Posted on 01/14/2009 10:05:09 AM PST by Coleus
It turns out "going green" may mean cutting back on those juicy steaks and burgers. The reason: Cattle and other livestock expel tons of methane gas, which wreaks havoc on the environment. The issue has become so heated, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed taxing cows as a way to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act -- a suggestion that rankles dairy and cattle farmers.
Pete Staats, whose family has owned Dutch Hollow Farms in Bridgewater for several generations, thinks taxing cows is just plain strange and could put farmers out of business. "I think it's pretty stupid," said Staats, who owns about 40 beef cattle on his Somerset County farm. "If you're going to tax the cows, then you're going to tax the deer, then you're going to tax the geese. It's just ridiculous."
According to the EPA, the gas that leaks from volcanoes and millions of cows and livestock is, pound for pound, about 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Under the EPA proposal, the permit costs potentially translate into $175 per dairy cow, $87.50 a head for beef cattle and $20 per hog, according to Liz Thompson, a research associate with the New Jersey Farm Bureau. A herd of 75 dairy cows would carry a price tag exceeding $13,000.
The proposal is still in the exploratory stage. Staats, a member of the Somerset County Board of Agriculture, sees the proposal as yet another blow to the small family-owned farm. He said the effects of methane from cows is minimal, "especially at the rate we're losing farmers in this country." He said of the methane, "trapping it in some way and using it would make far more sense than putting this so-called tax on it."
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
All these taxes are paving the way for Corporate Agriculture to swoop in and buy all these failed businesses at a steep discount. The power to tax, is the power to destroy. When food prices are up over 600%, Americans may realize they have destroyed themselves.
How do you HTML accent marks?
(Nothing like a FReeper paying close attention to the subject matter of the post, right??)
Actually I went to Alta Vista and their Bablefish translator and converted from English to Spanish (my spelling is bad in English and worse in Spanish). Then I pasted the translation with the accent mark into the FreeRepublic post. The editor in FreeRepublic converted it to HTML for me.
However there is a way to do this and a lot of foreign letter codes with standard keyboard using hot keys.
See following link:
http://www.starr.net/is/type/kbh.html#alt
The only political person I’ve heard lately with more common sense than nearly all the politicians in Washington, DC, is a lovely young lady, wife, mother, and Governor of the Great State of Alaska.
I can’t believe that Governor Sarah Palin would allow the shenanigans that the Government is pulling right now under her administration.
We’uns have got to do what we must to support Governor Palin for the Presidency of the USofA in 2012.
They had sneakers in the 19th century?
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