Blog - Joyful Curmudgeon - Blog
A Mary T. Hoffman Commentary from All-Creatures.org

 

"Joyful Curmudgeon" An oxymoron?
No! I see all the beauty of God's creation and I'm joyful.  At the same time, I see all the suffering and corruption going on in the world, and feel called to help expose and end it so that we may have true peace and compassion.

 

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Cattle Grazing on Federal Lands – 17 November 2008
By Mary T. Hoffman

Here are some interesting facts from Mike Hudak’s Cattle Grazing on Federal Public Lands Contributes to Global Warming:

“…based on the U.S. government’s figures…the methane annually produced by cattle grazing on U.S. federal public lands has the global warming potential equivalent…to any of the following:

• annual greenhouse gas emissions from 675,630 passenger vehicles
• CO2 emissions from 418,722,027 gallons of gasoline consumed
• CO2 emissions from 8,578,933 barrels of oil consumed
• CO2 emissions from the electricity use of 488,601 homes for one year
• CO2 emissions from the energy use of 325,591 homes for one year
• CO2 emissions from burning 19,263 railcars’ worth of coal
• CO2 emissions of 0.79 coal-fired power plants for one year
• carbon annually sequestered by 838,396 acres of pine or fir forests
• carbon annually sequestered by 25,730 acres of forest preserved from deforestation.

I also appreciate Mike Hudak’s sense of humor in the midst of presenting the facts on this disastrous situation:

“Wait a minute,” I can hear critics from the livestock industry protesting. “What about ways in which cattle grazing on public lands actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions? What about all the diseases that meat consumption contributes to, like stroke, heart disease, and diabetes that shorten people’s lives, and thereby reduces the amount of greenhouse gases those people will indirectly generate through their use of fossil fuels?” While there may be some merit to that objection, I will leave it as an exercise for ranching advocates to perform the calculations.
Mike Hudak is the author of Western Turf Wars: The Politics of Public Lands Ranching, the book that explains how governmental mismanagement of ranching is destroying America’s public lands with our tax dollars.

To read the entire article on cattle grazing on Federal Public Lands, visit:
http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/ar-cattlegrazing.html 

Go on to: A Few Snowflakes – 18 November 2008
Return to: Thought for Today – 16 November 2008
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