Kill the Cows!

A while ago I joked that if NZ was to get serious about carbon neutrality, we should simply start shooting all the cows,

To my surprise, my joke has become near official policy of the Greens, and of No Right Turn.

They are both critical of plans for the dairy industry to grow by 4% a year, as this will probably lead to increased carbon emissions.

So from this I can only assume that if technology can’t decrease the average emissions per cow, they favour killing off the cows in order to reduce emissions.

Why is this such a stupid thing to do? Well its stupid both economically and environmentally.

Economically, artificially restricting out major source of export income is just going to make us all poorer.

But environmentally, it’s damn silly also. Because even if we decided to get out of the dairy industry all together and shot all our cows, this wouldn’t magically stop the demand for dairy products and beef and lamb etc. So what would happen is other countries would increase their dairy/cattle production. And it’s likely, as our industry is relatively efficient, that total emissions would increase even faster.

I must be careful about joking on this blog in future – more of my jokes may end up as Green party policy!!