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Climate policy didn’t target meat. It targeted a metric.

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The panic over methane wasn’t scientific. It was strategic.

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The war on meat was never about warming. It was about control.

BRIEFING

Grant here. For eons now we've been sold the idea from climate activists that livestock is a serious threat to our climate. This then ushered in a new wave of alternative meats, veganism/vegetarianism, and every kind of dairy alternative out there. However, a new scientific review just cracked the foundation of this climate narrative, and the most surprising part of all is how fragile the foundation was in the first place. Let’s break it down.

For years, activists have pointed to methane as the "smoking gun" that justified attacking livestock, meat consumption, and fertilizer use. But the centerpiece of that argument, a metric called GWP100, stretches methane’s impact across a century even though the gas breaks down in a fraction of that time. This all results in a crisis that was built on a calculation that frankly doesn’t match the physics.

When a small Italian research team applied methane’s real atmospheric behavior, the entire threat profile collapsed. Warming projections fell by more than half at today’s emission levels, and small reductions in livestock emissions produced almost no warming at all.

So essentially, if the model inflating methane’s impact was this flawed, then the policies built on top of it are just as unsound. The war on meat wasn’t driven by data, but instead it was driven by a number that should've never been carrying the weight of this global policy in the first place.

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Sensational new scientific findings have blown holes in the climate hoax opinion that humans need to give up eating meat to save the planet. The effect of methane (CH₄), a minor ‘greenhouse’ gas, have been grossly exaggerated to suggest that animal farming poses a significant threat to the global climate. But the invented threat relies on multiplying by around ten the length of time that CH₄ stays in the atmosphere – an invention under Global Warming Potential 100 know as GWP100 that is in widespread use in activist circles, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. At current emission levels, five Italian scientists predict 54% less warming than under GWP100, while small decreasing emissions, possible with some changes in animal diets, produce only tiny amounts of claimed warming.

Load the vital protein-stuffed steaks on the barbie and celebrate the removal of another key plank in the climate hoax backing the ultimate luxury fantasy of Net Zero. You can go grubbing around the tropics for ‘superfood’ berries and grains, but meat is the core component of the evolved human diet. So much so that one fears the natural Darwinian process will in future start to reduce the numbers of weedy and increasingly feeble-minded individuals trying to get by on only ‘vegan’ sustenance.

Despite its obvious flaw, meat haters have persisted in using GWP100 to throw fuel on the climate crisis fire. But the fakery is exposed by the Italian scientists’ work, which accounts for methane’s short time in the atmosphere and shows large reductions in claimed warming at current levels, and even some cooling with relatively modest reductions.

Nevertheless, the Italian scientists break from the ‘consensus’ pack only up to a point, since they term all the greenhouses gases as climate ‘pollutants’ rather than trace atmospheric gases essential for all life on Earth. A rising methane emission pathway is presented showing little change from the proposed warming under GWP100, but the scenario depends on agricultural emissions rising an improbable three times faster than recent growth would suggest. Methane emissions may rise in future, but, if the need is felt, they can be controlled by a number of natural means. The cow produces protein rich natural food for humans by eating inedible grasses and vegetation that leads to enteric fermentation in its stomach. Reductions in the resulting gases between 10–30% have been achieved by non-chemical means such as rotating diet optimisation, selective breeding with animals with lower emissions and changes in husbandry techniques.

In essence, the new science paper shows that GWP100 gets it hopelessly wrong when it is used to promote the climate crisis hoax. Anti-meat eating has long been a fad of extreme environmentalism but, under cover of the command-and-control Net Zero project, it has been introduced into the mainstream. The new science findings suggest that wiping out methane emissions from livestock farming is unnecessary. If CH4 is your thing and you fear the addition of tiny amounts of cow burps and farts into the atmosphere, you need do little more than keep meat consumption at its current level. However, that might not be that relevant anyway since most methane emissions arise from a variety of sources and are subject to large natural variations.

