E-I-E-I-O
Cows, pigs and chickens cause more global warming than cars, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization reports in a recent study.

 

Duck, everyone. Run for your life. I can envision a certain gaggle of media yakkers jumping all over this report, yanking on it so hard they hyperventilate in their quest to twist its message into something as utterly black as the report itself is white.

 

See? It's what I've been saying for years: Cars DON'T have any impact on global warming. Which, as we all know, has never really existed anyway.

 

The correct take-home message, as stated in the introduction to the report on the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization web site, is that while the global livestock industry does contribute heavily to climate change and worldwide losses in biodiversity, if you flip the coin over you see that the same industry's potential to help solve those problems is proportionally huge.

 

And how would the livestock industry go about helping to solve those problems? The steps, all very attainable, are summarized nicely here, in a story about the U.N. report published Sunday in the Des Moines Register.

 

With A Gas Leak Here, And A Gas Leak There ...
A Wal-Mart store that opened this summer on the site of an old landfill near Cleveland, Ohio, had to be evacuated and closed for several days last week for some mysterious plumbing-repair-related reasons.

 

Rumors about methane leaks have been leaking around in the media, but local safety officials reportedly conducted a series of combustible-gas tests, and those tests turned up negative.

 

This marks at least the second time that store has had to abruptly close since it opened in August. And the timing could hardly be worse for Wal-Mart, what with the peculiar uptick in people's shopping patterns that we seem to be experiencing these days.

 

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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