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Big Oil and Big Ag are teaming up to turn cow poop into energy — and profits. The math doesn’t add up.
The hundreds of billions of pounds of waste produced by America’s dairy cows every year has long been a headache for farmers. Manure is expensive to manage and, to state the obvious, it smells terrible, which can lead to complaints, protests, and lawsuits from neighbors — even the occasional fine or misdemeanor charge. And when dairies store their manure in giant open-air lagoons, the most common and cheapest method, it becomes a climate problem: As the manure decomposes, it produces methane, a climate “super pollutant” that accelerates climate change at a much faster rate than carbon dioxide. But in recent ... (full story)