With all of the recent media focus being on the upcoming elections and the war in Ukraine, it’s easy to see how we might overlook some of the big questions that are really important to our readers. Chief among those for many of you, I’m sure, is the glaring quandary we’re all dealing with. What else could you be doing to combat climate change? Sure, you could go out and join the usual protests against natural gas extraction even as your lights are being turned off or you might donate some cash to help build more windmills that will kill off the golden eagle population. But those things suck up a lot of time and money. What if there were something you could do far more quickly and cheaply to help make a difference?

Fear not. We have just the answer for you. You can join in with groups of youths across Great Britain who are striking a blow against… cows. That’s right. The evil cows need to be stopped. And you can help do that by going to your local grocery store and dumping gallons of milk out onto the floors and counters while filming yourself doing so for your TikTok channel. These events are known as “milk pours,” and I only wish I was making this up. (NY Post)

The latest environmentalist trend is here: pouring out milk in grocery stores.

All across the United Kingdom, teenagers concerned about the environment are doing “milk pours.” The new trend involves going into grocery stores, picking up cartons of cow-produced milk, and pouring out their contents, according to the animal rights group Animal Rebellion.

Videos that have popped up on social media show teens pouring milk onto the floor, over sales counters, and elsewhere in the store.

The group behind this wasteful, pointless activity is called Animal Rebellion. (A ripoff of “Extinction Rebellion” perhaps?) This brief video report from The Independent in the U.K. shows some of the action.

It’s always amazing to me when we see the lengths that some bored young people will go to when seeking to occupy their time. Back in the day, if my parents found me dumping gallons of milk onto the floor of a grocery store the embarrassment for my family would have been intolerable and I probably wouldn’t have been able to sit down properly for a week. But as the saying goes, the times they are a ‘changing.

Perhaps the saddest part of this narcissistic display is that it will not only be ineffective but will likely produce the opposite of the intended effect. People aren’t going to buy less milk because you dumped a dozen gallons of it onto the floor of the dairy aisle. The store will bring out more from the back and step up their next order to replace the losses. If anything, the protesters are generating a greater demand for milk, so the supply will increase to accommodate that demand.

Or perhaps this is an effort on the part of Animal Rebellion to influence public opinion. Good luck with that. The people who see you doing this are in the store to do their shopping with many of them likely planning to buy milk. Once you are finished, they will need to walk through sticky puddles on the floor or dodge around them while they ask the clerks to bring them a gallon out of the back. Nobody is going to suddenly rush to your side, declaring that they’ve finally realized the great evil represented by… cows.

To their credit, the Post goes on to point out that current EPA estimates show that just 11% of the U.S.’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from the agricultural sector. Compare that to transportation (27%), energy (25%), and industry (24%), and you’ll see that these people are chasing a very small fish in a very large barrel.

But this effort is definitely in line with the dystopian goals of the climate movement, to be sure. Their eventual goal is for everyone to live in pods without heating or air conditioning and eat bugs. But nobody is going to be snacking on your bags of freeze-dried cockroaches when there are tasty burgers and milkshakes to be had. So wiping out the cows probably seems like a master strategy to them.