How to stop global warming

I'm bored with climate change now. I resent that I should feel guilty whenever the sun shines. When the weather is lovely, I want to enjoy it, dammit.

Not that I ever paid much attention to the global warmingists.

The usual free-range communists and fair trade hippies continue to berate us for having fun, and that methane is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and that farmed animals are doing more damage to the climate than all the world's transport, power stations, and sunken lightbulbs put together.  What's more, demand for beef means forests are being destroyed, and pressure is being put on our water supplies.  Oh my god.  We are doomed.

Plainly, then, the solution is to kill anything with more than one stomach. Maybe I should shoot my sheep?  No, happily what the free-range warmists are actually saying is that you can keep your petrol-run SUV and your walk-in beer fridge, but you must stop eating meat.

In fact, you have to stop eating all animal products. No more milk. No more cheese. No more jellybeans. You must become ...........shudder ...........vegan.

Now of course if you don’t like the taste of meat, then it’s perfectly reasonable to be vegetarian. It’s why people who don’t like non-Maori join the Maori Party.  At least vegetarians don't shun animal  products.   However, I can think of nothing I’d like less than being vegan.

Of course there are certain weeds I like very much. Broccoli, asparagus, basil, rocket and leeks in particular. But the idea of eating only a broccoli, without even so much as a blue cheese sauce or parmesan topping, fills me with dread.

There are wider implications, too. Let us imagine that the world decided today to abandon its appetite for joints of beef, and for meat-infused Mars bars. What effect would this have on the countryside?

What would you find in the fields that were once filled with grazing cows and truffle pigs?

Hardcore free-range vegan warmists like to imagine that the land would be returned to the indigenous species, that you could go for a walk without a farmer shooting a rabbit, and that you’d see all manner of pretty flowers and ferns and lots of once-extinct creatures. Moa, for instance.

In fact if animal farmers were driven away, the land would be divided up in two ways. Some would be given over to the growing of potatoes, and the rest would be bought by rock stars.

Plainly, the best thing we can do if we want to save the world, preserve the countryside and continue eating meat, is to work out a way in which animals produce less methane.

Scientists in Germany are working on a pill, but apparently this has a number of side effects. These are not itemised, but I can only assume that if you trap the gas inside the cow one of the drawbacks is that it might explode.  And scientists in NZ (AgResearch?) are trialling grasses that produce less methane inside a cow

But these ideas, while intelligent, are in fact unnecessary. Cows need a new foodstuff: something that is rich in iron, calcium and natural goodness.

Vegans.