Last night I was listening to Buck Sexton’s radio show when he played this ad.
You know, cow farts have been my number one environmental concern. Well, make that number two.
There’s a story behind the yodeling young cowboy and the burger chain: Burger King says it has found a way to reduce, er, the potency of the gases that frequently emanate from the southern ends of northbound cattle.
Deseret News picks up the story from there:
The fast-food chain has been diversifying its flagship Whopper sandwich recently, removing artificial preservatives and offering a meatless “Impossible Whopper.” Its newest innovation: beef from decidedly less-gassy cows. This new Whopper’s official name is the Whopper with Reduced Methane Emissions Beef.
Burger King delivered the announcement Tuesday via a new commercial starring viral country music yodeler Mason Ramsey.
This methane gets released through burping and flatulence. And its environmental impact is significant: Cattle contributes 14.5% of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions, Business Insider reports, and methane warms the planet 86 times more than carbon dioxide over 10 to 20 years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the livestock industry is directly responsible for approximately a quarter of climate change in the industrial age.
The Green New Deal, which garnered zero votes in Congress before being adopted wholesale into Joe Biden’s puppet platform, was hellbent on government mandating a way out of cow fart emissions. The mandate included telling Americans we would no longer be allowed to eat beef.
How that would be enforced by the “defund the police” party that has gone from being soft on crime to actively encouraging it would be among the details only the devil can be bothered with.
Burger King has found a better way to deal with cow farts through research, development, and innovation, as the private sector tends to do. So good on them. I haven’t eaten at Burger King in approximately two decades and don’t plan to just because of this, but private-sector innovation is a good thing. Government didn’t tell Burger King to do this, they just did it. Their customers will decide whether they like this beef or not, and as for me and my house, Whataburger, Five Guys, Sonic, Mighty Fine and others are better and BK remains as far down our burger list as it has been for a long time.
The private sector beyond flatulent cows is already reducing emissions across the world’s largest and most open economy, which would be ours. Prior to the pandemic, the United States led the world in reducing carbon emissions according to the International Energy Agency. President Trump had pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, yet the U.S. beat the targets the Accord set forth. The private sector, responding to market changes and pressures plus innovations in energy development, led the way.
The IEA says the switch in the United States, Japan, and the European Union away from coal and toward renewables, natural gas, and nuclear have driven the reduction. But it’s really the latter two, as renewables remain expensive and less reliable than nuclear and especially natural gas. Natural gas is now the top source of America’s energy according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with fossil fuels overall accounting for about 63% of our energy. That virtue-signal Tesla you see on the highway is a natural gas and nuclear powered car, for the most part. Solar and wind aren’t even powering one-fourth of it.
Natural gas tends to be produced as a by-product of extracting oil from the ground. Energy producers are able to extract this natural gas primarily by fracking. Fracking drove the pre-pandemic energy boom in Texas and across the nation, leading to the historically low fuel and home energy costs we have all enjoyed over the past three years.
Democrat presumed presidential nominee Joe Biden has pledged to end fracking, ban all fossil fuels (natural gas is a fossil fuel too), and thereby crush the U.S. economy, kill jobs and force you to pay more at the pump and to keep your home, office, school and church livable. Renewable energy depends heavily on the extraction of rare earth minerals from the ground, an industry dominated at this point by Communist China.
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