In fact, there is considerable scientific observations and evidence that suggest the entire alarm over atmospheric trace gases is a giant con. Trace gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide only warm within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum. In addition, their effects are often mitigated by overlapping water vapour, a much more powerful greenhouse gas that is plentiful across the atmosphere. Observations and measurements suggest that the trace gases ‘saturate’ and produce only logarithmic diminishing warming returns. This simple, and many argue highly plausible, hypothesis has the immense advantage of explaining the climate past going back 600 million years. Over time, trace gases were often at much higher levels, producing comfortable conditions for abundant plant and animal life to thrive. Two well-known exponents of ‘saturation’ are Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen. They are of the opinion that methane and nitrous oxide “are too small to have any significant effect on the environment”. Any warming effect is said to be negligible compared to natural variability.

Just to further highlight how out of whack the entire climate community was on methane, we can't ignore the ever-growing industry of almond farming and the serious negative impact it's had on the environment.

Almond farming has increased in production over the last several years, especially as climate activists are swearing off animal-derived dairy products and are instead turning to nut milk alternatives. However, these almond farms are arguably no better for the environment than the traditional livestock they're working to replace.

While almond farms hold a vital place in agriculture, they contribute to some serious environmental issues such as high water consumption, reduced biodiversity, deforestation, pesticide and fertilizer use, and, most incriminating of all, greenhouse gas emissions.

Proving yet again, the "natural" plant alternatives are no better than good ol' traditional cow's milk.

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1. High Water Consumption

Almond trees are notorious for their water use. Each almond nut requires, on average, 12 liters (just over 1.1 gallons) of water to be produced—a staggering figure when multiplied across thousands of orchards. In water-stressed regions like California’s Central Valley, this places tremendous strain on already limited resources.

As droughts become more frequent due to climate change, the question is almond farming bad for the environment becomes even more pressing. Critics argue that the sector’s water footprint is unsustainable amidst growing competition for freshwater, both for people and the environment.

2. Monoculture and Biodiversity Loss

Many almond plantations are monocultures—huge expanses of land planted with only almond trees. While this can maximize short-term efficiency, it comes at an environmental cost:

• Reduced habitat diversity: Fewer native species can thrive, harming biodiversity.
• Bees and pollinators at risk: Almonds depend on bees for pollination, yet intensive farming can expose bees to pesticides and diminish their habitat.

3. Pesticides and Fertilizers

1. Pesticide runoff contaminates soil and local waterways, impacting aquatic ecosystems and groundwater quality.
2. Overuse of fertilizers, like nitrogen and phosphorus, contributes to eutrophication and disrupts nutrient cycles.

The impact of chemical use is a major driver of why critics ask, is almond farming bad for the environment.

4. Soil Health and Erosion

Deforestation, removal of native grasses, and continual cultivation all result in soil degradation, erosion, and the loss of organic matter. Almond orchards, often located on flat, arid land, may exacerbate these risks without proper agricultural management.

5. Greenhouse Gas Emissions & Climate Impact

Almond farming—like much of agriculture—contributes to greenhouse gas emissions through farm equipment, fertilizer application, and land management. Land conversions (i.e., deforestation) for new orchards release stored carbon, further compounding climate challenges.

DEBRIEFING

The collapse of the methane narrative is a poignant example of how quickly a single (and flimsy) metric can become the backbone of an entire climate policy agenda. When GWP100 inflated methane’s lifespan, it turned a short-lived gas into a century-long threat. And that model, as we all know, became the justification for rewriting diets, labeling livestock as climate villains, and pushing the idea that meat was a luxury the planet could no longer afford.

But once you put methane back into its actual atmospheric behavior, the entire narrative falls apart. The true dangers of methane gas weren't just smaller, but they were structurally incomparable to what GWP100 presented.

And this is where the almond comparison matters. Almond farming surged because plant-based alternatives were held up as the clean, moral counterweight to livestock. Yet the reality is a lot more complicated. The fact of the matter is that almond orchards drain water-stressed regions, especially California, flatten biodiversity through monoculture, strain pollinators, and rely on fertilizers and chemicals that create their own negative environmental footprint.

None of this is to say that almonds are "bad" or meat is "perfect." It just simply shows the swap wasn’t based on sustainability. It was more so based on the overly simplified narrative of "cow bad, nut good."

The new research out of Italy on methane doesn’t just correct the numbers, but it completely pulls the rug out from under the idea that these dietary mandates were ever rooted in balanced environmental math. In all honesty, it's becoming more and more clear that we've been seriously hoodwinked by the climate community yet again.

NOW YOU KNOW

The climate fight wasn’t about methane. It was about shaping consumption through bad math.