Climate pseudoscience debunked: Livestock methane fears are baseless
By Gregory Wrightstone
Published May 14, 2026 7:00am ET
Policymakers are demanding that farmers scale back meat production, reengineer agricultural systems, and burden consumers with higher grocery bills to prevent a fabricated climate catastrophe. This is fearmongering based on false claims that methane emitted as a byproduct of livestock digestion contributes significantly to allegedly dangerous atmospheric warming.
Happily, the pseudoscience of this campaign against ruminants — mainly cattle and sheep — is refuted in a paper published by the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. Even if all 1.6 billion of Earth’s cattle were killed, the amount of warming averted would be an immeasurably small 0.04 degrees Celsius, according to the paper. The temperature reduction from killing all 1.3 billion sheep would be 10 times smaller. Even more absurdly, New Zealand’s national goal of reducing cattle and sheep emissions would affect the temperature by no more than 0.000008 degrees Celsius. That is eight one-millionths of a degree.
Even these tiny amounts would be made smaller by the emissions of wild ruminants, such as deer and termites, replacing domesticated animals as agricultural lands reverted to forests and grasslands.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/op-eds/4567157/climate-livestock-methane-fears-baseless/
