Honestly, its all pretty expensive: clean nuclear power plants, wind parks, energy production from all forms of bio mass and all the required infrastructure, building refurbishments and isolation; even a simple energy saving light bulb costs money, before it starts to pay off.

Government, industry and private households are facing a great task. The environmental protection report of the UN left no doubt about it: more costly than the efforts to protect the environment is omitting them. The sums needed in order to remedy damages caused by climate change would simply drive most countries straight into bankruptcy.

Naturally, there are those who claim the participation of mankind in the climatic change is insignificant and that the sun is causing all of this. After all, we have seen much warmer periods in earth’s history. But those wanting to act responsibly should rather not rely on such arguments.

Isn’t it wonderful? Bright yellow rape everywhere, juicy corn all the way to the horizon: a new era of agriculture is dawning. It’s not only food growing for humans but rather energy for their automobiles. Our fields provide us with almost any energy form we could think of. Feeling the need to change and knowing that fossil energy will be depleted some time we need to proceed in a new direction.

The German minister of environment just made it clear: until 2020 the percentage of biological fuels should increase to 17%, which would save the atmosphere millions of tons of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, the minister did not reveal how the remaining 83% fuel should be replaced. Probably he knows that there is simply not enough arable land and that already today, agriculturally generated fuel is putting up our food bills. The result is that Bavarian breweries are already running out of barley and in Mexico prices for corn tortillas are astronomic. Monocultures, needing immense amounts of water, are threatening civilisations: today more than 1,5 billion people do not have access to purified drinking water.

You can read it everywhere. Cattle, dairy farming and farming at large have a high output of dangerous climate gases and therefore substantially contribute to the climate change. So it’s really the cows: the source can be found in their stomachs. Every cow has four stomachs in order to process hardly digestible food, such as grass.

This causes huge lots of flatulation, methane clouds so to speak. Actually, all animals including humans produce such gases, but cows are really gas production plants, since they consume so much nutrition and because there are so many of them all over the globe. The problem could be solved if we would refrain from consuming cheese, milk, butter, steaks on our grill or even leather. This is how easy it could be, at least until someone invents a catalytic converter for cows.

On the other hand, before we sacrifice the things we love, wouldn’t it be smarter to reduce emissions in areas that would not degrade our living standards? And where would that be? Probably in the industry, households or transportation.