Beware: Happy Cows Can Harm the Climate | Alternative Uses for Furniture

Switzerland’s embrace of humane agricultural practices may be a roadblock to its climate goals.

If there’s one thing they don’t need, it’s more cowbells. Edith and Robert Albin’s tiny organic farm in the Swiss hamlet of Tersnaus is picture-postcard idyllic, with bell-bedecked cows roaming the Alps during the warmer months, then wintering in airy stalls.

It’s a meat-and-cheese-eater’s dream, calm and happy livestock that spend their lives well-cared for and well-fed before being slaughtered and sold as grass-fed steak. But there’s a dark cloud on the horizon, and it’s made of methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia. According to researchers from Switzerland’s Federal Office for Agriculture, free-range barns reduce stress on animals, but they can release nearly 50 percent more ammonia into the environment than contained barns where cows are constantly tied up.

Bill Schuette’s attorney general activism was just a warm-up for his bid for governor.

As a young congressional candidate in the 1980s, Bill Schuette poured countless cups of coffee at campaign events, which “got people to say hello when they might otherwise have ignored me,” he later wrote in his autobiography. He’ll need something stronger to perk up his chances to become Michigan’s governor this year, with a toxically unpopular outgoing Republican governor and strong national midterm headwinds.

But don’t discount the ability of this wily three-decade institution in state politics to find the mood of the moment — including a sharp pivot on health care in recent days.

Setting folks free is sometimes very different from how they embrace that freedom, but for one Saudi grandma, a muscle car seemed just about right.

The lifting of the driving ban on women in Saudi Arabia was music to my ears. It is something I had dreamed about for years but never thought would happen in my lifetime. For years, we had dreamed of driving in Saudi Arabia. We had seen women in other countries enjoy the freedom that comes from being able to drive, and we wanted that for ourselves, at home.

Saudi women travel, and we see that driving is a great thing for women all over the world. We see how it helps the economy, how it drives the will to explore and better ourselves and how that sense of adventure is sparked in people when they get to take real control of their destinies. So many Saudi women learned to drive overseas, and we knew what we were missing when we were at home.

Being able to drive goes beyond simply handing over the keys; it broadens your perspective and horizons. The moment I heard the decree lifting the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia is something I will always remember.