‘Hey Bill Nye, Is There a Conspiracy to Cover Up Agricultural Climate Change?’ #TuesdaysWithBill

Batman: Hello Bill. I’m Batman and I’m a big fan. My question to you is why isn’t the agricultural sector, especially with the cows, being addressed with global warming with as much media attention as oil companies, seeing as it is actually the biggest factor affecting global warming. At this day and age, do you believe that there is a conspiracy? Thank you.

Bill Nye: Batman. Thank you for your question. I hardly recognized you. I really appreciate you introducing yourself. So there is actually a lot of attention being drawn to the effect of agriculture on climate change.

And I want to emphasize that’s really cow belches coming out of the mouth where most of the methane comes from. They have four stomachs. They do things a little differently than we do. And people are studying ways to make cows less belchful. I don’t know how effective they’re going to be, but there is actually a lot of attention being drawn to it.

As far as there being a conspiracy, I really wouldn’t call it a conspiracy. We’ve been doing it this way for so long, 250 years, burning fossil fuels, burning the material of ancient swamps or wetlands that it’s a hard habit to break.

When it comes to agriculture, keep in mind that there are 7.3 billion people around today. But by 2050, there will be at least 9 billion people. There may be 10 billion people. And so those people are going to have to eat, and it’s very reasonable that all of us will move increasingly toward a plant-based diet, and it will not be economical to raise cattle and sell meat.

That it may go that way just with market forces. All this aside, or all this included, or think about all this at once. What would be great, I will say as a science educator, a voter, and taxpayer, is if we had a tax. Or we cannot ever use the word tax, if we had a fee on the production of greenhouse gases.

So if you have a dairy farm, if you have a meat ranch, a cattle ranch, a pig farm or ranch, or farrowing operation, what have you. If the farmer or the rancher were required to add the cost of putting methane into the atmosphere into the cost of his or her products, then consumers would make different decisions about those products.

And this fee would be inherently fair. We would have it on agricultural products. We would have it on oil and gas used in transportation. We’d have it on the transportation that the oil and gas use to take ships across the ocean.

So it would be a fair and inherent tariff on goods produced overseas, whether they are manufactured goods or agricultural products. So this is a big idea. But when you have the fossil fuel industry working so hard to introduce doubt about climate change, and you have these climate change deniers who have been so successful in getting the idea that plus or minus two percent is really plus or minus 100 percent, it’s been very difficult to get this sort of thing like a carbon fee or a methane fee put in place.

So I’m skeptical of a conspiracy, but I want you to know people are thinking hard about the effects of agriculture and methane and meat production on the environment. But it’s an excellent question, Batman. An excellent question.

Now I know you’re having fun, but I encourage you, when you ask serious questions, maybe to not dress as Batman. With that said, I think everybody here had a good time with it, so maybe you did the right thing. Carry on, Batman. Carry on. Protect us all, caped crusader.