Congressman Lee Terry (R. Neb) gave a speech on the floor of the House yesterday that bears dissecting.
I was surfing the cable channels last night, curious to see how the Senate pseudo-filabuster was going, when I happen to see my local Congressman, Representative Lee Terry step up to the lectern on the floor of the House. I decided to listen for a while.
Frankly, I was flabbergasted by what he had to say, not so much by his opining about the need for U.S. energy security, which is the new political mantra in America, or his endorsement of hydrogen and hybrid cars. No, it was his lack of a grasp for the science of the situation at irritated me.
I called his Washington office and they kindly -- and unwittingly -- provided me with a copy of his speech, portions of which I have reproduced below for your edification and mine.
He begins...
Mr. Speaker, I am here tonight to talk about energy security. We have talked about energy independence, and I think that is a subset of energy security.
We have to look at the world in total, and we have to realize that we need to secure our own energy sources if we are going to secure the future of our country. Even as I look at probably the most immediate issue, the war with terrorists, their actions against us, but if we take that and look at the world in total, when I see the lowest common denominator, it's energy. It is a fight or a battle for energy.
As a famous local sportscaster used to say, "Wow, Nellie!"
Is this an admission from a staunchly Republican, five-term Congressman, that in fact, the war on terror and in Iraq, in particular, really is about the oil, which the administration and its supporters have long denied? Sort of seems that way to me, though I didn't realize this the first time I heard it or even the first time I read it.
If so, that's a pretty remarkable confession to make.
Further on in his speech, Representative Terry -- who seems to be a nice guy and liked by many -- would appear to find himself on the fringes if not in the camp of the climate change skeptics, which doesn't surprise me since from his remarks, he obviously doesn't understand the science behind the situation. Here's the salient passage starting with paragraph eight.
Now, what a lot of people don't know when we talk about global warming or the CO2 emissions, that is the gas that is depleting our ozone, the vast majority of that is created naturally, not by humans. Yes, human activity that I am going to talk about in a minute does contribute to that.
Now, as I understand, the major contributor and the most significant contributor to CO2 emissions is livestock.
Okay, there are a couple fallacies here that need correction, the first being that carbon dioxide does not deplete the ozone (O3) layer. In point of fact, it is a family of chlorine and bromine gases, collectively known as chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) that cause ozone depletion. This is why we put in place the Montreal Protocol to ban the production and sale of these compounds which, when mixed with the ozone that protects life on the planet from the sun's harmful UV rays, causes the ozone to breakdown, creating holes in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide, Mr. Terry, doesn't destroy the ozone layer, illegal refrigerants do.
The next incorrect statement is that "the most significant contributor to CO2 emissions is livestock."
Now, it is true that based on a 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report entitled, "Livestock's Long Shadow - Environmental Issues and Options" the biological emissions of livestock (cattle principally) do produce more greenhouse gases, as measured in equivalent CO2, than the transportation sector. It is estimated to be responsible for 18 percent of total anthropomorphically-caused emissions.
Of course, the other 82 percent largely comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, land use changes, and the manufacture of cement, as we'll see below.
According to the FAO, livestock are only responsible for just 9 % of human-activity-related carbon dioxide emission. But the real culprits are methane, which is 23 times more effective as a heat-holding, greenhouse gas then CO2, and ammonia; the former accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane (the US EPA calculates the number is 28%) and the later 64% of ammonia, along with nitrous oxide which contributes 65%, both largely derived from their manure.
Representative Terry's argument seems to be that most carbon dioxide is created "naturally": cattle burps and manure being just one example and that man's contribution is relatively insignificant in comparison, which is, of course, the classic argument of global warming skeptics. Granted, raising cattle can create significant environmental damage, especially in terms of water pollution from feedlot run-off and deforestation like that in Central and South America. But long before white men settled in what would someday become Nebraska, the Congressman's home state, vast herds of bison, millions strong roamed the grasslands of America, as did similar herds of ungulates and other wildlife in Africa and Asia. Their biological emissions never caused the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to exceed 270 ppm for hundreds of thousands of years as ice core readings verify.
We're now at 370 ppm and rising.
Then starting in the mid-1700's increasing amounts of coal began to be mined and burned as the industrial revolution got underway. Since 1751, mankind has released from its million-years-long sequestration an estimated 315 billion tons of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and the production of cement. According to Environmental Defense, in 2004 American automobiles alone emitted 314 million metric tons of carbon. In 2005, about a third of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States alone came from the transportation sector.
In addition to carbon dioxide, the emissions from automobiles also contain less benign compounds than the NOx and ammonia produced by cattle. They emit a veritable witch's brew of volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and deadly carbon monoxide.
According to the World Resources Institute, the transportation sector accounts for some 17% of all CO2 emissions globally, and two thirds of that comes from cars and trucks.
So, while cattle contribute 9% of actual global CO2 emissions -- and these are "fueled" from natural energy sources (excluding the feeding of corn, which is produced with heavy petroleum and natural gas inputs) -- our cars and trucks produce some 11%. Cattle eating grass don't cause a net increase in CO2 concentrations, unlike exhuming and combusting coal and oil and natural gas (methane) by the millions of tons each year for the last 150 years. After all, when was the last time you saw a Hereford driving down the highway in an SUV or a Guernsey mining coal?
I'll tackle the rest of the Congressman's speech in a subsequent commentary.