Letter to the Editor - Pastor Robert Drury

To the Editor:

The "Green New Deal" has been promoted for a couple of years. It sounds attractive and has a worthy objective: To reduce pollution and global warming. But, on Memorial Day there was a strange twist to the vocus on going green.

There was an hour-long program on the radio about reducing greenhouse gases; but these were not the gases that come from burning fossil fuels. They were the kind that come from the rear ends of animals, especially cows. These are called methane. The whole program was presented as a crisis of bovine flatulence.

What I also found strange was that the presentation was given on the day after the running of the Indianapolis 500. So, I did some mathematics (in the old days we called it arithmetic), and here are my results: Thirty cars going around in circles at 200 m.p.h. for five hundred miles gives a total of 15,000 miles. If each car gets an average of eight miles per gallon of fuel, then 1,875 gallons of fuel were consumed in the race. We can then add that figure to the fossil fuel consumed for the 135,000 fans who attended. Though I am not the brightest star in the drawer or the sharpest knife in the galaxy, my initial estimate is that more pollution was generated by the whole Indy 500, or any car race, than was produced on Sunday, May 30 by all the cows in the world.

In my reading of the creation account in the Book of Genesis, it was the Creator, God, who designed and created everything, including cows. In the New Testament the messenger from God told St. Peter: "Slaughter and eat." We usually don't think of slaughtering fruits and vegetables.

So, with a little thought and a lot of sarcasm, for vegetarians and opponents of "calf arting", I propose these solutions to the problem of bovine pollution: a) take more farmland and build more racetracks; b) take more farmland and set up shopping malls, to be later abandoned for newer ones; c) take more farmland and construct more amusement parks, also to be abandoned; d) take mor farmland and build new airports and expand present ones; e) and, build more athletic stadiums for the already-overpaid athletes. That'll teach those cows to be rude.

If this is the direction in which the environmental movement is going, I may not participate.

Pastor Robert Drury

Fulton, Ky.