The New Zealand Ministry of the Environment is studying how to put a price on the flatulence of the animal population, in good romance, the digestion gases of cows and sheep. This Pacific island country has twice as many cows as humans and 5.2 times as many sheep. According to his Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, It would be a question of fixing, in common agreement with the farmers, a tax on the gas emissions produced by the population of farmed animals on which, to a large extent, the New Zealand economy revolves.
Globalizing the calculation, there are about 1,500 million bovine specimens on a planetary scale which annually emit about 100 million tons of methane gas as a result of the enteric fermentation of ruminants. According to scientists, this is equivalent to 2,500 million tons of CO2, with its resulting greenhouse effect, a small fraction (5%) if we compare it with the 50,000 million tons of said gas discharged into the atmosphere by the US, Europe, Japan, Russia, China, etc.
If cows pollute the atmosphere with their flatulence, where does the human species fit into this eschatological approach? A rough estimate indicates that the 7,900 million people who populate the planet produce, annually, about 300 million tons of fecal matter. The gaseous part of this digestion byproduct is composed of nitrogen, hydrogen, CO2, methane gas, and oxygen, in addition to hydrogen sulfide and carbon disulfide.
This is not a crazy or inconsequential calculation. Quite the contrary. According to the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), fecal gases contain the potential to generate biogas capable of supplying electricity to 130 million homes, which translates into business for more than 8,700 million euros. And that’s not all. The remaining dry matter is equivalent, at market value, to about two million tons of coal which, in the emergency arising from the war in Ukraine, is a far from negligible figure.
The difference is that while cows expel methane through respiration, humans do… well, you know. Some details are missing to adjust, but if the flatulence of the human species can be a business, why not also that of the vaquitas, which also feed us. Meanwhile, bovines and people send everything to the upper atmosphere. Who is more guilty, in the end, of the happy global warming?
