farting... But good heavens... What morons.

But a quick review shows that farting by cows is a very small amount of cow-produced methane. It's a huge Deal, though, for the "ni odnogo shaga" or "not a single step back" crowd.

Belching is more important. And there are wide-ranging estimates of what methane cows produce. If you just look at the Guardian for the last 8 years, you see every upwards and high revision to the number. You don't see where those numbers are called into question by later research. Just the oft-repeated claim that bigger is truer. The Guardian doesn't like the EPA's claim from a few years ago, because top-down estimates said that it was missing "up to 90%" of the cow-methane emissions.

Most reasonable (not high-end, "this is what must be true" but "this is what measurements seem to say is true&quot estimates put cows at maybe 40% of US production of methane. Give or take a bit. These estimates tend to back the EPA's, but that's not apparent from some media sources.

Most estimates say *human* contributions to world-wide methane production is 4% of the total.

The US doesn't produce the vast majority of methane from cows. We're #4 in cow population, a full 100 million behind #2 India. Granted, we outsource some methane production to countries like Brazil, but not so much; and some other countries' methane production is outsourced to the US. Other countries that are more scrupulous about reducing methane import more meat. Or dairy. (It's one of those confounds where if you don't pay attention to the footnotes all you come away with is advantage-providing agitprop. For example, each Saudi uses a fair amount of water. Total it all up, and they use far more water than they have access to in a given year. The US has done the same with carbon--so have a lot of other countries, to a greater extent, and often count only atmospheric carbon produced within their borders and not all the carbon needed, say, for the imported power or products/produce they consume.)

It also pays to note that the US production means try to avoid methane in belching. There's a fair amount of research in how to mitigate it, which has begun to percolate down to the feedstock in use, so there's no necessary reason for US "per cowpita" methane to be the same as free-range cows in India or Brasili-cows.

Even stranger is the document the disagreements are based on. It was produced, made public, transmitted to news sources. Staffers had interviews about it. Then, suddenly, after a couple of days of fire-storming, it was deemed a working draft that was accidentally released. You'd think that having Congressional staffers give interviews about it to national media--presumably requiring permission from their bosses--would have made the "premature emission" claim seem less plausible, but it didn't. Even then, after retracting it, the document still has defenders. So it's withdrawn as a draft, but was sufficiently official to be presented on multiple platforms; it's not to be taken seriously because of inaccuracy (presumably), but it is defended as accurate. Strikes me as something that was intended to be serious, will eventually again be promoted as official and serious, but nobody wanted to make that fight at that time.

Which Produce almost half of the US methane emissions. Methane breaks down faster than co2 but it holds more heat, so it's worse.

bovine belches as fuel.

Whatever, I have had slightly more experience with horses than with cows, and can assure you that they also fart. A lot.