of capitalism I suppose.

    The Feds claimed credit for smothering BSE, but there is very little evidence to support this claim, and much to cast doubt upon it. British beef, though heavily quarantined by most EU governments and several others to boot, was widely shipped to several eastern european countries and the former Soviet states as well, with little evidence of BSE outbreaks. Much more to the point, Argentinian beef (which uses similar food cyles and stockraising techniques) did not show similar BSE outbreaks, despite some incidents in the last few decades.

    The BSE scare, though real, was probably heavily overhyped and pursued by risk averse regulators and protectionist farmers who were all too happy to limit competition (and hence raise prices) while they could.

  10. I wouldn’t bet on the SCOTUS reining in the EPA without first checking what sort of mood Kennedy (the tie-breaking vote) is in. While I agree with many who say that the case here is clear-cut (the data underlying the ‘consensus’ that the SCOTUS cited giving the EPA this power in the first place now looks to be heavily doctored at best, and more likely utterly falsified, which would then undercut the reasoning of the SCOTUS in the original decision), Kennedy has shown very little attention to such niceties as consistency or even rationality in the past, and more to his glee in becoming a history maker.

    With that said, I suspect that if the GOP gets control of the House in 2010, the EPA might find it very difficult to obtain funding for enforcing such a ruling. Keep in mind this is one of those issues that the GOP might be willing to confront The One(tm) on knowing that public opinion is absolutely on their side. Does anyone care to suggest that given the almost certain economic and political consequences of such a regulatory change that public opinion, already trending against the greenies, wouldn’t shift even more against them and for anyone opposing their actions?

  11. “(we often mix animal protein into our feedstocks, thus making our food animals cannibals)”

    This is not true. It was once done, but I’m pretty sure it is now forbidden for any animal intended for human consumption.

    I know that you do have to eat nervous tissue (brain sandwiches anyone?), but there is some risk from improperly butchered animals, e.g. bits of spinal cord getting into your hotdog. Hence the feed restrictions and tight control over procedure.

  12. So are Homo Sapiens, including “Native” Americans and the people who were here before them. Fixed it for you Ethan.

  15. It’s gratifying to see an industry that won’t be cowed by the AGW movement. They have a legitimate beef, and not going to hide, but take the bull by the horns and kick some tail.

    The EPA may claim in self-defense that it got a bum steer from Mann and the CRU, but that will just give the skeptics more fodder for their blogs. It may even create a stampede in the press, prodding them to round up more maverick scientists who want to do a level headed assessment of the data. It will then become apparent that the CRU doesn’t represent the cream of the scientific community. The press may finally lose their herd mentalitly over AGW.

    Then it should become clear to all that whether you’re talking about CO2 or the methane in the dairy air, it is all a bunch of manure. Let’s hope this lawsuit deeply wounds the AGW movement, and doesn’t just graze it.

    After ruminating on this cheesy post, I find that I can’t milk it any longer.

  21. Pingback: Good: Climaquiddick Is Causing Lawsuits To Reverse EPA Rulings « Tai-Chi Policy

  23. “Well my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle”
    – Mal Reynolds, Firefly

  24. Big D
    An even better solution would be to kill all the AGW activists. Reduce CO2 emmissions (and methane) and cut down on hot air!

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