NY Attorney General Letitia James Sues World’s Largest Beef Producer

NY AG Letitia James deserves tremendous credit for intent and a severe scolding for her concurrent sin of omission.

She correctly states that current beef production emits the bulk of New York's environmental methane. Then she concurrently and shamefully omits the fact the ruminants are not responsible for its accumulation. The crime of methane accumulation accrues to New York's soil industry and the vested interests in the pharmaceutics and heavy equipment industries that have corrupted those soil managers.

The methano-phagic organisms that naturally return environmental methane to the soil by default, die in soils with less than 4% carbon. Healthy NY soil contains 7% carbon. Most contemporary NY soil barely maintains 1%. Those essential methano-phagic organisms have been destroyed by three multi-billion dollar predatory and biocidal industries:

• machinery that breaks and inverts soil to a depth greater than 4 inches;

• chemical pesticides that finish killing any soil organisms that survive the ploughing; and

• chemical fertilizers re-administered every year.

I sincerely admire AG James' courage in taking on the powerful beef industry.

I cringe at the cowardice, or perhaps the intellectual laziness, that criminalizes the ruminants rather than the predatory conditions under which they are raised.

That omission is all the more scandalous, nay criminal itself, when those innocent ruminants actually represent the solution to, not the cause of environmental methane accumulation. Ruminants freed from feed lots, returned to pasture under regimes of skilfully managed grazing, both till with their hooves to the ideal depth of four inches and, along with other restored organisms, fertilize and replenish soil to the requisite 7% carbon.

When Ms James re-allocates her quota of legislative and enforcement courage to banning or severely restricting petroleum based heavy equipment tillage, banning or severely restricting big-pharma pesticides, and banning or severely restricting big-pharma fertilizers, she will have graduated from difficult, but still cliché logical fallacy, to the truly heroïc.