Fuel to make cows jump over the moon (and other hot air)

Kiwi scientists have figured out how to cut the crap - but why has nobody heard of this ingenious plan? asks Killian Doyle.

I'M DUMBFOUNDED. Why, said I, reading a news snippet that was buried deep in the darkest recesses of this fine organ recently, wasn't this dominating every newspaper from Anchorage to Zanzibar?

Why wasn't George Lee jumping around, giggling like a schoolgirl at a private audience with Justin Timberlake, telling us we're not all going to die after all?

I refer, of course, to the claim by New Zealand scientists that they've developed an inoculation to reduce livestock methane emissions in a bid to cut global warming. Pull the udder one, you say. But I jest not. This could be the saving of us all.

"Our agricultural-research organisation just last week was able to map the genome that causes methane in ruminant animals, and we believe we can vaccinate against flatulent emissions," Kiwi trade minister Phil Goff told a Paris summit.

New Zealand, with its 45 million ruminants, has little option but to find a solution to global warming. The effect it's having on the country was evident during the recent All Blacks-Ireland sludgefest.

When your Wellington is entirely flooded, you know you're in trouble.

Noble - if not downright brave - though the Kiwi boffins' work may be, I feel for the cows. The digestion of grass is a tricky business, creating an unholy nebulosity of putridness from the primary orifices, fore and aft. They can't help it.

Not to mention their lives being like Pol Pot - nasty, brutish and short.

Belching and farting is their only release (or is that revenge?).

Still, the fact remains that bovine eructation accounts for around 18 per cent of all global greenhouse-gas emissions from human and animal activities, more than all forms of transport combined. So you see what an environmental goldmine these Kiwis are potentially sitting on.

I have great hopes for our valiant Kiwi chums. Should they beef up their processes and put some meat on the bones of their proposal, I'd happily gobble up a large steak in a future commercial enterprise, which I'd shamelessly milk for all it's worth.

(That's quite enough cow punning for now. Get a moove on - Ed.)

However, should they fail in their endeavours, all is not lost.

Methane is far from useless. It's already being harnessed for fuel. Indeed, Nasa is currently conducting research on its potential for use in rockets. So one of these days, the cow may really jump over the Moon.

And then there's biogas, harvested from fermented cowpats. I don't need to tell you this is a messy, malodorous undertaking. There must be a better way to gather the methane and rescue unfortunate biogas collectors from earning their crust as human dung beetles.

Now, I know of a chap called Myles na Gopaleen who, like the NZ government, famously had a Research Bureau himself. No doubt, being a gas man altogether, this would have been right up his street.

I imagine he'd have invented a device that would collect bovine vapours - from both ends - through a series of valves and mahogany gaspipes, distilling them into finest malt whiskey or other equally useful substances. Admirable, but doomed to failure. Too unwieldy.

Instead, the obvious solution is to genetically modify the cattle so they expel all their noxious gases from their gobs. They could then be fitted with tiny gas masks, which would pay for themselves in jig time when the collected methane is flogged off for fuel.

The added bonus of cows spouting clouds of hot air would be that they could then double as politicians, saving taxpayers a fortune.

Sadly, I doubt Myles would be too impressed. Up there in the ether, surrounded by millions of tonnes of methane, I can't imagine he's in any mood to approve of anything. You can hardly blame him. Have you ever smelled the stuff?