Note: This letter to the editor appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 19, 2023 in response to the Journal’s January 17, 2023 op-ed titled “There’s a Climate Solution in Dairy Cows’ Stomachs.”

In “There’s a Climate Solution in Dairy Cows’ Stomachs” (op-ed, Jan. 17), Fred Krupp and Antoine de Saint-Affrique manage to get everything wrong. Agriculture contributes about a quarter, not a third, of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Global per capita food production increased 46% between 1961 and 2020, and 20% since 2000. The global number of undernourished people increased from 618 million in 2019 to 768 million in 2021, but to attribute this to climate change is preposterous. Covid and various wars and supply-chain problems were the problem. (In 2000, the number of undernourished people was 823 million, when the global population was 30% smaller.)

Atmospheric physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden have demonstrated that the current contribution of methane emissions to warming is only about a tenth of the small effect of carbon-dioxide emissions. If we assume the elimination of all methane emissions from global dairy operations—about 600 million tons annually—and apply the EPA climate model, the reduction in global temperatures in 2100 would be 13 one-thousandths of a degree, an effect that wouldn’t be detectable.

The assertion that the methane reductions will allow dairy producers to earn more profits is also deeply dubious. There are no free lunches.

Read the full letter to the editor on The Wall Street Journal.