With all the focus on dirty air in metro areas like Los Angeles and Houston, California's San Joaquin Valley has established itself as the undisputed leader in dirty air.
An August 2 article in the LA Times lays the blame squarely on dairy cows, rather than traffic or crop spraying.
The San Joaquin is home to 20% of the nation's dairy cows, and together they emit 50 million pounds of volatile organic compounds per year.
The problem only gets worse when you consider the millions of pounds of cow dung that is laid out to dry along roads and highways -- something you will be quite familiar, if you frequent Interstate 5 or Hwy 99 between Sacramento and Los Angeles.
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This air quality problem hits home with the fact that 18% of children in Fresno carry an inhaler to school.
Another thing to remember is that cows raised for beef are not considered in these statistics.
Predictably the dairy industry is presenting a multi-pronged attack by simultaneously ridiculing the statistics as "fart science" and scrambling to fund their own, presumably contradictory studies.
The tragic thing is that, with all of its painstaking and expensive regulation of the auto industry, California has no regulations on meat or dairy producers. Nor are there any federal regulations. Because, despite its perennial standing as the #2 polluter in America, the beef/dairy industry is completely exempted from Clean Air and Water legislation. If the oil, coal, nuclear, automobile, or any other industry had such an exemption, there would have been protests and lawsuits. But states and the federal government have been quite successful at spending hundreds of millions of dollars painting the dairy industry as bucolic and cow-friendly, and milk as a kid-friendly food.
Speaking of which, this opinion piece from the August 13 LA Times has some interesting information on the latest studies on milk, childhood obesity, osteoporosis, and ovarian cancer in women, and prostate cancer in men. The quick take: milk might be as dangerous as the ads pretend it is healthful.
Truthfully, I am feeling a bit vindicated, after taking some heat in this diary (due in part to my strident tone, admittedly) over my claim that being vegetarian is a progressive issue.
If dairies are contributing to asthma in 18% of Fresno's children, if one glass of milk a day gives a woman a 13% increase in ovarian cancer risk, if milk may actually cause, rather than prevent brittle bones, perhaps it's time to start regulating the industry's pollution, and talking straight about health rather than using government agencies and federal funds to sell meat and milk to our kids.